When a Virus Goes Viral: A Speech Act Analysis of Egyptians’ Tweets on Monkeypox

Document Type : Original Article

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Delta University for Science and Technology

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide insight into the communicative characteristics of some tweets about Monkeypox disease. A corpus of 100 tweets from 100 Twitter users was gathered for this study over the course of 30 days. The data were then divided into five speech acts, with expressive and assertive speech acts standing out, strongly invoking Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts. Twitter can be regarded as a significant channel for deciphering virtual linguistic human interactions. Although Twitter users tended to utilize expressive language more frequently than other categories, numerous categories of speech acts were used. The tweets reflecting the epidemic condition reflect the societal differences associated with creating and developing personal distinctiveness making some tweets sound funny and sarcastic. This study serves the purpose of discovering how digital persona’s nuances can reveal not only the socioeconomic, religious, and political dimensions of users’ language but also their underlying motives, convictions, mindsets, and genuine orientations which sequentially may be applied to address some social problems logically.

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