A speech act analysis of status updates on facebook: The case of Ghanaian university students

In the last half a decade, social network sites (SNSs) have wrought a tremendous impact on interpersonal communication across the world to the extent that it can be postulated, arguably, that such sites/platforms represent the commonest new media in Ghana (Coker, 2012). However, the communicative significance of this new media as a means of articulating varying views and communicating differing intentions is relatively unknown in Ghana.

In this paper, I examine, ipso facto, the various categories of speech acts that manifest in the messages used by Ghanaian university students to update their status on Facebook as well as the pragmatic underpinnings of these messages. Based on a combined framework of Austin and Searle’s speech act theory and Warschauer and Herring’s notion of computer-mediated communication, the analysis on a corpus of 60 online messages indicated that Facebook status updates of Ghanaian university students are characterized by five speech acts, prominent among which are directives and asssertives. The study also revealed that the messages are informed and conditioned by multiple pragmatic notions, and reflect the socio-cultural variation and culture-specificity of language use in SNSs. These findings bear theoretical implications and hold implications for further research in computer-mediated communication and communication studies.