Construal of Fan Discourses in the Contemporary Anglophone Culture (the Case of Music Communities)

The musical tradition is a crucial part of modern Anglophone culture. Nowadays music as a phenomenon has obtained numerous new features within the framework of the media's globalization, for example, various communities of music fans have acquired the opportunity to independently construct their discourses. This study aims to analyze and identify the peculiarities in the process of fan discourse construal within fan communities of Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Arctic Monkeys. The research operates on the principles of digitally mediated discourse analysis (Unger, 2020) to examine the samples of language used among the members of different music communities. To add, a comparative analysis of the collected data is conducted to pursue the aim of the research. The simple random sampling approach is employed to manually collect data – 90 samples of posts, and 180 samples of comments from each social media platform (Twitter, Instagram*, Reddit) respectively. The research findings will shed light on the most prominent similar, as well as on the most significant distinctive features identified in the discourse construction of the stated music fan communities. The study's results can be applied for the future research of the discourse construal phenomenon among fan communities of other musical artists, as well as for the study of discourse communities formed in the media. Keywords: discourse, discourse construal, music fan communities, discourse communities, Anglophone culture, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Arctic Monkeys * Prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation