MULTIMODALITY IN FOOTBALL FANS’ BANTER ON TWITTER

Abstract

Banter, a form of playful and humorous social communication, is deployed in football discourse on Twitter. Previous studies on banter focused largely on the social bonding function of banter in daily interaction and the workplace. However, little attention has been paid to the deployment of banter in football discourse on Twitter. Therefore, this study was designed to examine the use of banter on Twitter by football fans, with a view to determining banter categories, banter strategies, linguistic and non-linguistic devices and politeness strategies employed in the discourse. Gunter Kress and Theo van Leuwen‘s Visual Grammar, complemented by M.A.K. Halliday‘s Systemic Functional Grammar and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson‘s Face Theory, was adopted as the framework. The descriptive design was used. Twitter was purposively selected because it contains a large corpus of data on football banter through its football Twitter community platform. One hundred and fifty Tweeter handles were purposively selected because their tweets deployed both verbal and non-verbal modes. One hundred and fifty banter tweets, one from each of the Tweeter handles, were purposively selected. The selected banter tweets were retrieved through the Twitter advance search platform. The data were subjected to multimodal discourse analysis. Five categories of banter were identified: football fans-targeted banter, football playerstargeted banter, football managers-targeted banter, football clubs-targeted banter and match officials-targeted banter. Football fans-targeted banter foregrounded defeat-induced emotional trauma, hopelessness, and fear and anxiety as subcategories. Football players-targeted banter was marked by unprofessionalism, professional incapability, incurable obsession, unachieved personal ambition and injury proneness. Football managers-targeted banter was indicated by ineptitude coaching and defeat-induced emotional torture. Football clubs-targeted banter was characterised with financial incapability and unsuccessful transfer. Match officials-targeted banter was marked by poor and biased officiating. Eight banter strategies were employed, namely posturing, gesturing, dressing, sarcasm, symbolisation, stereotyping, gazing and name-calling. Posturing targeted torturing, subordinating and slipping; while gesturing featured ridiculing poor officiating, fighting racism, ridiculing boasting and mocking constant failure. Dressing was used for questioning professional ability; sarcasm for poor decisionmaking and unmerited awards; and symbolisation for mocking lack of achievement and incessant defeat. Stereotyping concerned discriminating against dressing style and naming system; gazing focused on scorning and teasing; while name-calling involved blackmailing. The banter categories and strategies were marked by transactional and non-transactional action and reactionary processes, and conceptual and symbolic representations. The linguistic devices employed in the banter were coinages, anecdotes, allusion, sarcasm, hyperbole and pun. Coinages were used for identity damaging; anecdotes were utilised for intimidating; sarcasm, pun and allusion were employed for mockery; while hyperbole was deployed for creating impossible scenarios for ridiculing. Off-record and positive politeness were used as face-saving strategies; while depicting emotional state, body-shaming, mocking professional failures, bald on-record acts were employed as face-threatening strategies. Football banter on Twitter is marked with banter strategies, linguistic devices and politeness strategies aggressively deployed for ridiculing. There is need for policy and legislation formulation on use and control of social media.