Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 167

online ethnography and several semi-structured interviews with the participants.
One thing is carrying out fieldwork and collecting the data. Another thing is to
account for the methodological choices during this process. In this respect, I want
to emphasize Vanessa’s very thorough and pedagogical way of describing how the
different data sets were collected and what methodological choices were made dur-
ing the fieldwork. Finally, I would also like to highlight Vanessa’s analytical com-
petences. In the thesis, Vanessa draws on traditional variationist frameworks by
carrying out quantitative analysis on the level of lexical features. Vanessa also ana-
lyzes language attitudes and discusses different ways of writing in relation to mat-
ters of language ideology. Finally, Vanessa carries out a qualitative interaction
analysis of the participants’ everyday online language use, identity constructions
and social relations. Although Vanessa could have benefitted from making the dif-
ferent analyses “talk more together” in the dissertation, I would still say, that it is
impressive to carry out such different analyses in a single dissertation.

3. Discussion
My discussion of the dissertation is divided into five topics:
1. Media-related terminology.
2. Language terminology and theoretical frameworks.
3. Analytical points and results.
4. Overall contributions to the field of sociolinguistics (of social media).
5. Social media and sociolinguistic change in Iceland — future challenges
and possibilities.

3.1 Media-related terminology
The first topic I want to address is related to the use of media terminology. Let
us begin with the subtitle of the thesis: “Language use in informal online com-
munication” (emphasis added, ACS). Here Vanessa uses the notion “informal” to
characterize or frame the language use she studies on Facebook and not for
instance other available terminology such as “semi-public” online communication
(or something similar), which emphasizes the communicative context, rather
than the level of formality (the term “informal” is also used in the introduction
on p. 8). My point is that both “formal” and “informal” language use is found on
Facebook — and Vanessa actually also illustrates this point in the experimental
study that includes an example of a “formal” and an “informal” housing advertise-
ment on Facebook. So, my question is:
Why have you chosen to emphasize the dichotomy between “formal” and
“informal” and not contextual aspects such as “semi-public / public” when
you frame the communicative context of your study?
Comments and discussion points from the second opponent 167