Toward the Analysis of Online Supplication and Interactional Stance-Taking

Abstract

One social media phenomenon that serves as a humor catalyst is online supplication. This refers to the trending discourse of financial solicitation by faceless individuals, who usually open several different social media accounts to beg daily on pages with heavy traffic. The “online beggars” often elicit humorous responses from sundry online commentators, and this creates a number of analytical issues. This is because it is often difficult to determine the real source of the humor. In this chapter, the theory of stance-taking proposed by Du Bois (The Stance Triangle. In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. Robert Englebretson, 139–182. John Benjamins, 2007) is used to analyze the linguistic styles or choices evident in the communication of intention by both the beggars and the respondents. This chapter analyzes seven randomly selected samples of online supplication and respondents’ discourses on Nigerian celebrities’ pages and popular Nigerian blogs. Insights from pragmatics and the linguistic scholarship on humor serve as additional framework. Preliminary investigation shows that the stance of most respondents is hostile or antithetical to that of the online supplicants, whereas there is an alignment between the stance of majority of the respondents. Also, the humor in the utterances of the discourse participants reveals elements of incongruity and a high level of context-sensitivity. The analysis also pinpoints humor as an index of the Nigerian societal attitude in relation to online supplications.