Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 40, Issue 1, 2018

With the emergence of the internet and especially since the development of web 2.0, people increasingly communicate in an online environment. Be that as it may, this research domain has remained underexposed in Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing. The current special issue therefore addresses the importance of linguistic- and discourse-oriented research to explore the role of language in digital communication. On the one hand, the research papers in this issue investigate the influence of digital communication on communication styles. On the other hand, online genres are studied with large-scale corpora and (automatic) methods of analysis. We also highlight other research opportunities, such as whether digital communication changes the language use and proficiency of, for example, children and young people.

A linguistic analysis of the concept CHV

The concept of conversational human voice (CHV) was introduced in 2006 by Kelleher and Miller indicating a personal, conversational style in online organizational communication. The CHV measurement scale they presented consists of eleven items, like ‘the brand treats me and others as human beings’ and ‘tries to be interesting in communication’. Various studies showed positive effects of this style on organizational outcomes. In this paper we examine the clearness of the notion of CHV. First, we tried to identify for each strategy specific linguistic characteristics as found in the literature on conversations and computer mediated communication. We succeeded for only eight of the eleven strategies. For example, ‘tries to be interesting’ is not directly translatable in linguistics characteristics. Next, we coded the linguistic characteristics in a corpus of 540 webcare interactions. The coding showed that the remaining eight strategies were partly overlapping, and were lacking some essential characteristics of organizational conversational style as well. We conclude that the current operationalization is not sufficient in capturing CHV: On the one hand it is too restrictive because CHV seems to be more than the eleven strategies; on the other hand it is too broad, because relations cannot be determined unambiguously between these strategies and linguistic characteristics.

“Annoying that the bike hasn’t been removed! Can you give me a case number? ^EK”: Conversational Human Voice in webcare of Dutch municipalities

The conversational communication style organisations use in webcare is an important factor affecting its success, and is referred to as the Conversational Human Voice (CHV, Kelleher, 2009; Kelleher & Miller, 2006). This communication style reflects attributes such as treating others as humans, using a personal communication style, and being open to dialogue. Although several experimental studies investigated the relation between conversational linguistic elements in webcare messages and perceived CHV (for example Crijns, Cauberghe, Hudders & Claeys, 2017; Huibers & Verhoeven, 2014), there are considerable differences in the type and number of linguistic elements they used. Therefore we developed an instrument based on scientific research to identify conversational linguistic elements reliably. Next, we investigated how often these elements occurred in a corpus of 480 webcare conversations between twenty Dutch municipalities and their citizens, and to what extent they differ in its usage. The results showed that the identification instrument was reliable. Furthermore, municipalities often personalize their webcare responses, but hardly use informal language and invitational rhetoric. Large municipalities, such as Amsterdam and ’s-Hertogenbosch, appeared to be more progressive in applying conversational elements in webcare than medium-sized municipalities, such as Gouda and Deventer.

Language accommodation in online dating profiles: Effects of education level and type of dating site on language use

This study investigates whether online dating profile owners accommodate their language use based on the type of dating site used. Following Communication Accommodation Theory, we expect that highly educated online daters’ language use on a dating site designed explicitly for the highly educated is different from language use of highly educated people on a general dating site with users of both low and high education levels. Specifically, highly educated dating site users will accommodate their language use depending on the dating site they use. Based on an analysis of 1570 profile texts from two Dutch dating sites, we found that profiles of highly educated users on a general dating site differed from those written by highly educated daters on the high-education dating site on some but not all measures of lexical complexity and on the amount of language errors made. On the high-education dating site, the highly educated daters used some more linguistic elements that are associated with a high education level than those on the general site. This suggests that minor contextual differences in expected audience can already induce linguistic accommodation.

@Organisation in complaint tweets as a trigger for webcare interactions

An organization’s webcare is aimed at dealing with as many consumer complaints as possible. The question is what features of negative word-of-mouth tweets lead to more webcare response. From a pragmalinguistic perspective, we started with a brief overview of the speech act of complaining, and its illocutionary force which is communicated directly or indirectly. In two corpus analyses (with 6533 and 1479 negative word-of-mouth tweets), we examined the relations between the way consumers address an organization (operationalized as the position of @Organization in the negative word-of-mouth tweet) and the amount of webcare interaction between the organization and consumers. The results show that when a consumer places the addressed @Organization at the beginning of the tweet, this leads to a webcare-response more frequently than when @Organization occurs elsewhere in the tweet. In the second corpus analysis, the communicative function of @Organization (direct or indirect address) was included in the analysis. When @Organization was addressed directly, this resulted in more webcare interaction than when the organization was addressed indirectly.

This study investigates the relationship between the sentiment of news on social media and readers’ emotional response. We analyzed 1946 teaser headlines (‘New life for a dead language, as more public schools offer Latin’) from the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook page and determined their sentiment with the program VADER. We find that emotional headlines lead to more reactions than neutral headlines. The sentiment scores were systematically related to the emoji the readers attached to the headline (respectively those for ‘like’, ‘love’, ‘haha’, ‘wow’, ‘sad’, and ‘angry’). News with a negative sentiment is related to an increase in negative emotional responses by readers (as expressed in the emoji they use, ‘angry’ and ‘sad’) as compared to neutral and positive news. However, positive news does not result in an increase of positive affective responses (e.g., positive emoji) compared to neutral or negatively colored news. These results are in line with earlier positive-negative asymmetry findings, showing that negative events lead to a higher need for action than positive events. They also underscore the complexity of predicting emotional responses, because we also found some unexpected effects, such as the fact that a ‘haha’ response was given to both positive and negative headlines and that ‘wow’ responses were more prevalent with negative news. This study therefore contributes to our understanding of how people use emoji.