engleski

Affect-induced entextualization: Metaphorical games in online communities

Reading through a thread on the Male Corner subforum of the Croatian online forum.hr, one comes across the following exchange of lighthearted retorts: (1) A: I am ready to get married, I can cook, I am skilled in carpentry and metalwork (...) I’ll be one hell of a husband (2) B: Quotes A ; Then why marry at all? (3) A: Quotes B: I need someone to iron and all that. (4) C: it’s cheaper to pay a lady to “iron”. (5) B: Quotes A: There must be a place where they iron cheaply. (6) D: Women iron, they iron indeed… their husbands’ credit cards. Just go ahead and get married, but don’t come crying back here (…) Referring to housework in (1), A uses the concept of “ironing” as an allusion to sexual intercourse in (3). The metaphor presents a product of context-induced creativity (Kövecses 2010) that other participants accept and develop further in (4) and (5). It gets humorously recontextualized in (6), where “ironing” refers to a spending spree. Following the logic of entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990), a linguistic expression and/or its content is taken out of its original context, given a novel meaning through blending and reintegrated into a multi-participant dialogue, giving rise to a metaphorical game. As opposed to “classical” political metaphor, the quoted example does not feature appropriation of either linguistic expression or content to achieve a contesting image that one wants to be true for everyone else. Rather, a humorous, metaphorical entextualization-based exchange of retorts transforms what might have been a clichéd lamentation on the alleged nature of women into a spontaneously co-constructed playful dealing with an irksome topic, becoming nearly an instrument of group therapy (alluded to in (6)). Crucially, the process mobilizes the affective function of metaphor (Cameron 2003: 23), as opposed to the often-discussed ideational one, highlighting the relevance of context, joint nature of its meaning creation and its therapeutic aspect. The aim of this paper is to explore which factors enable this type of metaphorical game in online forums. We examined the first 20 pages of the 10 active threads of 6 subforums chosen according to their assumed conduciveness to either deliberation or expressing affect. The results show that the Politics, Law, and Religion subforums exhibited ideational contestation, without featuring any metaphorical games. In contrast, the Lonely hearts, Love and sex, and Male corner subforums yielded 10 threads with what we call metaphorical games. A qualitative analysis reveals that vagueness of topic, the longevity of the community, and shared emotional issues are all factors conducive to the emergence of the game. References Bauman, R. & Briggs, C. L. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 59–88. Cameron, L. 2003. Metaphor in educational discourse. London: Continuum. Kövecses, Z. 2010. A new look at metaphorical creativity in cognitive linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics 21(4), 663–697.

metaphorical game, entextualization, co-construction, blending, affect

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