“Itsyourownfault”: Space omission in a Russian women's support group

Abstract

Russian online discourse includes phrases in which spaces are omitted deliberately. This phenomenon is a Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) cue: it adds meaning to the verbal message and participates in identity and relationship building in online communities (Herring, 2004). In order to determine the meaning dimension of space omission as a CMC cue and the role of community in its use, an online community with a clearly defined group identity has been chosen as the source of data. Using posts from the women's support group #ščastʹebytʹženoj (happiness of being a wife), this study applies the tools of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring, 2004; Androutsopoulos, 2014) to examine the discourse functions of this cue. The analysis of space omission and its context suggests that, similarly to paralinguistic cues in oral reported speech, this CMC cue contributes to multimodal role-shift (Stec et al., 2016). Moreover, the study concludes that the participants of the group tend to use space omission to report speech that they heard multiple times. This CMC cue can position the original speaker as being a member of the out-group and it demonstrates the typically negative behavior, as viewed by the community.