Daria Dayter

@coocho.bsky.social

1096 Followers 224 Following

Assoc/prof in linguistics in Tampere • interested in digital language and new communicative environments, persuasion • owner of a malamute • Editor-in-Chief for Pragmatics & Society

Tampere University Influence, Manipulation, Seduction 3 Poster of octopus tentacles on a red background
A coat of arms featuring a porcupine and a bear wearing a muzzle collaborating on hanging up a painting of a house
Image of octopus tentacle on a red background
• American white nationalist. YouTuber. Alt-right. Alt-lite • Living in Vienna • Mainstream oriented "soft-tradwife' Lifestyle, relationship advice": self-declared "political activist" • extremely cognizant of the histories of feminist standpoints Bricany seliner
Presentation slides with several screenshots of newspaper articles using morphemes mog, cel, maxx
Ivermectin Collocate: "Study" study use human show • "Read the whole study. In every category the Ivermectin group had better outcomes. It just wasn't enough to be statistically significant" . Covd covid hwa"ivermectin") Nermecin horse effective •against • "this study administered ivermectin in a suboptimal way" take treat treatment 10-LogDice(7.5), L5-R5, C15-NC20; work • It honestly is a joke how difficult it has been to get a decent ivermectin study"
Previous research on the self-presentation of influencers (e.g., García-Rapp, 2016, Jerslev, 2016, Kováčová, 2022) shows that influencers employ specific discursive practices that emphasize relatability and intimacy to build and maintain harmonious relationships with their followers (or at least the illusion thereof). This talk, on the other hand, explores those situations when such relationships are potentially challenged by influencers themselves. Specifically, the attention is paid to audience reactions to rapport-challenging posts (e.g., posts containing threats directed at the audience) by high-profile manosphere influencers. Drawing on the rapport management framework (Spencer-Oatey, 2008), this talk examines two sets of comments – each reacting to a different rapport-challenging post by the same influencer – and identifies relevant multimodal resources and discursive practices commenters utilise. The analysis shows that as the two sets of comments predominantly hold opposing rapport orientations, different communities of shared values are found to have formed in each case. In this way, the study seeks to highlight the dynamicity of influencer-audience relationships and the role of contextual variables in rapport management as well as contribute to the growing body of research on online commentary.
Screenshot of the VP in the show Diplomat putting a cross on a map of Russia in the location of Arctic military bases, one of them Dikson
Malamute rolling in a thin layer of snow
This talk presents the first results from a study exploring how social media users take responsibility for their own contributions in order to manage potential conflicts and uphold civility in online interactions. While the prevalence of online conflicts and incivility has attracted significant scholarly attention, recent research has increasingly focused on the constructive and positive aspects of social media interactions (e.g., Tanskanen 2021; Canute et al. 2023; Biri & Tanskanen 2025). This investigation is part of that emerging trend. The talk specifically examines instances that can be labelled as self-condemnation, i.e. cases where users explicitly assume accountability for their contributions as potential transgressions. Users can, for instance, modify or edit their contributions or confess to having uttered an inaccuracy or untruth. These instances are particularly interesting because according to previous research, actual self-condemnation is very rare in interaction; people typically evaluate their own transgressions more leniently than those of others (Szabados 1979; Valdesolo & DeSteno 2007). From an interactional perspective, the reactions to self-condemnations are equally interesting, and, where possible, these have been analysed as well in order to shed light on the dynamics of accountability in online discourse.
The cards for the Codewords game spread on the table, combining the sets from the russian and the German versions
The military has been identified as a gendered space where hypermasculinity seems to be a potential predictor of sexual violence and impropriety (Bonnes, 2024; Duval Lantoine, 2022; Eichler, 2019; Pershing, 2003; Stachowitsch, 2013). In Canada, while the Canadian Armed Forces institutionally espouses gender equality, in practice problems relating to gender-based harm seem “intractable” (Rubenfeld and Lucas, 2025, p. 2). The persistence of these problems could be, in part, the result of discursive practices that reinstantiate a gender-based divide in banal and mundane ways. Using a discursive approach to sexual violence and impropriety (Ehrlich, 2001; Kitzinger & Thomas, 1995), this paper identifies gender ideologies, i.e., normalized beliefs and values about gender that are shared throughout Canadian servicemembers’ language use. These gender ideologies tend to underpin arguments about sexual violence and impropriety in the Canadian military. Using a 1.6-million-word corpus of short answer responses to military surveys, corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) is used to examine gendered representations, comparing and contrasting these across subsets of data produced by male and female servicemembers. Findings reveal both explicit representations via overuse of gendered labels and more subtle mechanisms of representations via metaphor and personal pronouns. The paper concludes by highlighting the role of gendered ideologies in attempts to discredit accounts of sexual violence and impropriety.
March 13 | 15-16 CET Rachelle Vessey (Carleton University) Gender ideologies in workplace surveys: The case of the Canadian military April 17 | 13-14 CEST Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (University of Helsinki) My bad: the metapragmatics of accountability on social media May 4 | 12-13 CEST Dominika Beneš Kováčová (Masaryk University) Rapport management and community building in audience reactions to rapport-challenging posts by manosphere influencers
Two left climbing shoes
A paperback romance novel cover depicting a woman passionately hugging an anthropomorphic horse. Title "But... You're a horse" by David Bussel
octopus tentacles on a red background, writing: Influence, Manipulation and Seduction 3
l'm a male teacher. A good one, but probably a few steps from being a great one. The amount of times that parents and administrators will listen to me over my women colleagues is ridiculous. Friends, I'm just some jagoff that just wants your kid to listen and succeed. So does she. When I was in sales, I sometimes had to employ a manslator. He would say exactly what I ust said to the same customer. same tone, some verbiage, everything. And they'd believe it because it came from a man. That shit was annoying.
Octopus tentacles on a red background
Selfie with a malamute in a snowy landscape
Snowy frozen lake, a malamute sniffing the ice, and a snowman in the shape of the Groke
iPad screen with the article in the foreground, snowy yard with a sleeping malamute in the back
Screenshot of a Kindle library: Dead house, Wylding Hall, Her fearful symmetry, The great believers, The Rachel incident, The book of love, The house on the borderland, Nothing on earth, Dept of speculation
Screenshot of an alarm set to 6:15
screenshot of a Zoom meeting with 33 participants and a slide "Creating interaction: let"
Ylva Biri University of Helsinki Expertise and engagement in YouTube informational videos: Case studies on the finance advice genre
Reddit as a platform for online forum interaction hosts various communities (subreddits), which give rise to specific digital communicative practices. Communication on Reddit is on the one hand unified by a set of common affordances, and on the other hand it is characterized by a great deal of variation in terms of topics, interactional patterns, and linguistic features. In this article, we aim to map the communicative space(s) of Reddit by means of vignettes of studies from four research groups, each of them describing a different approach to one or several subreddits. Study 1 examines concessive constructs in r/changemyview posts, Study 2 focuses on expert-lay communication on r/mountaineering, Study 3 addresses register variation within a large corpus of Reddit comments from many different communities, and Study 4 looks across different subreddits to explore the function of text-length. Drawing on these four vignettes, we show the range of discourses that Reddit has hosted in recent years, while also exploring the methodological tools as well as the insights that qualitative, text-based digital humanities, critical discourse analysis and computational text analysis can provide. The map to the Reddit language research space we create here can help digital humanities researchers to make sense of the variety of different theoretical vantage points and methodologies that are currently being employed to Reddit, and it can serve as a guideline when it comes to choosing research agendas and relevant literature on current forum interaction.
In this article, we examine positive statements (usually about self) known as ‘affirmations’. Affirmations are employed in positive psychology as an intervention tool but have also become popularised by pop psychology influencers. Our corpus of affirmations stems from the pick-up artist (PUA) paradigm, a community of men revolving around the ‘speed seduction’ of women. We examine affirmation videos posted by ‘expert’ community members to YouTube for their linguistic features and their fit into the speech act taxonomy by Searle. Our results show that most affirmations in the PUA affirmations are of the declaration type and thus diverge from uses of affirmations described in positive psychology literature. They are largely contingent on external appraisal and target a type of world-to-words fit that is impossible to achieve, leading to our designation of them as ‘magical’ affirmations. We argue that this potentially leads to frustration by community members and further radicalisation. Beyond the immediate analysis, we use this data set and our analytical procedure to problematise the notion of the speech act type of expressives, in particular when set in relation with assertives and declarations. As we show, magical affirmations, due to their position on the fuzzy borders between declarations, expressives, and assertives, are a particularly suitable data type to interrogate this taxonomy and especially expressives' place within it.
In an early linguistic de nition, Robin Lakoff (1982) described persuasion as“an attempt or intention of one participant to change the behavior, feelings, intentions, or viewpoint of another by [linguistic] communicative means.” More recently, Rudolf von Rohr (2018, p. 1) extended this de nition to conceive of persuasion as“a process between at least two parties (sender and receiver), which can target different communicative outcomes through reasoning or urgent requests to act or believe something”. The updated de - nition describes a dynamic interpersonal process that can be aimed both at changing one’s viewpoint or at strengthening an existing conviction. However, both de nitions emphasize the intentions behind the linguistic form as well as the interpersonal dimension of communication and therefore place the study of persuasion within the area of pragmatics. Corpus linguistic approaches to prag- matic phenomena fall into one of the two types: one taking the linguistic form as the starting point (for example, comparative forms of adjectives) and the other, pragmatic function (for example, implicature). Jacobs and Jucker (1995, p. 13) labeled these approaches“form-to-function” and“function-to-form”. Naturally, the former approach lends itself more readily to a classic corpus linguistic study, although corpus-based and -assisted discourse studies have contributed prominently to the function-to-form body of research (for a more in-depth discussion of both types of corpus pragmatic research, see Landert et al. (2023)). Below, we will present the key corpus linguistic research on persuasion organized according to these two types.
Malamute on a lakeshore in twilight
An old edition of Deborah Tannen’s You just don’t understand. Women and men in conversation.
Cover of "Women in their speech communities" ed. By Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron
A malamute on a blue sofa, sniffing a piece of a nikolaus biscuit
Life on Svalbard
Dark forest, a fire in the foreground, a white dog in the background
As conlangers, we use grammaticalization to achieve many goals, from making our languages more naturalistic, to incorporating aspects of worldbuilding, and achieving specific phonaesthetic goals. Using examples from languages we have created (High Valyrian from Game of Thrones, Kryptonian from Superman, and others), we will demonstrate how we use grammaticalization to shape foundational aspects of a created language.
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
RSPB SCOTLAND "i asked ChatGPT" okay well ! asked these barn owls and they weighed your soul against a feather and they said your spirit has been found wanting
September 17 | 10-11 CEST Frazer Heritage (Manchester Metropolitan University) Caveman Theories, Modern Misogyny: Evolutionary Psychology in Incel Fora October 29 | 12-13 CET Veronika Laippala (University of Turku) Mining Digital Discourse(s) from the Multilingual Web November 5 | 15-16 CET Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (UNC Charlotte) Forgiveness? in Post-Digital Societies: A Technosocial and Metapragmatic Perspective December 17 | 10-11 CET Ylva Biri (University of Helsinki) Expertise and Engagement in YouTube informational videos: Case studies on the finance advice genre Join the Zoom room: https://tinyurl.com/talkddi