Digital punctuation as an interactional resource: the message-final period among German adolescents

Abstract

This paper outlines a multi-level framework for empirical research on punctuation in digitally-mediated interaction and exemplifies it by close qualitative analysis of a corpus of WhatsApp conversations collected among secondary-school students in Northern Germany. We propose a sociolinguistic analysis of digital punctuation that orients to Silverstein's notion of “total linguistic fact” (Silverstein 1985), i.e. the integrative study of linguistic form, language practices, and language ideologies. Applying this to the case of the period, our analysis integrates its frequency of use in digital conversations, its placement in a message, the illocutionary force of messages that contain a period, and their sequential placement in digital interaction. Our findings suggest the period undergoes a process of pragmaticalization, i.e. a gain of pragmatic functions at the expenses of syntactic ones. In particular, its overall quite rare use in message-final position is found to contextualize a terminal point in the on-going interaction. Based on the interplay between digital data, ethnographic insights and interviews with informants, the analysis then shows that the metapragmatic awareness of period use among the adolescents is linked to its on-going enregisterment as an index of communicative distance and a part of adult and professional registers of language. We suggest the pragmaticalized period is a salient feature of a register of informal written language, which our informants identify as part of their everyday out-of-school digital practices. These informal practices co-exist with institutional literacy norms to which the students equally orient to. We juxtapose these insights to the thematising of punctuation in German school textbooks.