Description
Book SynopsisThe nature of communicative practices today, particularly in the context of digitalized media, has revealed that earlier paradigms on language contact do not prove to be fully satisfactory. Based on 1,507 Facebook posts of German university students participating in the Erasmus exchange program, the analysis aims at exploring how posters draw on their entire repertoire of local and «translocal» semiotic resources in interactions among speakers with diverse language backgrounds. The students under examination participate in actual processes of meaning-making by refashioning the semiotic potential of various features. As a result, the interlocutors create heteroglossic and polycentric posts to decollapse collided and fuzzy contexts and to negotiate potentially large and multiple audiences.
Table of ContentsLanguage as social, open, adaptive constructions, deeply embedded in sociohistorical developments of speech communities – Including both micro and macro, as well as synchronic and diachronic dimension of analysis to understand non-linear processes of meaning-making – Speakers draw on mobile semiotic features in heteroglossic interactions
