Carmen Lee is Professor in the Department of English and Associate Dean of Arts (Education) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and co‑Editor‑in‑Chief of the journal Discourse, Context & Media. Her research focuses on digital discourse, digital multilingualism, and online verbal aggression. Her recent publications include the second edition of Language Online (Routledge, 2026, with David Barton), Doxxing Discourse (CUP, 2026), and the Handbook of Language and Digital Culture (De Gruyter, 2027, co-edited with Astrid Ensslin). Her current projects examine the interplay between online and offline linguistic landscapes.

Ruth Page is Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has written several books including Narratives Online: Shared Stories and Social Media (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction, (London & NY: Routledge, 2012). She is currently co-authoring a book with Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou on memetic storytelling and short-form videos (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Her publications have explored narratives and multimodal communication in a wide range of mediated contexts. She was the lead researcher for the ESRC funded project (2024-2026): Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People: https://influencerstories.bham.ac.uk/, which examined mental health narratives from influencers in TikTok and produced a range of resources to help educators, policy makers, parents and carers and young people.

ABSTRACT: AI generated stories: Empowering creativity, misinformation or harmless ‘slop’?

The rise of AI generated content (AIGC) has recently expanded to incorporate stories produced with prompt to video tools. The resulting realistic, cinematic videos circulate in highly visual social media platforms, such as TikTok (Chateau, 2026), ranging from humorous memes that recontextualise historical figures into impossible contemporary contexts to deepfakes of healthcare professionals used to offer misleading advice. In this presentation, I offer a technographic perspective (Georgakopoulou, 2024) on AIGC videos shared on TikTok to reflect on the ways in which narrative tellability and tellership have evolved in the platform. Using case studies which track multimodal healthcare narratives (Christiansen et al., 2025) and memetic storytelling (Georgakopoulou and Page, forthcoming), I show how these stories depend on the templates and recognisability inherent in the imitation publics of TikTok (Darvin, 2022), but open up critical questions about the ends to which this recognisability is put.

Janina Wildfeuer is Associate Professor in Communication and Information Studies at the University of Groningen - and a #multimodalist with more than 15 years of experience in working with visual and audiovisual communication. She has contributed to the theoretical and methodological development of multimodality studies (see e.g. the co-authored textbooks "Multimodality" (2017 & 2026) and works in corpus-analytical and empirically-oriented projects. At the moment, she focuses on projects on multimodal disinformation and hate, the automation of multimodal corpus analyses, and on the question how (audio-)visual communication can help build a better future for our society.

ABSTRACT: Identity across digital media: Materiality as a starting point for systematic multimodal discourse analysis

Digital discourse is multimodal by default. Short videos, news feeds, digital comics – all combine a broad diversity of expressive forms, including spoken and written language, still and moving images, sound, layout and platform-specific elements. It is precisely in the combination of these elements that identities are constructed, performed, and negotiated. Who is shown, how they are framed, whose voice is heard and which visual and verbal choices recur all contribute to how identities become recognisable in digital spaces.

Capturing this requires a critical eye on the complexity of multimodal communication and an analytical approach that is fine-grained enough to account for the interplay of multiple modes, yet systematic enough to be applied to larger data sets. In this talk, I will argue for such an approach: one that makes it possible to move from the individual artefact to patterns across hundreds of them - without losing sight of the discursive work through which identities are constructed.

I will show that such an approach is general enough to address very different digital artefacts, with materiality as the central point of connection. Starting from the material properties of each medium, such as the temporal unfolding of short-form video, the layout of digital news pages or the vertical scroll of webtoons, allows us to ask how these properties shape the semiotic modes available for constructing identities. I will zoom in on the specificities of these different media forms and discuss the performance of motherhood in short-form video, the representation of migrants in digital news, and identity construction in webtoons. Across these cases, I will demonstrate how systematic multimodal analysis can reveal the recurring patterns of identity construction in digital discourse.

Francisco Yus is full professor at the University of Alicante, Spain. He has specialised in the application of pragmatics (especially relevance theory) to media discourses and conversational issues. For instance, he has made two applications of pragmatics to characters in alternative comics (Conversational cooperation in alternative comics, 1995; El discurso femenino en el cómic alternativo inglés, 2001), proposed a pragmatic verbal-visual model of communication in media discourses (La interpretación y la imagen de masas, 1997), and studied the written-oral interface (La preeminencia de la voz, 1998). His most prominent research is on pragmatics of internet-mediated communication: Ciberpragmática. El uso del lenguaje en Internet, 2001; Ciberpragmática 2.0. Nuevos usos del lenguaje en Internet, 2010; Cyberpragmatics. Internet-Mediated Communication in Context, 2011; Smartphone Communication. Interactions in the App Ecosystem, 2022; The Discursive Construction of Place in the Digital Age (ed. with A. Parini), 2023; Emoji Pragmatics, 2025. His research also applies relevance theory to the analysis of misunderstandings and irony, as well as to the production and interpretation of humorous discourses (Humour and Relevance, 2016; Pragmatics of Internet Humour, 2023). He is also editor of the journal Internet Pragmatics (John Benjamins, https://benjamins.com/catalog/ip).

ABSTRACT: Cyberpragmatics of stickers: The content-inference interface

Unlike emojis, about which there is a substantial amount of bibliography, including research from a pragmatic point of view (Dainas and Herring, 2021; Yus, 2025; Suau-Jiménez and Yus, 2026), there is a clear scarcity of pragmatic research on stickers (Ge-Stadnyk et al., 2025; Linares-Bernabéu and Yus, in press). This is surprising, considering that nowadays stickers are massively used in everyday messaging interactions, to the extent that they have even taken over emoji use, especially by the youth.

This lecture aims at providing the scaffolding of a cyberpragmatics (Yus, 2011, 2022, 2025) of sticker use. Firstly, not only inferential aspects and associated sticker functions are taken into account, but also typical aspects of research within this theory such as the attention to demographic variables (user-related contextual constraints), the role of interface affordances (interface-related constraints) and the importance of non-propositional effects (feelings, emotions) in the assessment of the eventual cognitive benefit (relevance) of sticker-centred messaging interactions (Parini and Yus, in press).

However, in this lecture, a special emphasis will be placed on the pragmatic implications of the gap between image content and inferred interpretation of stickers, proposed as similar to the gap existing between coded verbal utterances and the eventually inferred interpretations by the hearer. This is part of a broader proposal to view verbal, visual and multimodal discourses as performing similar pragmatic functions and demanding similar inferential strategies to the ones resorted to in verbal communication, despite the obvious differences regarding how these discourses are coded or created.

References

Dainas, Ashley R., and Susan C. Herring 2021. “Interpreting emoji pragmatics.” In Camilla Vásquez and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Approaches to Internet Pragmatics. Theory and practice (pp. 107-144). Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Ge-Stadnyk, Jing, Susan C. Herring, and Lusha Sa. 2025. “Multimodality in Digital Discourse: Exploring Image-Text Interrelations in WeChat Sticker Use.” In Camilla Vásquez and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Experiencing Digital Discourses. Multimodality, Engagement, Activism (pp. 161-192). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Linares-Bernabéu, E. and F. Yus. in press. “A pragmatic typology of WhatsApp sticker functions.” Pragmatics.
Parini, Alejandro, and Francisco Yus. in press. The Discourse of Digitised Emotions. Abingdon: Routledge.
Suau-Jiménez, Francisca, and Francisco Yus. 2026. “Pragmatic recontextualization through emojis in users’ responsive engagement with destination marketing on social media.” In Rosa Lorés and Pilar Mur-Dueñas (eds.), Recontextualizing Expert Knowledge. The Process, Practices and Aims of Digital Dissemination (pp. 140-158). Abingdon: Routledge.
Yus, Francisco. 2011. Cyberpragmatics. Internet-Mediated Communication in Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Yus, Francisco. 2022. Smartphone Communication. Interactions in the App Ecosystem. Abingdon: Routledge.
Yus, Francisco. 2025. Emoji Pragmatics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.