Jana Pflaeging

Is it just me or has the Internet been consumed by lists? Offering information on 25 Reasons Why Getting In Shape Actually Sucks or The 30 Teeniest Tiniest Puppies Being Adorably Teeny Tiny, such list-sites seem to have recently gained prominence on the Web. List-sites are typically provided by commercial media start-ups. In their endeavour to create valuable advertising space, they intend to produce content that goes viral on the web, i.e. reaching vast amounts of user within short periods of time.
This contribution is based on the assumption that professional web au-thors design content in such a way that it is likely to succeed in achieving virali-ty. The recurrence of communicative practices (and, thereby, the likely emer-gence of a genre I call ListSite here) seems of vital importance in this re-spect. It allows for quick reception in accordance with users’ expectations and may facilitate their decision to curate the content by sharing it on social networking sites like Facebook.
By means of an empirical analysis of 50 ListSite-exemplars, I hope to shed light on how this genre works with regard to its communicative situation, multimodal structure, topical organisa-tion, and textual function – and how these aspects relate to virality.

In December 2014, we announced the launch of “a journal for those who con-sider linguistic curiosity both part of a profession and a unique way of life.” What a catchy phrase. And some of you might ask – why do we need yet another eJournal? Others might have had a look at the table of contents of this first issue or at our website that introduces several rather unfamiliar contribution formats on offer such as …is thinking about..., dialogue, brainstorming and info-graphic next to familiar ones like journal article or review. They might have won-dered what these genres are about and why we felt the need to make them part of the 10plus1 concept. In this first editorial of 10plus1, we would like to take the opportunity of answering some of your questions and introducing you to some thoughts of ours which have fuelled our work on this project.

This paper seeks to promote the idea of visualising linguistic theories in the context of teaching (English) linguistics to beginner students. Drawing on a typology of pic-tures of knowledge transfer commonly applied in (educational) psychology, I use a semiotic approach to refine the categorisation. Having gained a workable terminolo-gy, I investigate a small corpus of chapters on semantics extracted from contempo-rary introductory books to English linguistics. My analysis focusses on the quantity and quality of picture use. A suggestion concerning the question of how linguistic theories could be visualised concludes my paper.