Antagonism on YouTube: Metaphor in Online Discourse (original) (raw)
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Using a discourse dynamic, metaphor-led analysis, this article investigates the use of metaphor in three YouTube videos made by two American YouTube users: one a fundamentalist Christian and one an atheist. The focus of the analysis is on how metaphor was produced dynamically in the interaction and what this interaction may tell us about how misunderstanding occurred between the two users. Analysis shows that understanding of specific metaphors seems to differ depending on who is producing and interpreting a given metaphor.
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Among Evangelical Christians on the popular video-sharing site YouTube, the Bible is an important resource for justifying and challenging specific words and actions. Such justifications and challenges provide researchers with an opportunity to study how authoritative text is interpreted in social interaction. To that end, this article presents analysis of a single debate -an episode of what YouTube users call 'drama' -around one Evangelical Christian's controversial use of a passage from the Bible to justify calling others 'human garbage'. This analysis shows first, that conflicting interpretations and use of the Bible's moral authority led to the development of 'drama' because users evidenced differing beliefs about the development of biblical metaphorical language; and second, that users appropriated the Bible's words to their own discourse activity through exegesis and metaphor development. This article thus provides both an empirical case study in the interpretation of figurative language and a challenge to the common assumption that Evangelical Christians are committed to a 'literal' interpretation of the Bible.
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This thesis addresses the need for a metaphoric understanding of religious language. However, the task to distinguish metaphoric meanings from literal ones is not always easy because all linguistic meaning, metaphoric or not, is expressed through the literal. While there has been some research that has shed light on the problem of metaphoric language and religion, no academic work has been done regarding this problem with respect to the religion of Islam. This thesis is an attempt to fill that gap. Since accounting for the comprehension of meaning is a complex endeavor, the study of metaphor lends itself naturally to philosophy. Therefore, I review two philosophical accounts, those of Paul Grice and Josef Stern before I discuss the two linguistic views of metaphor that I embrace, those being Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Relevance Theory (RT). In adopting Conceptual Metaphor Theory, I build on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s cognitive linguistics work (1980), which changed what we know about language and cognition. In terms of Relevance Theory, I draw from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s work (1986; 2008) and Carston’s (2002; 2010) to make my argument that relevance is a pre-requisite for metaphorical understanding of religious language. Both theories proved helpful in providing a harmonious analysis. Using both theories, I analyze an underlying Quranic metaphor, life is a test. I clarify that it is not directly stated in the Qur’an, yet Muslims use it in everyday discourse, and take it as if were literal. I argue that the concept has to be essentially metaphoric for it to be consistent with the Islamic belief of God as All-Knowing and I discuss its inferences and entailments. Since this underlying metaphor reveals the Islamic view of life and its purpose, I further examine the metaphorical nature of religious discourse, by analyzing part of a relevant religious lecture given by the spiritual consultant of Az Zahraa Islamic Centre in Richmond, British Columbia. One of the examples I analyse in this lecture utilizes the Journey domain, while another reveals the Container schema. Although both theories seem to be able to account for this Quranic metaphor, yielding the same cognitive result (CMT through domain mapping and RT through lexical adjustment), Relevance Theory was especially useful in providing the terminology to describe how I arrive at the metaphoric realization, that being “the search for relevance”. This suggests that RT has more explanatory power for understanding problematic concepts which might not seem to make sense, while CMT is well-suited for analyzing non-problematic metaphors. In the life as test metaphor, a conceptual metaphoric analysis was not even possible without the cognitive maximization of relevance. I agree, therefore, with the scholars who argue that the two theories are not contradictory and hence should be integrated. The thesis also includes a transcription of other excerpts that are rich in poetic metaphors, with a discussion of how religious discourse contains some metaphorical expressions that stem from our embodiment and others that are merely “loosely” used.
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This thesis presents a systematic discourse analysis of sustained antagonistic debate—called 'drama'—on the video-sharing website, YouTube. Following a two-year observation of a YouTube community of practice discussing Christianity and atheism, 20 video 'pages' (including talk from videos and text comments) from a drama event were identified and transcribed, producing a 86,859 word corpus comprising 136 minutes of video talk and 1,738 comments. Using metaphor-led discourse analysis (Cameron & Maslen, 2010b) of the total corpus, metaphor vehicles were identified, coded, and grouped by semantic and narrative relationships to identify systematic use and trace the development of discourse activity. Close discourse analysis of a subset of the corpus was then employed to investigate membership categorisation (Housley & Fitzgerald, 2002), impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011), and positioning (Harré & van Langenhove, 1998), providing a systematic description of different factors contributing to the emergence of 'drama'. Analysis shows that 'drama' developed when negative views of one user's impolite words exposed the different expectations of other users about acceptable YouTube interaction. Hyperbolic, metaphorical language derived from the Bible and narratives about tragic historical events often exaggerated, escalated, and extended negative evaluations of others. Categories like 'Christian' were used dynamically to connect impolite words and actions of individuals to social groups, thereby also extending negative evaluations. With implications for understanding 'flaming' and transgression of social norms in web 2.0 environments, this thesis concludes that inflammatory language led to 'drama' because: (1) users had diverse expectations about social interaction and organisation, (2) users drew upon the Bible's moral authority to support opposing actions, and (3) the online platform's technical features afforded immediate reactions to non-present others. The 'drama' then developed when users' responses to one another created both additional topics for antagonistic debate and more disagreement about which words and actions were acceptable.
Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction (two volumes)
Journal of Pragmatics, 1999
His main research interests are metaphor, on which he published Understanding metaphor in literature (Longman, 1994), narrative, discourse analysis, genre theory, and the empirical study of literature (on which he has published in, for instance, Poetics, Poetics Today, and SPIEL). He is the coordinator of a special interest group on metaphor, and is editing a book on metaphor in cognitive linguistics, with Raymund Gibbs. He is currently writing an introductory textbook on discourse linguistics.
Discourse & Society - ResearchGate
Discourse & Society, 2005
ABSTRACT. This article aims at reconciling Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor research. Although the two disciplines are compatible, efforts to discuss metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon have been scarce in the CDA tradition. ...
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