MENTALLY I’M HERE. THE ROLE OF DEIXIS IN ‘SMALL STORIES’ ON TWITTER

Abstract

Deixis, a semiotic resource present in all languages, is usually defined as a direct link between the linguistic structure and the context of an utterance or a speech event, which is why it is studied in the domain of pragmatics (Levinson 1983). Typical deictic resources are indexicals such as pronouns or adverbs (I, you, that, here, yesterday, etc.) that position speakers in relation to other aspects of the communicative context; other participants, space, time, and the text, i.e., the utterance itself. Building on contemporary approaches within discourse analysis, this paper aims to expand the understanding of deixis from its referential and textual function to its social embeddedness in the deictic field in different interactional contexts, with an emphasis on the practice of sharing experiences online. The study is informed by the theory of positioning in small stories (Georgakopoulou 2017a, 2017b), a particular type of narrative discourse. Compared to privileged and dominantly studied narrative genres such as narratives of personal experience, which are about some extraordinary, linear events from the past (Podboj 2020), small stories encompass a wide range of short, elliptic accounts about mundane, trivial, everyday situations, ongoing events, or events that have just happened. Social networks, where a great amount of communication occurs nowadays, are designed in a way that particularly favours sharing of such narrative formats. The aim of the paper is to illustrate the role of deixis in the process of affective positioning (Giaxoglou 2015) on social networks by analysing
examples of sharing on Twitter. Special emphasis is given to the processes of entextualisation (Androutsopoulos 2014, Leppänen et al. 2014) and the multimodal construction of discourse through the combination of verbal and visual semiotic resources. The main conclusion of the study is that small stories shared on Twitter favour a multimodal construction of deixis, with an aim of affective positioning of the author.