Between common sense and linguistic science: an analysis of comments on an Instagram post by Leandro Karnal about linguistic changes

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the construction of comments by Instagram users on a publication by historian, professor, and writer Leandro Karnal on this social network, using categories of Digital Discourse Analysis (DDA) at the morpholexicological, enunciative, discursive, and semiodiscursive levels, seeking to identify whether a view of language more related to common sense or one more consistent with studies of language science predominates in them. In the post in question, Karnal addresses what he calls the “death” of the Portuguese language, due to linguistic changes in Brazilian Portuguese and new forms of native digital writing. The 34 most liked comments were analyzed using a qualitative and quantitative approach, classifying them according to the typology of digital comments proposed by Marie-Anne Paveau (2021). From these 34 comments, 29 are discursive comments, three are metadiscursive, and two are hybrid (metadiscursive and discursive). It was found that most of the comments agree with the publication, which is closer to a common sense view of language than to the contributions of linguistic science. The results indicate two contributions of the work: one concerns the need for greater dissemination of linguistic research in a dialogue between experts and society. The other is related to a contribution to the analysis of digital texts, realizing that only with a theory that contemplates linguistic and technological elements can one analyze these comments in an unrestricted way.