Assignment 2: Facebook and Speech acts (Click to Enlarge)

Introduction

The purpose of this study to identify which speech acts are frequently used in social networking sites. This is an analysis based on analysing the UNICEF (The United Nations Children’s Fund) corpus taken from UNICEF Facebook fan page.

Literature Review

Nastri, Pena and Hancock’s study (2006) on analysing the speech acts of 483 “away” messages (messages of what participants do away from the computer) from 44 participants show that assertives were used the most in constructing “away” messages. Expressives and commissives were used more frequently than directives but the difference between expressives and commissives was not significant.

An extension of Nastri’s study by Carr, Shrouk and Dauterman (2009) on speech acts and social networking sites was done by analysing seventy four students’ status messages three times a day for fourteen days. The results show that the primary speech acts used in status messages are expressives. Assertives were used more than directives and commissives but there was not much difference between the directives and commissives.

Reich’s (2010) mixed method study involving 2 focus groups of 33 college students and data from two survey studies involving 360 students suggests that social networking sites users have a strong sense of virtual community in terms of influence on the community, exchanging resources, sharing important experience and immersion. There is also some evidence of sense of belonging and identification, shared values, satisfying needs, shared positive emotional connection and honouring members of a group.

Speech Acts

The corpus will be analyzed according to the 5 types of speech acts; declarations, representatives, expressives, directives and commissives.

Declarations are defined when the speaker has to have a speaker intuitional role in a specific context in order to perform a declaration appropriately. In this type of speech acts there is no example found.

Representatives are what the speaker believes to be the case or not. It is a statement or fact, assertion, conclusion and description.

Expressives are related to what the speaker feels. They expressed psychological state and can be statement of pleasure, pain, like, dislike, joy and sorrow. It can be caused by something the speaker does or the hearer does but they are about the speaker’s experience.

Directives are an expression of what the speaker wants. It can be a command, order, request and suggestion. It can be positive or negative. For example, “How can we help him?”. In this context, the commenter is saying her request of what can she do to help the child.

Commissives are defined when the speaker used to commit themselves to some future action. They express what does the speaker intends. There are promises, threads, refusals and pledges. 

Methodology

The corpus will be analysed by examining the commentaries made by the members of the UNICEF fan page. The commentaries will then be categorized into the five types of speech acts and the frequency in which the speech acts were used. The results will then be discussed on why some types of speech acts are more commonly used by the members rather than the other types.

Data Results

The results of data collection are as follows:

Type of speech acts	Frequency
Declarations	0
Representatives	4
Expressives	32
Directives	3
Commissives	16

            The data results show that expressives have a higher frequency compared to the other types of speech acts, followed by commissives as the second highest frequency. The other 3 types of speech acts which are, representatives and directives occurred not more than 5 times and there is are declarations in the commentaries.

Data Analysis

            The frequency of expressives are higher compared to the other speech acts because the corpus involves a discussion regarding a child living in poverty. So, people are mostly commenting about their reactive emotions and feelings. Their comments contained words like “I wish”, “I hope”, “I pray” saying gratitude and showing their sorry. This supports Carr’s study that expressives are used the most by social networking site users.

            The lowest amount of comments is declarations. As stated in the definition above, declarations are comments made by any eligible authority. It can be seen in the corpus that all of the commenters are Facebook users and none of them were talking on behalf of the professionals. UNICEF also did not make any replies towards the comments or making any statements regarding the issue. The Facebook users are only allowed to express their feelings, experiences and their future hopes.

            There are also comments contained of more than one speech acts. Often, expressives are always paired with commissives as people stated their feelings and started to give solutions and hopes. The comment “I worked in Bangladesh for three years. Two and a half as a Peace Corps volunteer and six months with an NGO. It is full of wonderful people who just need help. Thank you for helping the kids there. They are hard working and smart, I wish I could have adopted them all! Breaks my heart!”, indicates that the whole comment contains both expressive and commissives.

Reflection

The UNICEF Facebook page is meant to spread awareness of their programmes and activities to Facebook users globally. The speech acts used in the comments of users indicate that a lot of emotions and sentiments are expressed when they see the picture of the Bangladeshi child. This shows that Facebook and the UNICEF page are platforms for people from various geographical locations in the virtual community of the same interests to come together and express their opinions, share resources as well as make change happen.

Conclusion

This study shows that Facebook is an important platform for the online community to communicate on issues of various interests and that it encourages users to use speech acts to express their thoughts and emotions in a shared virtual community.

References

Carr, C., Schrock, D., & Dauterman, P.R. (2009). Speech Acts within Social Network Sites’

Status Messages. Retrieved on 1^st February 2011 from https://www.msu.edu/~carrcale/CarrSchrockDauterman_2009.pdf

Nastri, J., Pena, J., and Hancock, J.T. (2006). The Construction of Away Messages: A Speech

Act Analysis. Journal of Computer-mediated Communication, 11 (4), Article 7.

Retrieved on 1^st February 2011 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/nastri.html

Reich, S.M. (2010). Adolescents’ Sense of Community on Myspace and Facebook: A Mixed-

Methods Approach. Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 38 (6). Retrieved on

4^th February from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcop.20389/pdf

Unicef (2011). UNICEF’s Photos- Photo of the Week. Retrieved on 31^st January 2011 from

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150117966524002&set=a.40739600400

1.193793.68793499001#!/photo.phpfbid=10150117966524002&set=a.407396004001.193793.68793499001&pid=7413465&id=68793499001

Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford University Press: London. pp  53-55

Corpus

Corpus

Corpus

Corpus

Reflection- Assignment 2

Procedure- The assignment was interesting and interactive as it allowed us the freedom to find our own sources that we were close to. It was also a good extension to the first assignment as we had a hands-on experience doing our own small-scale research.

Lesson- We realised how important social networking sites are for people to share and express themselves. This was something we clearly took for granted earlier. We were also aware that while many people use these sites for personal reasons, these sites can also be used to spread a good cause, an awareness of certain issues and especially to do more research in CALL.