Archived

This content is available here strictly for research, reference, and/or recordkeeping and as such it may not be fully accessible. If you work or study at University of Kentucky and would like to request an accessible version, please use the SensusAccess Document Converter.

Date Available

4-29-2016

Year of Publication

2018

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Linguistics

Faculty

Dr. E. R. Barrett

Faculty

Dr. Greg Stump

Abstract

Social media has become a large part of today’s pop culture and keeping up with what is going on not only in our social circles, but around the world. It has given many a platform to unite their causes, build fandoms, and share their commentary with the world. A tool in helping group posts together or give commentary on a thought is the hashtag. In this paper I explore the evaluative roles of hashtags in social media discourse, specifically on Twitter. I use a sample of randomly selected tweets from the Twitter API stream I collected and compiled myself. I collected a total of 200,000 tweets and filtered out Re-tweets. Looking at each individual hashtag I sorted them into the categories outlined by the Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and White (Martin & White, 2005). I explore the types of evaluation expressed in hashtags, the relationships between evaluative hashtags and how users negotiate evaluations using meme hashtags.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2018.047

Download

Share

COinS