WhatsApp Communication: utterance boundaries from a gender perspective

Abstract

This article presents the results of a research on the demarcation processes used in the construction of digital communication on WhatsApp. For this purpose, we have applied a quantitative-qualitative method on a corpus of conversations carried out through this app, consisting of more than 22,000 messages, on which the methodology of pragmatic linguistics has been applied. The results show that resources typical of face-to-face conversation appear, such as greeting formulas or discourse markers. However, it is more convenient to employ the notion initiative-reactive adjacent pair, because users do not seem to want to initiate a real conversation in most cases, but simply to show information to the receiver to incite him/her to respond. This is formalized by verbal resources, multimodal resources or a combination of both (the most frequent scheme in the corpus). We have also carried out an approach from a gender perspective, which has allowed us to demonstrate that women show a preference for issuing a postponed reactive intervention on the previous message before opening a new topic, which can be attributed to the typically feminine tendency of promoting the relational work in communication.