Language evolution online? The use of multimodal cohesion on YouTube

This research project deals with the classification of cohesive and multimodal relations between commentaries by viewers to a video of the YouTube channel Different Russia. Its videos present a personal perspective on Russian daily live situations with commentaries by the Russian host in English. Normally, a video receives around 100.000 views. Commentaries by viewers can be in English, Russian, and other languages. The channel was founded in 2015 and has more than 60.000 subscribers. This research aims to analyse the multimodal relations between commentaries and videos. The methodology for this analysis is based on Royce (2013) and Bateman (2014). Royce (2013) discovered visual message elements in the relation between images and text, which present a visual form of a linguistic entity. Visual message elements present a process with a verb and participants with a noun in a sentence. Nouns and adverbs express context such as place and time. The aim is to explain the connection between visual message elements and cohesive devices of commentaries and the video content in Different Russia. For the practical analysis 300 chronological posted commentaries from the selected YouTube channel were coded in an Excel-databank according to the following parameters, adapted from Herring and Kurtz (2010): Number of message, ID of the participant, responds to and cohesive device. The results show that the following cohesive devices were used between commentaries and a video: multimodal relations of repetition and collocation of nouns, verbs, adjectives, the use of personal and demonstrative pronouns, ellipsis of nouns.