GENDIGIT

The strong development of digital genres or cyber-genres and so-called computer-mediated communication is an undeniable recent development. Their development at all levels, through the inclusion of texts and/or multimedia elements, has been shaping, transforming and enriching discourse. Here we must understand both the mechanisms of textual production and those of reception, given that the user, receiver or reader, who played a more passive role in traditional genres, participates actively in cyber-genres, becoming an agent, a discursive modeller in a medium, the Internet, which undergoes constant changes. In short, digital genres and media, both collective (blogs, websites, forums, social networks) and individual (narrative blogs, e-mails), have opened up a universe of possibilities and characteristics thanks to the incorporation of electronic media. We are thus witnessing the genesis of new genres with discursive proposals that need to be known and described in detail in order to understand their impact on speech communities and their implications in sociolinguistic fields. Our research group aims to analyse the multiplicity of linguistic aspects, pragmatic and discursive strategies, phraseology, vocabulary, multimodal features, etc., in five languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian and German. To this end, we have created databases containing samples of original versions and translations of cyber-genres where we can examine the construction of these texts and their behaviour from the point of view of contrast and interaction. We hope that this will allow us to carry out more precise and detailed research. Thanks to these databases, we hope to be able to use the various analyses to better characterise digital genres, their discourses, lexicon or phraseology, socio-pragmatic, cognitive or semiotic (multimodal) aspects. We are also interested in the interactive role of the recipients of all this vast digital production, since we know that the audience plays a decisive active role, for example, through the opinions expressed on social networks, or in various discussion forums, influencing more clearly the effective transformation of content and messages. We prioritise the use of corpus tools as they enrich linguistic description, and outperform simple manual, intuition-based analysis, particularly when aiming to empirically analyse large data samples. The introduction of corpus tools methodologically links quantitative and qualitative analysis. The implementation of these databases and the commitment to appropriate corpus-based methodologies provide systematicity and solidity to our research, not only based on the theoretical, but mainly on a strong empirical component to observe actual usage, in the hope that all this can serve as a model for further work. Our research group intends to analyse the multiplicity of linguistic aspects, discursive strategies, phraseology, vocabulary, multimodal features, etc., in five languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian and German, and gradually incorporating Arabic. To this end, large databases will be created containing samples of original versions and translations of cyber-genres where we can examine the construction of these texts and their behaviour from the point of view of contrast and interaction. Progressively, these databases will incorporate annotations that take into account sociolinguistic or geolectal elements, and morphological, semantic and discursive tagging will be introduced.