PRAGMATIC INFERENCE AND CONTEXTUAL GAP-FILLING IN DIGITAL COMMUNICATION: A CYBERPRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF MULTIMODAL MEANING-MAKING ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Abstract

This paper investigates pragmatic inference and contextual gap-filling in digital communication, with a specific focus on multimodal meaning-making on Twitter/X, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Grounded in Francisco Yus’s (2011) Cyberpragmatics framework and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986, 1995) Relevance Theory, the study examines how users negotiate communicative contexts that are simultaneously cue-impoverished and multimodally enriched. A qualitative, theoretically driven methodology informed by Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring, 2007) was employed, drawing on 120 purposively sampled English-language interactions across the three platforms. The corpus is limited to English-language data, and cross-linguistic generalisability is not claimed. The analysis reveals that social media users employ a diverse repertoire of compensatory pragmatic strategies including emoji deployment, typographic deformation, hashtag pragmatics, and visual anchoring to close the inferential gap created by the absence of physical co-presence. Findings further demonstrate that the principle of optimal relevance operates dynamically across platforms, with users calibrating cognitive effort against anticipated cognitive effects in platform-specific ways. The study proposes three theoretical extensions to the Cyberpragmatics framework: multimodal ostension, layered implicature in emoji-text co-deployment, and platform-conditioned relevance thresholds. These concepts build on and extend prior work by Yus (2019) on multimodal memes and Dainas and Herring (2021) on emoji pragmatics, offering more granular inferential accounts applicable to contemporary multiplatform communication. These findings contribute a refined conceptual vocabulary to Cyberpragmatics and carry pedagogical implications for digital literacy education and second-language pragmatic competence in online environments.