The study explores deictic operations involving first person plural linguistic forms
from the vantage point of social cognitive pragmatics in a computer-mediated genre.
Its central question is how the participants implement their socio-cultural situatedness
by using first-person plural deictic expressions and how they participate in the formation
of group identity. The data of the empirical study in Hungarian was provided by a
discussion forum. We annotated first-person plural deictic expressions in two self-contained
samples of 500 contributions each from 2013 and 2015. The analyses focused on qualitative
properties of the samples. The results suggest that instances of the exclusive use
of first person plural forms outnumber those of their inclusive use, in accordance
with the characteristics of the given genre. Inclusive use construes participants
of shared interest directly as an online discourse community; but a crucial role in
the establishment of group identity is also played by stories that are shared. In
these stories, the participants use first person plural forms in an exclusive sense
and thereby construe themselves as members of other, offline, groups typically as
mothers. The change in the relationship among members of the discourse community is
also shown by the fact that in the two time-varying samples, the proportion of the
use of both the first-person plural and the exclusive and inclusive forms changes.
