I am currently working on three projects.

Language of seduction

This project is a collaboration with Dr. Sofia Rüdiger (University of Bayreuth).

The project analyses the online discourse of Pick-Up Artists. The PUA community unites men who learn and practice speed-seduction for short-term mating. The main means of contact for this community are online platforms that incorporate forums where members exchange tips, strategies and reports of their exploits. By means of a 2-million words corpus of forum posts, thematic websites, YouTube comments, and Twitter posts, we explore narrative framing of seduction reports, pseudoscientific vocabulary that serves as a gate-keeping device, referential strategies, and conversational sequences of pick-up artists. We also have a special interest in the research ethics of working with hostile or unlikeable subjects.

We have published a monograph on this project with Routledge in 2022.

Corpus analysis of simultaneously interpreted English

Simultaneous interpreting (SI) is the key mode of interpreting at high-level international events. However, the difficulty of obtaining data means there are few empirical, corpus-based investigations into SI. To fill this gap, I created a parallel bidirectional corpus of simultaneous interpreting Russian-English of 230,000 words. The data includes speeches given at various UN events as well as press conferences by high-ranking officials and humanitarian figures, and is balanced for free and with-text interpreting.

In a series of papers exploring the corpus, I look at interpreting strategies, disfluencies and repairs, collocations, lexical complexity, and pragmatic repertoire of the English subcorpus. The findings of the project indicate that there is systematic linguistic variation between interpreted and non-interpreted English. However, this systematic variation is not due to universal shifts in register markers caused by the process of interpreting from one language into another, but by a variety of other factors. Demonstrably, whether the interpreter is working into his/her L1 or L2 is one of those factors.

evolution of persuasive discourse in the age of attention economy

Social media platforms have done more to influence communication than giving us a new means of reaching across the physical space. These outlets compete for our time and cognitive resources in the age of attention economy, the information environment where your personal value depends on your ability to win listeners’ attention in an information-saturated world. As a result, social media users are driven to incessantly create content that would attract more listeners, more followers, more likes. The orientation towards personal validation through social media metrics inevitably changes how we talk and how we discursively construct our identity. It is this drastic change in interactional goals that makes social media data a new and exciting terrain for corpus studies of persuasive language.

The Persuasion on Social Media project aims to describe two modalities of argumentative online discourse using corpus-assisted discourse analysis. One modality is the constructive argument which embodies the positive affordances of social media: accessibility, freedom of expression, global communication. As a prototypical example of such a platform, I use the Change My View reddit: a community where people come with an explicit aim of constructive argument and where a successful ‘change of view’ is formalised through a Delta award. The other argumentative modality is the manifestation of the “culture of outrage” where extreme views stimulate engagement on social media and therefore produce more of emotionally involved, unconstructive verbal confrontation. (Anti)vegan Twitter serves as the data source for this subproject.

Dayter, Daria and Thomas C. Messerli. 2022. “Persuasive language and features of formality on the r/ChangeMyView subreddit.” Internet Pragmatics https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00072.day

Conference presentations:

  • “Pragmatics of persuasion on R/ChangeMyView“, EPICS X. - PDF

  • “Change my view about language: Language awareness on the subreddit r/changemyview“, SS24. - PDF

  • “Persuasive register in the Change My View subreddit”, iCAME42. - PDF

  • “Persuasive language and features of formality on the R/CHANGEMYVIEW subreddit,” Influence, manipulation, and seduction conference. - PDF