THE BIOGRAPHY OF A SYMBOL: AN INTRODUCTION TO HASHTAGS IN SOCIAL MEDIA DISCOURSE

Throughout the last two decades, the number of linguistic studies on online discourse has increased gradually. The rapid development in technology and its effect on the language used in digitally mediated communication both lead to the creation of new linguistic conventions, one of which is the hashtag. Despite the numerous works conducted on hashtags in interdisciplinary fields such as information technology and marketing, only few studies devoted to the hashtag tend to stress its function as a linguistic element. Therefore, this study aims to present a comprehensive overview of the works that analyse the hashtag on different linguistic levels, ranging from the morpho-syntactical to the socio-pragmatic level. The review is preceded by an introduction to the concept of the hashtag in cyber language, describing its development towards an essential feature of the language used on social media platforms. A comparison is drawn between the results obtained in previous works, and a number of aspects are pointed out to be examined in future research