Evidentiality and stance in YouTube comments on smartphone reviews

Abstract

Online participatory environments have become saturated spaces in terms of the opportunities that they offer for the display of different viewpoints and ideologies. YouTube, as a popular video-sharing and networking site, constitutes a new media space that invites both individual and collaborative stance-taking by participants who gather, virtually, to address a particular topic, issue or event depicted visually and discussed textually through the comments that are posted on the site. This interactional dynamics triggers a dialogic sequence of follow-ups through which stances are formulated following up on previous stances or counterstances. Against this background, this paper reports on a case study of individual and collaborative, and interdiscursive and intradiscursive stance-taking in participants’ comments to an online review focusing on the strategic use of direct (tactile) and indirect (inferential) references to evidentiality and their co-occurrence with argumentative markers. In this multilayered context stance-taking does not only contribute to evaluation but also to the construction of collective identities.