Pragmatic Analysis of Selected WhatsApp Chats

Abstract

WhatsApp chats are human communication activities in which language is put to use by social actors (discourse participants). Language operates therein as units of communication with one or more topics. A pragmatic analysis of WhatsApp chats examines who utters an utterance, why the utterance is uttered and where the utterance is made; indeed, these are crucial issues in the analysis of WhatsApp chats. Such an analysis is a linguistic approach towards investigating the concept of meaning in human communication, which in social media, shows the link between ‘context’ and ‘meaning’ as evident in the selection and sequencing of speech acts. Arguably, language use cannot be divorced from the discrete contexts that produce it. In communicative events, different contexts are invoked for the purpose of making speech acts ‘easy to mean’. This shows the intentional nature of speech acts. This study is poised to explain the fact that speakers’ intentions, beliefs and principle-driven use of language can be elucidated through a pragmatic-analyst approach to WhatsApp conversations. The theoretical framework of this study is Bach and Harnish’s (1979) speech act theory. The study finds out that in WhatsApp chats, illocutionary acts are selected and sequenced according to communicative goals; and expressions pick referents that are either abstract or concrete from the immediate or remote world.