Exploring interpersonal language in wedding discourse on social media

Abstract

As evidenced by YouTube's rising online popularity, sharing experiences via social media is becoming more and more common. Since the advent of digital media, communication and experience sharing have changed. A wedding speech is an intriguing example of this genre, where the speaker naturally expresses gratitude to the newlyweds and guests while reliving family history. By recognizing important linguistic elements, the audience can better understand the interpersonal ties presented. The present study aimed to explore the interpersonal language and investigate the significant linguistic features of social media speech through a spoken analysis of YouTube videos. Approximately 2.5 hours (and 13,707 words) worth of real audio-visual recordings of wedding speeches were gathered and transcribed. The theoretical foundation for this study is strengthened by systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The findings and discussions section provides a comprehensive review of interpersonal language as it relates to appraisal theory, for example, the context variables of genre and register and lexico-grammatical features. These findings were investigated to comprehend the underlying interpersonal meanings in various language strata domains. The present study advances our knowledge of how language shapes speakers' communicative behavior in wedding discourse and provides insight into this novel media text form.