Nominal forms of address and the construction of attitude in young speakers of Twitter (X), Argentina

Abstract

In the following paper, we present an investigation into the youth cyber-discourse (Palazzo, 2008) of Argentines on Twitter, currently called ‘X’, based on the forms of address. Building on Kerbrat-Orecchioni's (2010) contributions for nominal forms of address, we analyse how these elements assist in the construction of the speaker's attitude towards an utterance or interlocutor. Attitude is a concept from Appraisal Theory (White 2002), which focuses on the interpersonal metafunction of language to
describe the linguistic mechanisms a speaker uses when evaluating others and their utterances. These shape an attitude of judgement, appreciation or affect which, in turn, can be in a positive or negative polarity. Our main objective is to describe how forms of adress are key elements for analysing the configuration of X users' attitudes. To this end, we start from a descriptive and exploratory methodology of 300 tweets of young Argentines collected from the ‘Responses’ section of the @porquestendencia account to analyse them using a qualitative tool built ad hoc.