Entextualizing high energy texts: an exploration of modal shift on a Chinese online video-sharing website Bilibili
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Man Teng
Man Teng received her Bachelor’s degree in English in Guangzhou University, China and her Master’s degree in Discourse Studies in Lancaster University. She is currently a doctoral student in English Studies in University of Macau. Her research interests are discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication.
and
Brian Hok-Shing Chan
Brian Hok-Shing Chan has been teaching courses in Sociolinguistics and Bilingualism in the University of Macau. His research has focused on bilingual code-switching, including the syntax and pragmatics of code-switching, with data drawn mainly from Cantonese-English in Hong Kong. Besides, he has done some work on Hong Kong English and sentence-final particles in Cantonese. His publications can be found in
Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2004),Lingua (2008),The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching (2009),World Englishes (2009),English in Asian Popular Culture (2012),Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order (2013), andInternational Journal of Bilingualism (2015). He is a co-author (with Setter and Wong) ofHong Kong English (2010, Edinburgh University Press).
Abstract
Recently, there has been a surging interest in meaning-making processes in Chinese social media. However, most studies focus on the current contexts, ignoring the process of entextualization, that is, how semiotic resources have been decontextualized from the original/prior contexts and recontextualized in the current Chinese social media context. This paper intends to fill this gap by studying an example of entextualization coupled with modal shift. Specifically, an oral warning – initially a line frequently uttered in a Japanese animation serial – has been reshaped and reused to type comments in various video scenes and for various meanings on a Chinese video-sharing website Bilibili ( https://www.bilibili.com/ ). Drawing on selective notions in computer-mediated communication and social semiotic multimodality, this paper analyses a set of these comments, which we call high energy texts, focusing on their multimodal quality and the meaning-making processes involved. We suggest that new possibilities are generated during the modal shift (i.e. from speech to writing); in particular, warning acts carried out through high energy texts have been transformed into a collective social action that is recognized and understood by Bilibili users, the participation of which enables the users to build alignment and enact different identities. Our paper showcases how a social semiotic multimodal perspective can enrich our understanding of the semiosis in Chinese social media.
About the authors
Man Teng received her Bachelor’s degree in English in Guangzhou University, China and her Master’s degree in Discourse Studies in Lancaster University. She is currently a doctoral student in English Studies in University of Macau. Her research interests are discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication.
Brian Hok-Shing Chan has been teaching courses in Sociolinguistics and Bilingualism in the University of Macau. His research has focused on bilingual code-switching, including the syntax and pragmatics of code-switching, with data drawn mainly from Cantonese-English in Hong Kong. Besides, he has done some work on Hong Kong English and sentence-final particles in Cantonese. His publications can be found in Journal of Language and Social Psychology (2004), Lingua (2008), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching (2009), World Englishes (2009), English in Asian Popular Culture (2012), Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order (2013), and International Journal of Bilingualism (2015). He is a co-author (with Setter and Wong) of Hong Kong English (2010, Edinburgh University Press).
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- Non-directive play therapy with autistic adolescents: a qualitative study of therapists’ interactional practices
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Full Length Articles
- “Un projet de justice et de progrès social”: President Macron’s 2020 new year message to the nation. A linguistic viewpoint
- Proximal versus distant suffering in TV news discourses on COVID-19 pandemic
- Reframing Arabic narratives on Daesh [ISIS] textually through translation: MEMRI’s translation as a case study
- Non-directive play therapy with autistic adolescents: a qualitative study of therapists’ interactional practices
- Intensification for discursive evaluation: a corpus-pragmatic view
- Entextualizing high energy texts: an exploration of modal shift on a Chinese online video-sharing website Bilibili
