Voices on the web: university students and tweets

https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.91

Clarena Muñoz Dagua
ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5358-9002
clarenamunoz@unicolmayor.edu.co
Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, Colombia

Martha Cecilia Andrade Calderón
ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7376-3004
mandrade@unicolmayor.edu.co
Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, Colombia

Abstract:

Texts arisen with information and communication technologies determine how university youth interconnect and interact among themselves, who are urgently calling for defining the practices, purposes, roles and modes of organization imposing themselves with each textual type arising from those contexts. Within the framework of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, and with the help of Appraisal Theory (Martin, 2000), and particularly the Commitment System (White 2005), and the workings of e-texts’ dialogic ability in tweets are discussed in depth. Making use of concrete examples —the resources most used by youth to exchange academic information—, they explain how reference is made to other authors, how direct and indirect style is used to convey the message and how rumour and the ironic echo appear in the staging on the Web.

Keywords: tweet, rumour, extra-vocalization, heteroglossia, appraisal theory.