Towards a cyberpragmatics of mobile instant messaging [In: Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2016: Global Implications for Culture and Society in the Networked Age. Ed. Jesús Romero-Trillo. Berlin: Springer] (original) (raw)

Cyberpragmatics analyses Internet-mediated communication from a cognitive pragmatics, relevancetheoretic perspective. It focuses on the inferential strategies that “addressee users” engage in while processing information located on the Net or the one exchanged with other users through this virtual medium. In this sense, the theory underlines the role that the interfaces play in the eventual (ir)relevant outcome of the acts of communication that take place on the Net. In this chapter, I will sketch the main research issues that cyberpragmatics should address when studying mobile instant messaging applications (WhatsApp, WeChat, Snapchat...). As a theory grounded in cognitive pragmatics, cyberpragmatics aims at explaining how users make sense of messages when transmitted on the Net. However, in order to achieve that, an extension of analysis is proposed as necessary for this kind of mobile phone-mediated interaction, so as to cover not only propositional aspects of communication (i.e. the relevance of the information exchanged), but also non-propositional constraints and effects associated with this kind of communication and which play a major role in the eventual (dis)satisfaction. New terminology will be added to the general relevance-theoretic formula of positive cognitive effects vs. mental effort, opening up interesting paths for future research on why mobile-mediated interactions end up (ir)relevant to the users.