The Romance seminar - Víctor Ramírez Rivas - Universidad de Cádiz
Seminar
Date:Thursday 20 November 2025
Time:14.30 – 16.00
Location:Room C585 and Zoom*
Meaningful Streams: Cognitive-Pragmatic Perspectives on Multimodal Discourse in Spanish Streamers on Twitch
Foto: Privat
Víctor Ramírez’s doctoral thesis researches how meaning is constructed and negotiated in multimodal live digital discourse, taking the live-streaming platform Twitch as its main case study. The research combines Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Pragmatics to examine how streamers and viewers co-create meaning in real time through speech, chat messages, emotes, visual overlays, and sound cues. The study argues that Twitch interaction exemplifies inferential communication, where meaning arises from the recognition of intentions and continuous feedback rather than from linear message transmission. Drawing on Relevance Theory, it analyzes how participants manage attention, assess relevance, and interpret multimodal signals within fast, overlapping communicative exchanges. Methodologically, the project employs Multimodal and Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis, using an adapted multimodal transcription model to align verbal, textual, and embodied actions. The corpus consists of selected Twitch broadcasts analyzed qualitatively to identify how coherence, attention, and relevance are collaboratively managed in interaction.
The thesis contributes to digital discourse studies by proposing a discourse-pragmatic framework that explains how meaning is co-constructed through multimodal and inferential strategies, offering new insights into how humans make sense of communication in complex and immediate online environments.
*External participants may write to Bengt Novén to receive the Zoom link (department members may find it in Romklass calendar)