Source-linked AI summary
Textual Paralanguage and its Implications for Marketing Communications
Andrea Webb Luangrath, Joann Peck, Victor A. Barger
TL;DR
Online nonverbal communication lacks clear boundaries, so the paper defines textual paralanguage, develops a typology from social-media data, and finds that most instances are readily classifiable. It also identifies empirical study of TPL effects as an important remaining need.
Problem
Online nonverbal communication lacks clear boundaries, requiring a broader conceptualization of textual paralanguage.
Method
The paper conceptualizes textual paralanguage and develops a typology using communication data from social-media platforms.
Results
Most instances of textual paralanguage are readily classifiable, while 31.3% of 1,550 analyzed Instagram posts contained at least one instance.
Takeaways & Limitations
The typology is intended to make textual paralanguage easier for future research to interpret.
Takeaways & Limitations
The effects of textual paralanguage remain unstudied empirically.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Both face-to-face communication and communication in online environments convey information beyond the actual verbal message. In a traditional face-to-face conversation, paralanguage, or the ancillary meaning- and emotion-laden aspects of speech that are not actual verbal prose, gives contextual information that allows interactors to more appropriately understand the message being conveyed. In this paper, we conceptualize textual paralanguage (TPL), which we define as written manifestations of nonverbal audible, tactile, and visual elements that supplement or replace written language and that can be expressed through words, symbols, images, punctuation, demarcations, or any combination of these elements. We develop a typology of textual paralanguage using data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We present a conceptual framework of antecedents and consequences of brands' use of textual paralanguage. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
In-Person Nonverbal Communication and Behavior · Visual Nonverbal Communication · Haptic Nonverbal Communication
In-person nonverbal communication supplements words through auditory, visual, and haptic channels. These foundations help explain online textual paralanguage, including facial emojis as visual paralinguistic elements.
- In-Person Nonverbal Communication and Behavior: Nonverbal communication conveys information through means other than words and is readily observed in face-to-face interactions.The paper examines these in-person forms to clarify the nature of nonverbals in text.
- In-Person Nonverbal Communication and Behavior: Auditory paralanguage uses speech properties such as pitch, rhythm, and tempo to qualify literal words.These vocal qualities and vocalizations communicate information beyond verbal prose.
- In-Person Nonverbal Communication and Behavior: Paralinguistic elements in theatrical scripts provide stage directions, relay emotions, and facilitate interaction across languages, cultures, and time.Playwrights have used communication beyond literal words for centuries.
- Visual Nonverbal Communication: Visual nonverbal communication includes kinesics, bodily movements, gestures, body language, and facial expressions.Facial muscle changes can communicate emotional states and provide nonverbal feedback.
- Visual Nonverbal Communication: Facial emojis are visual textual paralinguistic elements.Their existence follows from the communicative role of visual elements in face-to-face interaction.
- Visual Nonverbal Communication: Presentational style communicates nonverbal information through adornments, clothing, style, tattoos, and cosmetics.These artifacts can signal personality characteristics and inform initial judgments.
- Haptic Nonverbal Communication: Touch is an effective form of communication whose meaning depends on environmental, personal, and contextual factors.People differ in their preferences for seeking or avoiding touch, and relationship closeness influences which touches are appropriate.
- Haptic Nonverbal Communication: Relationship closeness influences the types of touch considered appropriate.Touch develops from an early means of exploring the environment into a method of communicating with others.
Nonverbal Communication Online and Textual Paralanguage Conceptualization
The paper conceptualizes textual paralanguage (TPL) as written nonverbal elements that supplement or replace language, proposing a typology to organize its forms and support research on its antecedents and consequences. The typology distinguishes voice qualities, vocalizations, tactile kinesics, visual kinesics, and artifacts.
- Conceptualization: TPL is a broader conceptualization of written nonverbal communication that supplements or replaces language through words, symbols, images, punctuation, demarcations, or combinations.The authors argue that symbols and punctuation have communicative value but that a broader framework is needed.
- Typology: The typology distinguishes voice qualities, vocalizations, tactile kinesics, visual kinesics, and artifacts, adding artifacts for text visuals without direct in-person counterparts.It is based primarily on sound, touch, and visual properties likely to occur in text.
- Voice Qualities: Voice qualities encode how words should be spoken, including emphasis, pitch, and rhythm, through capitalization, underlining, punctuation, and special characters.In “Best. Sale. Ever.,” periods create rhythm and convey more information than “Best sale ever.”
- Vocalizations: Vocalizations are meaningful audible utterances, fillers, terms, or bodily sounds that may or may not qualify as English words.Examples such as “umm” or “uhhh” can convey hesitancy, nervousness, or indecision depending on context.
- Kinesics: Tactile kinesics represent physical or haptic interaction, whereas visual kinesics represent bodily movement through emoticons and emojis.“*high five*” exemplifies tactile kinesic TPL, while emoticons and emojis are treated as examples of visual kinesic paralanguage.
- Artifacts: Artifacts capture the message’s presentational style, including typeface, spacing, color, formatting, layout, and non-kinesic or non-tactile emojis and stickers.Images and icons can supplement or replace words in online communication.
Exploratory Study: Brands’ Use of Textual Paralanguage
The study takes a deductive approach to textual paralanguage by examining evidentiary data from actual online communications. It analyzes brand posts across social media platforms to substantiate the framework.
- Exploratory Study: Brands’ Use of Textual Paralanguage: The study shifts from an inductive approach to a deductive examination of textual paralanguage.It uses evidentiary data to investigate the phenomenon.
- Exploratory Study: Brands’ Use of Textual Paralanguage: The analysis examines how textual paralanguage is used in actual online communications.The study approaches usage through evidentiary data rather than induction alone.
- Exploratory Study: Brands’ Use of Textual Paralanguage: It examines brand posts across various social media platforms to substantiate the framework.The platform-based analysis focuses on brands’ online communications.
Sample · Results · Antecedents of Textual Paralanguage Use
The study examined recent social-media posts from large national brands and spokescharacters to characterize textual paralanguage (TPL). TPL appeared across platforms and was linked to brand, platform, and audience factors, including desired personality and communication norms.
- Sample: The sample comprised recent Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram posts from large national brands and their corporate or spokescharacter accounts.Posts were imported into TAMS Analyzer, and three individuals manually coded tweets for TPL.
- Results: 31.3% of Instagram posts, 20.6% of brand tweets, and 19.1% of Facebook posts contained TPL.These figures indicate that TPL occurred on all three platforms in the sample.
- Results: All five TPL types appeared across platforms, with voice qualities most frequent and tactile kinesics least frequent.The study also identified uses not initially theorized, including spelling out words with dashes to indicate vocalization.
- Antecedents of Textual Paralanguage Use: Brands may use TPL to convey meaning and emotion online, where nonverbal cues are lacking and organizations seek a social presence and conversational human voice.TPL may particularly benefit brands seeking a young, relatable, or warm image.
- Antecedents of Textual Paralanguage Use: Brand personality and communicator personality may shape both whether TPL is used and which type is employed.Brand mascots and other anthropomorphic characters may be more likely to use TPL.
- Antecedents of Textual Paralanguage Use: Platform-specific communication norms may guide TPL use, including Twitter’s character limit and differences in communication synchronicity.The passage proposes that synchronous interactions may contain more TPL because immediate responses limit message length.
- Antecedents of Textual Paralanguage Use: Target-audience characteristics may influence TPL use and interpretation, with younger or more expressive and emotional consumers potentially prompting greater consideration of TPL.The passage frames these audience effects as possibilities rather than established results.
Consequences of Textual Paralanguage Use
TPL may shape brand personality perceptions, brand–consumer relationship closeness, and consumers’ interpretation of messages. However, its brand and consumer effects remain empirically unstudied.
- Brand personality: TPL may influence perceptions of brand personality, potentially increasing warmth while its informality may hurt perceptions of firm competence.Warmth and competence can translate into consumer engagement, connection, and loyalty, but emoticons may also be viewed as casual and unprofessional.
- Brand–consumer relationship: TPL may influence the brand–consumer relationship by conveying closeness through personal tactile kinesics such as “*hug*”.These personal textual paralinguistic elements may foster a sense of closeness.
- Message interpretation: TPL may affect message interpretation because emoticons can intensify messages, perform functions similar to nonverbal behavior, and aid comprehension.The cited evidence concerns emoticons’ effects on message intensity and understanding.
- Research gap: Brand and consumer effects of TPL remain empirically unstudied.The paper identifies this gap as motivating consideration of avenues for future research.
General Discussion and Future Research
Textual paralanguage (TPL) is complex, context-dependent, and increasingly important in online consumer and marketing communications. The typology provides a foundation for studying how TPL shapes interpretation, sensory experience, memory, consumer insight, and brand management.
- Contribution: TPL is complex and context-dependent, but its typology makes the properties and effects of textual messages easier to study.Most instances are readily classifiable despite some overlap among categories.
- Future Research: The typology provides a foundation for investigating whether TPL alters sensory experiences and evokes auditory, tactile, or visual imagery.Future work could examine how these modalities are encoded in memory and affect information retrieval and use.
- Future Research: Future research could test whether TPL’s embodied expressions influence recall and recognition through internal simulation and bodily action.Related questions include physical mimicry of expressions such as “*shrug*” and modality-specific processing.
- Future Research: Companies could use consumers’ TPL to predict personality, loyalty, engagement, tendencies, and behaviors.Suggested attributes include age, gender, socioeconomic status, education, emotional intelligence, relationships, networks, and sentiment.
- Managerial Implications: TPL should inform hiring, training, and customer-service strategies because it contributes to a brand’s online tone and voice.Representatives may need different communication strategies depending on the source, valence, and context of consumer messages.
- Managerial Implications: Paralanguage is abundant in online communication and will continue to grow with social media, making TPL information valuable for marketers.The paper argues that marketers should explore the wealth of information contained in textual paralanguage.
Typeface
Brands’ Instagram posts contained textual paralanguage more often than their Facebook posts, while the exploratory study analyzed brand and consumer communications across several platforms.
- Facebook: 19.1% of 3,749 Facebook posts contained one or more instances of textual paralanguage.Frequencies and percentages were based on 250 posts per Facebook page, except Cheerios, which had 249 posts.
- Instagram: 31.3% of 1,550 Instagram posts contained one or more instances of textual paralanguage.The analysis used 160 posts per Instagram account where available, with several accounts having smaller samples.
- Methodological Details Appendix: The exploratory study collected data from consumers and brands, including tweets, at-replies, Facebook posts, and Instagram posts.The appendix describes analyses of consumer tweets, brand tweets, brand at-replies, and brand posts on Facebook and Instagram.
Consumer Tweets
The study analyzed 5,000 public English-language tweets to examine consumer use of textual paralanguage (TPL). Among 4,608 valid tweets, 40.3% used TPL, with voice quality and visual kinesics most prevalent.
- Consumer Tweets: Coders identified all nonverbal communication in text, including instances that did not fit existing textual-paralanguage categories.The procedure was designed to test whether the existing classification captured all relevant categories.
- Consumer Tweets: 1,859 of 4,608 valid tweets (40.3%) employed some form of textual paralanguage.This result indicates that TPL occurred frequently in consumer-generated Twitter messages.
- Consumer Tweets: Among 3,097 TPL instances, voice quality was most common (35.4%), followed by visual kinesics (33.7%), artifacts (16.4%), vocalizations (11.5%), and tactile kinesics (3%).Voice quality and visual kinesics together accounted for the largest shares of observed TPL instances.
Brand Tweets
The study analyzed brand tweets after excluding at-replies and retweets, using independent coding by four coders. TPL appeared in 20.6% of analyzed tweets, with voice qualities comprising the largest category of instances.
- Data collection and coding: Four coders independently coded the tweets, compared resulting documents, and resolved discrepancies through researcher discussion.Tweets were collected through the Twitter REST API, downloaded as JSON, and stored using UTF-8 encoding to preserve emojis and symbols.
- TPL prevalence: 859 brand tweets (20.6%) contained one or more instances of TPL.Across these tweets, the analysis identified 1,233 total TPL instances.
- TPL types: Voice qualities accounted for 55.6% of TPL instances, followed by artifacts (16.7%), vocalizations (12.7%), visual kinesics (14.4%), and tactile kinesics (0.6%).The category shares describe the distribution of 1,233 TPL instances.
Brand At-Replies
The study analyzed brand at-replies collected from Twitter and independently coded by four coders. Among 2,943 at-replies, 34.8% contained textual paralanguage, with visual kinesics the largest category of the 1,342 recorded instances.
- Data collection and coding: Four coders independently coded the at-replies, compared documents using Kaleidoscope, and resolved discrepancies through researcher discussion.The coding process used independent coding followed by comparison and discussion-based resolution.
- TPL results: 2,943 brand at-replies were analyzed, and 1,025 (34.8%) contained one or more instances of TPL.The prevalence of TPL was reported with reference to Table A2.
- TPL results: 1,342 instances of TPL use comprised 25.3% voice qualities, 21.8% vocalizations, 2.7% tactile kinesics, 33.2% visual kinesics, and 17.1% artifacts.Visual kinesics represented the largest share, while tactile kinesics represented the smallest.
Brand Facebook Posts · Brand Instagram Posts
Brand Facebook and Instagram posts were collected, coded independently by four coders, and analyzed for textual paralanguage (TPL). TPL appeared in 19.1% of Facebook posts and 31.3% of Instagram posts, with different distributions of TPL types across platforms.
- Brand Facebook Posts: Brand Facebook Posts used the 250 most recent posts per brand, except Cheerios, which had 249 posts.Posts were downloaded with DiscoverText and imported into TAMS Analyzer for coding.
- Brand Facebook Posts: Brand Facebook Posts were coded independently by four coders, compared using Kaleidoscope, and reconciled through researcher discussion.
- Brand Facebook Posts: 716 of 3,749 brand Facebook posts (19.1%) contained one or more TPL instances.The analysis identified 933 total instances of TPL use.
- Brand Facebook Posts: Brand Facebook Posts contained TPL consisting of 63.5% voice qualities, 18.9% visual kinesics, 8.9% vocalizations, 8.6% artifacts, and 0.2% tactile kinesics.
- Brand Instagram Posts: Brand Instagram Posts used the most recent 160 posts per account, although eight accounts had fewer than 160 posts.Posts were collected through Iconosquare, scraped from saved HTML with Python, and imported into TAMS Analyzer.
- Brand Instagram Posts: Brand Instagram Posts were coded independently by four coders, compared using Kaleidoscope, and reconciled through researcher discussion.
- Brand Instagram Posts: 485 of 1,550 brand Instagram posts (31.3%) contained one or more TPL instances.The analysis identified 858 total instances of TPL use.
- Brand Instagram Posts: Brand Instagram Posts contained TPL consisting of 50.5% artifacts, 22.5% visual kinesics, 20.9% voice qualities, 5.2% vocalizations, and 0.9% tactile kinesics.