Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to find the correlation between linguistic features and social engagement so that we can employ proper language to solve the ecological problem in the new media context. It collected all 2647 video messages of CCTV.com (account name, not website), the official media, on Douyin (China’s domestic version of Tik Tok) from January 1, 2020, to December 28, 2020, which were analyzed and studied by SPSS 22.0 and Corpus Online. It is found that public concern for a topic was significantly influenced by public opinion (r=0.483, p=0.000) and public dissemination (r=0.590, p=0.000). Declarative (n=1858, f=0.57) and Exclamative (n=1132, f=0.35) were used most frequently by CCTV. com, while the former one (p=0.02) was the key point to influence public opinion, while the latter one (p=0.001) had a significant bearing on public concern through regression analysis. On the contrary, Imperative (n=0) is not favored. Interrogative (p>0.05), Punctuation (p>0.05) and Emoji (p>0.05) had no effect on social engagement. The results of this paper indicated that language could significantly guide users’ ecological behavior and value orientation across space-time in the new media context.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.