Heteroglossia Online

The analysis of 1,507 Facebook posts of German university students participating in the Erasmus exchange program explores how posters "reaccentuate" and "relocalize" mobile semiotic resources. In doing so, they create translocal frames of meaningfulness in concrete heteroglossic interactions among speakers with diverse language backgrounds.

The nature of communicative practices today, particularly in the context of digitalized media, has revealed that earlier paradigms on language contact do not prove to be fully satisfactory. Based on 1,507 Facebook posts of German university students participating in the Erasmus exchange program, the analysis aims at exploring how posters draw on their entire repertoire of local and «translocal» semiotic resources in interactions among speakers with diverse language backgrounds. The students under examination participate in actual processes of meaning-making by refashioning the semiotic potential of various features. As a result, the interlocutors create heteroglossic and polycentric posts to decollapse collided and fuzzy contexts and to negotiate potentially large and multiple audiences.

Autorentext

Caroline Schilling studied English and History at Greifswald University and later became a Doctoral Student and Lecturer at the Chair of English Linguistics. The focus of her research lies in the field of contact linguistics, social semiotics, English as a globally shared mobile resource, and digitalized communication.

Inhalt

Language as social, open, adaptive constructions, deeply embedded in sociohistorical developments of speech communities Including both micro and macro, as well as synchronic and diachronic dimension of analysis to understand non-linear processes of meaning-making Speakers draw on mobile semiotic features in heteroglossic interactions