Performing Couplings: Communing affiliation through bullet curtains in live stream

This paper provides insights into how viewers commune affiliation through bullet curtains in live stream. Due to the apparently chaotic form of live stream interactions and streamers’ central role in holding live stream shows, previous research either sees live stream interactions as disordered or over-emphasizes the role of streamers in mustering the community. This study argues that viewers can also affiliate with co-viewers by performing in bullet curtains. To account for this particular way of affiliation, this study localizes the Ambient Affiliation theory in systemic-functional linguistics with the help of the linguistic-anthropological theory of stage performance. Through the analysis of 50 h’ recording of live stream shows, this paper finds that although the strategies of Ambient Affiliation are still adopted in live stream, the realization of them is different. Instead of addressing potential readers as in other forms of social media, viewers here dialogue with streamers and commune affiliation by performing the ideation-attitude couplings in their dialogical comments on the virtual stage of live stream. The performances targeting couplings brought up by streamers would adjust the dialogical space of these couplings (FINESS), and those targeting couplings in viewers’ bullet curtains would interpersonally foreground an entire coupling (PROMOTE). Viewers may also meta-perform to remind audiences of upcoming performances and in this way attribute couplings to target audiences (CONVOKE). Meanwhile, as viewers need to steal the spotlight of streamers by building their performances on streamers’, not only is stylization employed to invoke more powerful voices so as to compete with streamers, but the resulting logico-semantic dependency also sets constraints on the semantic choices of their performances.