Verbatim Representation Of Viral Enunciation As Fictive Direct Speech On Weibo

This thesis considers the cognitive,linguistic and communicative phenomenon of verbatim fictive enunciations,i.e.,non-protypical speech for non-reports involving an actual utterance from prior discourse(Pascual 2014).I aim to shed light on their pragmatic purposes,grammatical form,stylistic effects,heterogeneity,etc.in social media communication by studying the rhetorical use of Internet popular language at sentential level in Weibo posts.Verbatim fictive speech is a particularly understudied sub-type of fictive speech,which is different from creative fictive speech in that it is the reproduction of the exact words of a previously produced utterance token instead of the creation of one’s own one-time enunciation.Still,they are essentially cohesive,since neither are independent utterance tokens in the situation of communication in the here and now,but constitute types of enunciations that represent types of non-conversation information.Verbatim fictive speech has long been studied in the field of language pathology as a conspicuous symptom,i.e.,echolalia,among aphasia and autism spectrum disorder patients,used for narrations,expressing needs and referring to individuals and events(cf.Pascual,Dornelas & Oakley 2017).By comparison,this construction is found to serve a wider range of purposes in online language use,additionally including as an expression of emotions,attitudes,relationships,character features,and phenomena,etc.Enunciations of this type in Weibo posts are also observed to be more grammatically flexible,displaying different syntactic levels,from the sentence to the lexical item.What’s more,compared with mitigated echolalia,i.e.,echolalia appearing slightly modified from the original,with old or new information,including information from the here-and-now(Wetherby 1986),semi-verbatim(verbatim but modified)fictive enunciations occur in Internet discourse more frequently out of more diverse consideration.Thus,this thesis assumes that verbatim fictive speech representation is a natural and overarching cognitive phenomenon that may work as an adaptive strategy in language pathology(to make up for the gaps of one’s linguistic resources)and as a rhetorical device in adult,scripted communication(to enhance stylistic and pragmatic effects).When it comes to enunciations of which the original setting is displayed audio-visually,they serve as a reference point to evoke the source scenario in the readers’ minds and selectively project non-verbal information into the new context where they are represented,thereby improving expressive power of written language as emoji and memes do.In this regard,the current study also presents the difference between the use of verbatim fictive enunciations in language pathology and professional communication.I also claim that the dissemination of viral enunciations and verbatim fictive speech representation are mutually motivated.This thesis also seeks to offer a comprehensive insight into fictive interaction manifested in Internet discourse at different levels as underlying cognitive mechanism in light of conceptual integration theory(Fauconnier & Turner 1994,1998 a,1998b,2002).Firstly,online monologue is conceptualized as a fictive type of interaction emerging in the blend that results from projecting the blogger from the Past Reality Space and a generic reader from the Present Reality Space and integrating them with the roles from the Conversation Frame.Secondly,in quite a few cases,such interactional monologues(Pascual 2022,2006 a,2008,2014)are built as a fictive trialogue,in which a fictive addresser speaks to a fictive addressee for the benefit of fictive bystander,i.e.,the netizen readers of the post.Thus,the fictive conversation between the blogger and the reader is presented as a non-genuine one between two different interlocutors.At these two levels,fictive interaction functions as a discourse organization device,while the third level concerns specific discourse content,i.e.,the use of fictive speech to achieve certain rhetorical,pragmatic and stylistic effects,with verbatim fictive speech as the focus of this study.