De metadato a recurso comunicativo: usos de los hashtags #HeForShe, #MeToo y #Mansplaining en X/Twitter

Abstract

In the context of sociolinguistic and pragmatic studies in recent years, the discourse produced in digital environments has become a topic of growing interest. The digital age (Giammatteo, 2014) has allowed for an expansion of the ways people communicate, which has led to the generation of new discourses. These texts present particularities that originate in the different ways in which people express themselves and convey their opinions regarding a particular topic and their interests (Herring and Androutsopoulos, 2015, p. 127). The utterances produced in these environments do not strictly belong to the written or oral modes of language realization (Koch and Oesterreicher, 2007), but rather combine both modes with the characteristics of digital multimodality (König, 2024). In them, we find a diversity of semiotic resources that combine in different ways, generating multiple communicative potentialities for the speaking user, who chooses among those that are most productive to satisfy their communicative needs. Along these lines, one of the most studied social networks is Twitter (X1). Digital environments, in general, and Twitter/X, in particular, provide us with access to a large amount of data to analyze linguistic phenomena (De Benito Moreno and Estrada Arráez, 2018, p. 78). Thus, the exchanges on this social network are of interest due to their variety and heterogeneity, as they can range from everyday topics, such as sharing thoughts, experiences, news, and other aspects of daily life, to exchanges related to political opinions and ideological debates. In fact, it is often used as a platform to discuss controversial topics, express polarized opinions, or even confront others on political issues. This broad range of topics allows us to explore the diverse possibilities for the circulation of these discourses and their communicative potential, as well as the resources used by speaking users according to their communicative purposes.