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In:Patterns of Context: Modelling cultural and contextual influence in utterance interpretation
Edited by Elke Diedrichsen and Frank Liedtke
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 356] 2026
► pp. 218–244

Instagram posts as contextualising stance patterns

Diachronic insights into digital body communication

 | University of Mannheim
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
This study focuses on German body-reflexive Instagram posts as contextualising stance patterns, thus focusing on multimodal texts of everyday digital life used to construe and negotiate (female) bodies. The study pays particular attention to the potential of these texts to create sociocultural contexts, always under digital conditions. The context concept, as developed by Fetzer in numerous studies, as well as works on (discourse) common ground serve as a theoretical basis. At the same time, an urgent desideratum of internet linguistics is addressed: the largely missing diachronic perspective. By comparing two Instagram corpora from 2013 to 2016 and 2020 to 2023, we not only gain insights into digital stance patterns as utterance-context pairings but can also observe how contexts change.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Instagram posts and digital body communication
    • 2.2Stance patterns
    • 2.3Contextualising resources
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Empirical insights
    • 4.1Construing space and time
    • 4.2At a glance: Thematic developments 2013 to 2023
    • 4.3In transition: On the recontextualisation of a multimodal stance template
    • 4.4Addressing shared knowledge and values: Sociocultural and cognitive contexts
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (42)
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