Address and evaluation as stance-taking resources in the co-construction of YouTube product reviews in Spanish

Abstract

Online participatory environments have become saturated spaces in terms of the opportunities that they offer for the display of different viewpoints and ideologies. YouTube, as a popular video-sharing and networking site, constitutes a new media space that invites both individual and collaborative stance-taking by participants who gather, virtually, to address a particular topic, issue or event depicted visually and discussed textually through the comments that are posted on the site. This interactional dynamics triggers a dialogic sequence of comments or posts through which stances are formulated following up on previous stances or counterstances. Against this background, this paper presents an exploratory study of the individual and collaborative stances adopted by participants in their comments written in Spanish on online product reviews. Specifically, it focuses on forms of address and the manifestation of evaluation as linguistic resources that are exploited by the participants to adopt and negotiate stance at both interdiscursive and intradiscursive levels.