“Dump her!”: Stancetaking in multimodal replies to ‘Am I the Asshole?’ Twitter posts

This paper investigates the function of visual and textual elements in stancetaking, using a small corpus of 58 multimodal reply posts containing GIFs/images along with co-text and/or embedded text. The posts respond to nine Twitter reposts from the sub-reddit “Am I the Asshole?”, in which users post situations in which they, or another person, may have been acting reprehensibly and ask the readers for their judgement. Reply GIFs, images, and texts relate to each other and to the original post in different ways, frequently constructing multiple stances, which may be simultaneously positive towards one stance object, and negative towards another, thus achieving the communicative goal of passing judgement on the events. Stances can be conveyed explicitly or implicitly, and riff on the original not only through text but also through the visuals, taking a stance through the combination of text and image.