ANALYZING THE CONVERSATIONAL FEATURES IN THE CONVERSATIONS OF WHATSAPP GROUPS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: A CORPUS STUDY

Abstract

The thesis entitled “Analyzing the Conversational Features in the Conversations of WhatsApp Groups in Social Media: A Corpus Study.” aims to identify the conversational features used by participants of WhatsApp Academic Groups, including students and teachers. The results of this study can help students and researchers who would like to work in the field of corpus linguistics and social media. Quantitative research with descriptive analysis is applied. The researcher has selected this topic because in today’s era Internet learning has become quite common. For quick interaction and sharing many institutes and students now create WhatsApp Academic Groups to share knowledge and material conveniently. The researcher has analyzed the types of conversational features using corpus software and has also analyzed which conversational features are most prominently used by teachers and students at university level. According to the researcher, In the total of 5 different Academic Groups, the most prominent conversational features are adjacency pairs, backchannels and discourse markers. Their frequency however differs in each group. The frequency of these conversational features is high in three of the groups as compared to the other two groups, respectively.