Browsing by Subject "Online identity"

This MA-thesis examines sentence types and speech acts used on Twitter by the fans of Korean pop music when replying to tweets by Korean pop idols. In addition to analysing the sentence types and speech acts, the aim is to draw conclusions on how parasocial relationships can be observed based on the choice of speech acts and how they appear in relation to the target of the message. With the globalisation of Korean pop music, fans from all over the world have created large fandom communities online and are able to interact with idols through multiple different online platforms such as Twitter, TikTok or Weverse. Speech acts have been studied from the point of view of celebrities and as a part of fan-to-fan communication, but they have not, however, been connected to parasocial relationships in fandom context. Parasocial relationships have been the target of fandom studies previously, but adding a linguistic point of view is novel. Online environments evolve rapidly in a short period of time and because of new norms of online communication new approaches are required. The data was collected from Twitter manually by choosing posts made by Korean pop idols on their official accounts and the first six English replies under the posts. The corpus consists of 34 celebrity tweets and 204 fan replies. The idols’ tweets were tagged in terms of the sentence type and the replies were tagged in terms of the sentence type, target, speech act and how the speech acts were delivered. Sentence types were categorised based on their syntactic form into five categories (Oxford handbook of English grammar, 2019) and with speech acts the division was done following the division by Searle (1979) into five categories. The material was analysed by using simple descriptive statistics with discourse analysis. By comparing the results to previous research on speech acts and parasocial relationships separately, conclusions about the relationship between the fans and the Korean pop idols were drawn. The results show that Korean pop idols and their fans have established the type of relationship, where neither the original posts made by the idols, nor the replies written by fans require a reply, but both still imply a close relationship between both sides of the parasocial interactions. Both the idols and the fans express feelings such as love, worry and thankfulness with declarative sentences and in the fan replies, expressive speech acts are very prominent when it comes to fan-to-idol interactions, taking the form of multiple sentence types in addition to declaratives.