Consecutive Postings in IM: A Case Study of QQ Group Chat

The dissertation develops a topic of an inadequately studied phenomenon in Instant Messaging (IM) — Consecutive Postings. More specifically, the circumstances under which consecutive postings are used are the target to be studied. The data are collected in one chat group from the most popular Chinese IM product — QQ. After analysing the data with the conversation analytical approach, some basic results are attained that the consecutive postings could be divided into two major types depending on whether they develop their internal topics or not. Consecutive postings without internal topic development tend to have the same or similar content in every single posting, which often perform the functions of displaying advertisement or getting rid of the previous topics; whereas consecutive postings with internal topic development are inclined to contain different content in each posting and shoulder the missions of initiating self-repair, competing for turns and shifting topics. It is also suggested that there is much room for further studies of consecutive postings