Russian social networks on the web: cohesion and coherence in Vkontakte

Liebschner, Andrea (2016) Russian social networks on the web: cohesion and coherence in Vkontakte. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

In this thesis connections between messages on the public wall of the Russian social network Vkontakte are analysed and classified. A total of 1818 messages from three different Vkontakte groups were collected and analysed according to a new framework based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) research into cohesion and Simmons’s (1981) adaptation of their classification for Russian. The two categories of textuality, cohesion and coherence, describe the linguistic connections between messages. The main aim was to find out how far the traditional categories of cohesion are applicable to an online social network including written text as well as multimedia-files. In addition to linguistic cohesion the pragmatic and topic coherence between Vkontakte messages was also analysed. The analysis of pragmatic coherence classifies the messages with acts according to their pragmatic function in relation to surrounding messages. Topic coherence analyses the content of the messages, describes where a topic begins, changes or is abandoned. Linguistic cohesion, topic coherence and pragmatic coherence enable three different types of connections between messages and these together form a coherent communication on the message wall. The cohesion devices identified by Halliday and Hasan and Simmons were found to occur in these texts, but additional devices were also identified: these are multimodal, graphical and grammatical cohesion.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: social networks-cohesion-coherence-Russian-social media-linguistics.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PB Modern European Languages; P Language and Literature > PG Slavic, Baltic, Albanian languages and literature
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > Slavonic Studies
• Supervisor's Name: Dunn, Dr. John and Khairov, Dr. Shamil
• Date of Award: 2016
• Depositing User: Dr. Andrea Liebschner
• Unique ID: glathesis:2016-7674
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 25 Oct 2016 10:05
• Last Modified: 02 Nov 2016 11:05
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/7674