Evaluation and Identity in the Slovene Twitter Community

Abstract

Based on the corpus of Slovene tweets about the Olympic Games, the study illustrates what kinds of interpersonal evaluative meanings users of Twitter produce and how they create an affiliation with the online community. With the systemic-functional approach that was used to analyze the relevant communication on Twitter, the author finds that the analyzed tweets comprise all evaluative dimensions. The study improves upon existing research on the use of evaluative language by social network sites and other internet services. It rejects the widely accepted criticism of Twitter as a service distributing primarily meaningless messages without any interpersonal interactional value. Twitter offers a place where large audiences can express and exchange personal views on common experiences