ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 adopts a social semiotic approach to model the discursive features of university TikTok videos, an emerging digital genre in the changing milieu of higher education in China. Drawing upon Matthiessen’s (2009, 2015) register typology, this chapter maps out the social semiotic activities performed in the TikTok videos post by Peking University and identifies various forms of register hybridization. Compared with other types of university discourse, the videos show interesting new features in terms of social semiotic activities and subject matters. Interdiscursivity is not just realized linguistically through sequential texts, but multimodally through sequential shots, co-spatiality, added background music, and so on in the videos. The realization of these activities and their interdiscursive mix is enabled by the editing possibilities and multimodal repertoire of TikTok. Through these semiotic activities, four major communicative functions, i.e., promotional, relational, entertainment, and educational functions are realized. The findings shed new light on variegated neoliberalizaiton and the discussion on “neo/non-liberal China” (Wallis & Shen, 2018) by revealing the interaction between neoliberalism and local politics.
