Kate Scott, Pragmatics Online. London: Routledge, 2022. ix+168 pages, ISBN: 9781138368590

The significance of digital media in our daily lives has sparked a rapid increase in linguistic research on communication online. Although ‘internet pragmatics’, or the pragmatics of internet-mediated communication, is now an established subfield of pragmatics with devoted journals and handbooks, Kate Scott’s Pragmatics Online contributes to the field as an accessible and concise introduction on applying pragmatics to online communication. Online communication draws on different non-linguistic and para-linguistic cues than face-to-face communication, yet overall, the principles of online communication are similar to those of offline communication. As Scott points out early on, “There is no reason to believe that our basic human abilities and behaviours change when we go online” (p. 1). However, pragmatic theory based on face-to-face interaction may need to be reconceptualised for the analysis of written or image-based online communication and the resources used as part of it. Scott’s book consists of eight chapters that address different aspects of online communication and the technological communication resources available on social media.

As an introduction to the book, Chapter 1 provides an accessible overview of pragmatics and of digitally mediated communication. The author introduces speech acts as a concept for analysing writer intended meaning but focuses on relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) as a key approach for understanding how audiences infer meaning based on their prior knowledge and assumptions. Drawing on Baym (2010) and boyd (2010) in particular, digitally mediated communication is introduced in terms of its basic features and affordances such as the persistence and global reach of digital communication.

Chapter 2 expands on the social contexts of online communication by discussing topics such as writer identity, user anonymity, target audiences, and imagined audiences. For readers new to pragmatics or to analysing online language, the chapter answers the fundamental question of how and why pragmatics takes an interest in these issues. A message on a global social media site such as Facebook can be visible for a heterogeneous audience: pragmatics can help explain how the same message becomes subject to various, and even contradictory, interpretations. The chapter’s brief literature review discusses how users manage content visibility and how they address and make assumptions about the interactants with whom they communicate, whether strategically or intuitively.

While the first two chapters serve as more theory-based overviews of digital communication, Chapters 3–7 discuss features of social media platforms from a pragmaticist’s perspective. Supported by data samples from the author’s own research, each chapter applies concepts introduced in Chapter 1 to selected communicative innovations prevalent on social media.

Chapter 3 considers platforms such as Twitter (now ‘X’) in terms of the pragmatic functionality of two non-verbal communicative acts: liking and sharing. Sharing, i.e. the rebroadcasting of content by other users, has so far received less attention in pragmatics, yet it is a prevalent practice with various motivations. Applying the relevance-theoretic framework introduced in Chapter 1, the chapter argues that sharing content is a way to share information and to express attitudes towards the information and that the act of sharing is itself a context-sensitive ostensive communicative act. ‘Likes’ and Facebook reactions are discussed only in brief but with the important reminder of that they, too, are context-dependent and complex signs of attitudes and managing relationships between users.

Chapter 4 discusses hashtags and how a reader might make sense of the layered pragmatic meanings of topic-identifying or interpersonal hashtags. The author demonstrates how a hashtag with seemingly no propositional meaning can be used in an inferential process to draw implicatures about a writer’s affect or evaluation. As the chapter briefly notes, affect-labelling or evaluating hashtags may also be encountered in offline discourses, where a speaker’s oral mention of a hashtag communicates interpersonal functions and “[presents] the utterance as part of a group of utterances that might be so tagged” (p. 77). The chapter ends with a brief overview of user-mentions—in the format “@username”—and messages with mentions seemingly address a single user or entity while made visible to a wider audience.

Digital written communication lacks gestures, intonation, and non-verbal cues found in face-to-face communication, but in line with the current approaches to online language, Scott focuses not on the sparsity of these cues but rather on how their functions are achieved through alternative means (p. 83). Chapter 5 discusses non-verbal cues found in digitally mediated communication, for example, on social media and in WhatsApp instant messaging between friends. The chapter illustrates how typography, punctuation, emojis and emoticons, and reaction GIF s are used by writers to convey and by recipients to infer an attitude, a proposition, or an illocutionary force. As a welcome note on a still understudied topic in pragmatics, the chapter ends with a discussion of reaction GIF s: when processing the pragmatic meaning of a GIF image in, say, a WhatsApp chat, readers can usually infer relevant meanings even when the original source of the GIF is unknown to them.

Chapter 6 turns to memes and how they are used in online culture to create humour and solidarity. The recognition of cultural references or relatable events creates a sense of a shared experience, and while memes allow for creativity and innovation, they also form collections or families of texts, which set certain expectations for what kind of values and experiences should be expressed. In particular, the chapter addresses text-based phrasal-templates and image macros with superimposed text at the top and bottom of the image. The chapter focuses on the inferences that viewers draw from object labelling memes—where an object in an image is labelled as a person, event or concept—create a multimodal metaphor between the events of the image and the label referents. This case-study illustrates how information from both the image and the labels are necessary for drawing implicatures and thus understanding the message of the meme creator.

Chapter 7 discusses clickbait by news content organizations. Unlike the topics of previous chapters, clickbaits are less related to user-to-user communication, yet they are admittedly a prominent part of our social media experience and of online news and marketing discourses seeking audience revenue. Through a literature review and plenty of examples (most of which are drawn from a corpus compiled by Chakraborty et al., 2016), this chapter discusses linguistic features that are used in carefully crafted clickbaits to exaggerate information value while being intentionally vague on relevant details. This strategy creates an information gap that arouses the reader’s curiosity and makes them click the link in hopes of being provided more information.

The book wraps up with Chapter 8, an introduction to conducting a research project on pragmatics online. One chapter is not enough for discussing potential data and methods at length, but as a conclusion to an introductory level book, the chapter is helpful for readers interested in conducting a study of their own. The chapter compares what linguistic information a researcher might gain based on common methods such as user surveys and corpus linguistics. Issues such as data collection and ethical data use are also addressed, if only in brief. In a section on finding a research topic or using pragmatic theory, the author shares the outset and motivation behind her own research projects. While contextualising the case studies from previous chapters, this discussion also shares some tacit knowledge on how to formulate a research topic in pragmatics, which seems particularly helpful for undergraduate/postgraduate students.

The book’s examples focus on English-language communication in a culturally Western setting, and the interactions and online groups encountered in the analyses are taken from popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. This makes the book sparse in contrastive perspectives to different linguacultures or the social contexts of smaller platforms or niche online cultures. However, the author has a rightly cautious approach to generalisability, as Chapter 8 ends on a call for more cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research that considers the diversity of the language context(s) analysed.

Overall, Pragmatics Online is a clear overview of how pragmatics can be applied to social media contexts. With approachable language, clear definitions and detailed examples, the book is particularly helpful for beginners in online pragmatics. The book’s focus on relevance theory-driven analyses keeps the pragmatic theory concise. Especially for readers new to pragmatics, this limitation may be pedagogically welcome, but linguistics students embarking on an independent research project would benefit from more in-depth supplementary reading to or from familiarising with other pragmatic theories. Fortunately, each chapter contains its own list of references that can serve as a starting point.

As the book focuses on online practices through a pragmatic lens, even more experienced pragmaticists new to online communication could consult the book for examples of how pragmatic theory can be applied not only to verbal communication but to non-verbal communicative practices. As the book argues—through literature reviews consulting linguistics, communication studies, psychology, and more—the communication strategies found in face-to-face communication are achieved through the many verbal and non-verbal means provided by the online platform or invented by its users. Some prominent aspects of online communication go unaddressed in the book: topics that could have been covered include, for example, content recommendation algorithms, interaction with social media bots and chatbots, and the option to edit message content post-publication that is available on some platforms. An exhaustive overview, however, would not be feasible, especially in an introductory book, as online communication is constantly evolving. With new platforms emerging and older ones (e.g. Twitter) waning in popularity, various topics in online interaction can quickly become outdated. Yet the general themes of the book will likely remain relevant for readers. After all, the fundamental theories on pragmatic meaning making seem very persistent in various interaction settings.