ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews four tweets, taken from Twitter site CorpusPragmatics and from a search for ‘pragmatics’, aimed at members of pragmatics communities of practice. They are unrelated, but each one depends on assumed knowledge of the cultural background context of pragmatics. Beginning with an analysis of context, from the point of view of the intended reader, it can be said that these tweets rely on shared knowledge but that none of them relies on the readers’ situational context, in that the readers will be all around the world, and that none of them relies on reader knowledge of an interpersonal background context. However, all the tweets are based on the assumption that readers know the cultural background context of pragmatics analysis theory and practice. All four texts could be analysed by using exchange theory, in that they all contain initiations and responses that could be said to be ‘elicits’ and ‘replies’.
