Cyberpragmatics. Internet-Mediated Communication in Context by Francisco Yus
It is an undeniable fact that Internet-mediated communication has had an enormous and increasing impact on our society in the last 20 years. The internet has become a pervasive and almost indispensable tool not only in our work but also in our leisure. It
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It is an undeniable fact that Internet-mediated communication has had an enormous and increasing impact on our society in the last 20 years. The internet has become a pervasive and almost indispensable tool not only in our work but also in our leisure. It would be difficult to imagine our lives today without the Internet and without the different forms of communication available on the web, such as the electronic mail, the virtual conversation or the increasingly present and influential social networks. These new forms of interaction have influenced human communication in general and also the type of language human beings use to interact with other human beings. More than a decade ago, Francisco Yus initiated his research into the use of language on the web with the publication of his book Ciberpragmática. El uso del lenguaje en internet, in 2001. Afterwards, in 2007, he published a book entitled Virtualidades reales. Nuevas formas de comunidad en la era de Internet. The monograph under review is an expansion on earlier work by the author and, particularly, on the first book mentioned above, which in 2010 had a second edition with the title Ciberpragmática 2.0. Nuevos usos del lenguaje en internet. The theoretical framework adopted in those publications is cognitive pragmatics and, more specifically, Relevance Theory. Cyberpragmatics. Internet-Mediated Communication in Context consists of eight chapters preceded by an introduction and followed by a 46 page bibliography. As mentioned in the introduction, cyberpragmatics, a coinage by the author himself, “aims at applying pragmatics to Internet users’ interactions” (xi). In this introductory chapter, the author also anticipates and justifies the theoretical framework he will use in the subsequent chapters, Relevance Theory. In the author’s opinion, Relevance Theory has proved to be useful to explain face-to-face interaction as well as asynchronous communication. The only difference involved in Internet-mediated communication, Yus claims, is the way communication is achieved and the means
F.J. Díaz-Pérez (*) English Department, Faculty of Arts and Education, University of Jaén, Jaén, Spain e-mail: [email protected] J. Romero-Trillo (ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013: New Domains and Methodologies, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_14, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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created by human beings to be used in interactions. A chapter-by-chapter summary of the contents of the book is also included in the introduction. After providing a summary of the main concepts and theoretical assumptions of Relevance Theory – such as ostension, mutual manifestness, cognitive effects, or the principle of relevance –, chapter 1, “Pragmatics, context and relevance”, focuses on the notion of cyberpragmatics and makes some claims about Internet-mediated communication from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Thus, for instance, it is claimed that context plays a decisive role in the p
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