The linguistic-cognitive essence of virtual community

One of the objectives of the so-called cyberpragmatics is to determine the inferential strategies of contextualisation which Internet users perform when they produce and interpret other users’ messages. Leaving aside a static view of context, according to which communicative exchanges take place in a pre-determined spatial-temporal location, today’s view of context is much more dynamic, of inferential nature, and which starts immediately after the linguistic input has been decoded. Besides, there are multiple sources from which the inferential system can gather information, whose activation is guided by the general search for relevance to which human minds are constantly geared. In previous research, this dynamic view of context has been useful in order to explain communicative strategies such as the ones taking place in chat rooms or through e-mails. In this paper, our attention will be focussed on strategies of contextualisation which are intended to form and stabilise the user’s thoughts on virtual community. Again, it will be shown that dynamic strategies of contextualisation are needed so that stable information on community can be not only stored in the user’s mind, but also shared with other users who belong to the same community. The key to this on-going and negotiated storage of information on community membership lies in sustained communicative interactions in a sufficiently lasting time span.

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