Stance-taking and language choice in #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen: Critical discourse analysis of campaigning discourse on Twitter

Abstract

Twitter, with its affordances, offers a rich site to investigate linguistic practices and the sociocultural meanings they carry in the noisy, multilingual and multi-voiced context of social media. The current study aimed to explore how Twitter users use discursive strategies and language choice to express their stances towards the guardianship system in Twitter campaigning hashtag #StopEnslaveSaudiWomen. The study deployed quantitative and qualitative methods in collecting and analysing the tweets while relying on different theories such as stance, language choice, and CMDA models that are integrated within the wider framework of critical discourse analysis. With the support of MAXQDA, 3,162 tweets were analysed following Fairclough’s three dimensional-model.
Twitter users employed various discursive strategies in constructing their stances towards the guardianship system relying on different modes supported by Twitter such as pictures, emojis, videos as well as multilingual texts. The constructed stances were varied in being conservative, liberal, moderate, radical, and traditional representing a range of views on political, religious, social topics. The tweets revealed key themes/ topics that were employed differently by particular groups in English and/ or in Arabic (e.g., the driving ban) to align/ disalign with different groups; and to legitimise, delegitimise their stances and stances of other. Audience was also found to be a significant factor in language choice when taking a stance. The study has contributed to a better understanding of discursive strategies and language choice and how they are reconfigured and interrelated in the online context.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Bdreah Mubarak F Alswais: orcid.org/0000-0001-5809-0107

ORCID for Darren J Paffey: orcid.org/0000-0003-2709-8012

ORCID for Jaine Beswick: orcid.org/0000-0002-1866-939X

Catalogue record

Export record