My love is better than yours: a discursive-pragmatic analysis of love confessions on Instagram

Abstract

Social media allow, among other aspects, to simulate a level of interpersonal closeness, achieved through the exposure of an individual's intimacy to a group of people who, under other circumstances, would not have access to such information. Among the different strategies for sharing privacy on social media, the love confession may perhaps be one of the most frequent, constituting a text in which the author confesses their feelings, ideally paying tribute to the person they are involved with. In this sequence, in the present work, we aim to understand whether these texts are a new way of expressing love in writing, constituting updated examples of the epistolary genre, even if it wasn’t the only way of doing it in the past. To do so, we analyze a corpus of seven Instagram captions from different authors, seeking to understand, from a discursive-pragmatic perspective, the convergences between these examples and the genre in question. Focusing this goal, we analyze some typical features of the epistolary genre, such as opening and closing formulas, and treatment and courtesy forms, relating them to the notion of ethos, but also of implicit. In general terms, we conclude that the common points are evident, not only regarding verbal routines but also concerning the construction of the authors' ethos, the dialogical nature of the discourse, as well as the choice of speech acts.