Abstract

This study examines how people creatively use available semiotic resources to adapt to technology-mediated written communication on the Korean Internet and TV in order to efficiently display their stance. Specifically, by investigating emerging grammatical and discursive practices as new semiotic features on the Korean Internet social websites and TV shows, this dissertation aims to illuminate how language accommodates the interplay of stance marking and technology-mediated communication.

From the perspective of discourse-functional linguistics, linguistic anthropology and multimodal discourse analysis, we show that hybrid grammatical constructions (-(u)miya, -sam, -tanun) on the Internet that deviate from the standardized usage of nominal predicate, speech style and quotation relativization in Korean, respectively, represent the routinization of new grammatical patterns that reflect the blended nature of Internet communication as a medium and display multi-layered voices. These constructions are used to efficiently mark the speaker's subjective evaluation through objectification/detachment ( -(u)miya, -tanun) and to make a request to the unknown addressee politely in brevity or to convey the speaker's evaluative stance assertively (-sam). Also the physical separation between the participants facilitates the use of graphic features to express their facial appearances and auditory features on the Internet.

Another type of technology-mediated communication, written communication in the form of mediated subtitles on Korean TV shows, is investigated. In examining graphic features such as typography and colors in mediated subtitles used to convey a participant's storytelling, we argue that these are relevant semiotic resources to deliver evaluative, affective stance in the organization of multimodal TV-mediated discourse, replacing the paralinguistic features of spoken language and creating a new discursive written practice. An adaptive usage of linguistic features to the media-specific written communication ( -(u)n, sound symbolic words, and overt stance-laden words) is also examined to illustrate how Korean TV-mediated subtitles are a result of people's attempts to express different voices and stances in multileveled audience designs with a special focus on entertaining the audience. The examination of creative co-deployment of multimodal semiotic resources that compensate for the contextual limitation of technology-mediated communication in expressing stance illuminates the relationship between language and discourse.