Searchable talk: the linguistic functions of hashtags

Abstract

An important dimension of social media discourse is its searchability. A key semiotic resource supporting this function is the hashtag, a form of social tagging that allows microbloggers to embed metadata in social media posts. While popularly thought of as topic-markers, hashtags are able to construe a range of complex meanings in social media texts. This paper uses the concept of linguistic metafunctions, to explore how hashtags enact three simultaneous communicative functions: marking experiential topics, enacting interpersonal relationships, and organizing text. Corpus-based discourse analysis of linguistic patterns in a 100 million word Twitter corpus is used to investigate these functions and how they relate to the notion of social search.

Keywords:

• social media
• microblogging
• Twitter
• hashtags
• systemic functional linguistics
• discourse analysis

Notes on contributors

Michele Zappavigna is a Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Her major research interest is the language of social media. Recent books include Discourse of Twitter and Social Media, Tacit Knowledge and Spoken Discourse and, with R. Page, J. Unger and D. Barton, Researching Language and Social Media.