Metadiscoursal Realisation of Pragmatic Strategies @ResearchProject Twitter Accounts.

To ensure the global communication and visibility of their work, international research groups leverage online settings and endorse specific digital academic practices. Twitter as a Social Medium for Research Dissemination Purposes has become an effective outlet to widely disseminate the development, knowledge production and findings of research projects. As a result, research groups implement pragmatic strategies that respond to three overarching communicative intentions--informative, promotional and interactional--and use metadiscursive markers within them to establish links with the audience. This paper analyses these practices by investigating the metadiscoursal realisations of a taxonomy of twenty-seven data-driven pragmatic strategies in ten Horizon2020 research project Twitter accounts. First, we propose metadiscursive adjustments for the digital environment of Twitter. Then, we use NVivo12 to identify salient metadiscourse features which help to realise the pragmatic strategies. In general, interactional metadiscursive features predominate over interactive ones, and we find attitude markers, self-mentions and directives to be the characteristic markers in, respectively, informative, promotional and interactional strategies. Moreover, some metadiscourse categories are found to rely on non-verbal markers for their realisation. The present analysis expands the understanding of complex digital discursive practices developed by researchers aiming to disseminate their results, account for their funding, make themselves visible and engage multiple audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]