Exploring agreement on social media: a small-scale corpus study with proposals for technical and analytical frameworks

Abstract

he article focuses on the methodology of creating a small-sized corpus from social media platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram to study speech acts, particularly the act of agreement, within the context of Spanish social networks. It aims to demonstrate the contributions of such a corpus to the understanding of speech acts while addressing the complexities and challenges associated with collecting conversational interactions and user data from these platforms, including factors such as representativeness, privacy, and platform limitations. The article proposes a technical sheet for capturing contextual information and users’ sociolinguistic data, along with a pragmatic analysis sheet for the act of agreement. The latter delineates the variables and variants studied at the interactive and illocutionary levels, covering aspects such as the types of communicative turns seeking agreement, direct resources for expressing agreement, their functions, and complexities. Ultimately, the article seeks to enrich the field of corpus pragmatics by providing a resource for researchers interested in annotating pragmatic corpora for agreement research.