Language In Computer-mediated Communication Research Articles

Understanding the multi-modal affective expression of net language in computer-mediated communication.

The fast development of technology and the popularity and prevalence of social media are constantly changing people's way of living especially their communication patterns. Computer-mediated communication facilitates human contact. Meanwhile, net language becomes widely accepted by computer-mediated communicators. Originating from the text-based form, net language evolves into a multi-modal physical form with a combination of texts, symbols, emojis, pictures and other forms of messages. The multi-modality of net language gives rise to difficulties for hearers or readers of the computer-mediated communication to understand the hidden message due to the ambiguous and polysemic nature of symbols. To clarify hearer's understanding and ensure the smooth conduct of computer-mediated communication, the conceptual blending theory will be useful in processing the multi-modal net language. With a four-space network and three operation mechanism, the emergent meaning will be constructed.

Attitudes Towards Romglish in Online Discourse

"Attitudes towards Romglish in Online Discourse. As English has become a global language, it has also become the language of computer-mediated communication. The online medium has offered the ideal space for English to enter in contact with multiple other languages and, as a result, to contribute to the formation of new varieties. In Romania, this new variety is Romgleză or Romglish, a combination of Romanian and English that is used especially by, but not limited to the younger generations. However, language change does not come easy and, although it has been around for quite a while, Romglish is still considered as improper by some. The present paper analyses two sets of online comments in order to identify attitudes towards Romglish and the language ideologies behind them. To this end, monoglossic ideologies, such as the standard language ideology (Milroy 2001) and the purist ideology (Langer & Davies 2005) will be taken as references when analysing the online comments. The data focuses mainly on two online sources: the Știrile Kanal D Facebook page and an Elforum thread, and it shows that rather than singular and static, language ideologies are multiple and rather fluid, with many online users displaying both monoglossic and heteroglossic ideologies. Keywords: language ideologies, heteroglossic ideologies, monoglossic ideologies, attitudes, Romglish, online discourse "

Word Shortening Strategies: Egyptian vs. Non-Egyptian English Tweets

The language of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) is known to deviate from standard language in many ways dictated by the characteristics of the medium in order to achieve brevity, speed as well as innovation. Together with the intrinsic features of CMC in general, the character limitation imposed by the popular social media platform, Twitter has triggered the use of a number of linguistic devices including shortening strategies in addition to unconventional spelling and grammar. Using two parallel corpora of English tweets written by Egyptians and non-Egyptians on a similar hashtag, the study attempts to compare the shortening strategies used in both datasets. A taxonomy for orthographic and morphological shortening strategies was adapted from Thurlow and Brown (2003) and Denby (2010) with particular focus on message length, punctuation, clipping, abbreviations, contractions, alphanumeric homophones and accent stylization. Given the scarcity of linguistic studies conducted on Egyptian tweets despite the vast amount of data they offer, the study compares the findings about tweets written by Egyptians in English as a foreign language to previous studies. The findings suggest that Egyptians tend to omit punctuation more frequently, whereas non-Egyptians favor abbreviations, contractions and clipped forms. The results also indicate that Twitter may be shifting towards longer messages while at the same time increasingly employing more shortening strategies. The study also reveals that character limitation is not the only factor shaping language use on Twitter since not all linguistic choices are governed by brevity of communication.

Zur Verschriftung mündlich tradierter Sprachen in sozialen Netzwerken: Der Gebrauch des Tarifit auf Facebook

AbstractIt isn’t particularly difficult to use one’s own language in computer-mediated communication, when the language has a written culture. However, the situation is different, when the language is only an orally transmitted language and one wants to use it for communication in New Media. There is a lack of unified rules, to which one can orientate oneself. The native speakers of Tarifit, who want to use their language in computer-mediated communication as well (like in Facebook groups), are in such a situation. There are many Facebook groups of Rifian Berbers, but the communication within these groups is usually not only in Tarifit. In groups with cultural topics on the other hand, a dominance of Tarifit can be observed. This includes groups, which have been created specifically for the culturally typical rhyme-songs of the Rif, the so-called “izran”.The analysed corpus of the present study originates from such a group. The initiated standardization processes for Berber in Morocco have not had any impact on the language use in social networks yet. The Berber script Tifinagh, introduced in Morocco’s education system in 2003, has never been used for communication between group members. The Arabic script is rarely used. This behavior can have different reasons, which are discussed below. It can be observed, that the Latin writing system is often chosen for the notation of Tarifit. Instead of using diacritics, the Latin characters are complemented by Arabic numerals when certain sounds have no corresponding graphemes. The choice of the writing system requires a constant assignment of graphemes to the sounds, but the notations are often characterized by the absence of uniform spelling and by neutralisations between phonemes.

Challenges of building a CMC corpus for analyzing writer's style by age: The DiDi project

This paper introduces the project DiDi in which we collect and analyze German data of computer-mediated communication (CMC) written by internet users from the Italian province of Bolzano – South Tyrol. The project focuses on quasi-public and private messages posted on Facebook, and analyses how L1 German speakers in South Tyrol use different varieties of German (e.g. South Tyrolean Dialect vs Standard German) and other languages (esp. Italian) to communicate on social network sites. A particular interest of the study is the writers’ age. We assume that users of different age groups can be distinguished by their linguistic behavior. Our comprehension of age is based on two conceptions: a person’s regular numerical age and her/his digital age, i.e. the number of years a person is actively involved in using new media. The paper describes the project as well as its diverse challenges and problems of data collection and corpus building. Finally, we will also discuss possible ways of how these challenges can be met. 1 Language in computer-mediated communication There is a wealth of studies in the corpus linguistic literature on the particularities of language used in computer-mediated communication (CMC) (e.g. for German Bader 2002, Demuth and Schulz 2010, Durscheid et al. 2010, Gunthner and Schmidt 2002, Harvelid 2007, Kessler 2008, Kleinberger Gunther and Spiegel 2006, Siebenhaar 2006, Siever 2005, Salomonsson 2011). Especially, the use of “netspeak” phenomena (Crystal 2001) such as emoticons, acronyms and abbreviations, interaction words, iteration of letters, etc. have attracted attention. The studies describe different functions of such phenomena within CMC. Features transferred from spoken language, such as discourse particles, vernacular and dialectal expressions are frequently mentioned characteristics of CMC. They serve to transmit informality of a given message, comment, or status post. Writers often use emoticons, interaction words (e.g. *grin*), abbreviations (e.g. lol), and spelling changes such as the iteration of letters (e.g. coooooll) to compensate for the absence of facial expressions, gestures and other kinesic features, and prosody. Many emoticons, interaction words, and abbreviations are “verbal glosses” for performed actions and aspects of specific situations. In addition, there are also particularities in spelling that people use without the aim of representing features of spoken language and that deviate from the standard variety. To cover such phenomena (e.g. n8 for ‘night’), we will follow Androutsopoulos (2007; 2011) and use the term “graphostylistics”. Finally, all forms of shortening (e.g. lol, n8, and thx for thanks) are often used for economic reasons to perform speedy conversations in chats and instant messages. The use of shortenings can also be motivated due to character restrictions of the used services. Differences between the use of language in CMC and in traditional written genres were often described with respect to the model of Koch/Oesterreicher (1985; 2008). The model

Punctuating the home page: image as language in an online newspaper

Between February 2002 and April 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald online [www.smh.com.au], an influential Australian newspaper which went online in 1995, showed a remarkable degree of change in the design of its home page. However, over the same time period, the use of images in hard-news stories on its home page was remarkably consistent, both diachronically and synchronically. These hard-news images are small `thumbnails', and are most typically close crops of faces. Their small size, their consistent and limited subject matter, and their positioning in news stories represent a new practice in hard-news reporting, and raise questions about the role they play in the multimodal story-telling practices of the newspaper, and about the discursive practices of online newspapers more generally. This article presents an analysis of these thumbnails using tools from systemic functional semiotics, and an investigation from three socio-historical perspectives (news photography, typography, and punctuation). On this basis, I argue that in the specific discursive context of the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online during the time period studied, thumbnails function less as images and more as an expression of the expanding system of language in computer-mediated communication.

Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer‐mediated communication

This theme issue ofJournal of Sociolinguisticscomprises a number of empirical studies focusing on a range of ways in which people use language in computer‐mediated communication (CMC). This introduction contextualizes the contributions to this issue by providing an outline of linguistically focused CMC studies. A critique of the research on the ‘language of CMC’ is given, and aspects of CMC research from a sociolinguistic viewpoint are presented: the move from the ‘language of CMC’ to socially situated computer‐mediated discourse; its grounding in the notion of online community; and the application of sociolinguistic methodologies to its study. It is argued that CMC provides a new empirical arena for various research traditions in sociolinguistics; conversely, sociolinguistics can contribute to the interdisciplinary theorizing of CMC by demonstrating the role of language use and linguistic variability in the construction of interpersonal relationships and social identities on the Internet.

On-Line Smiles: Does Gender Make a Difference in the Use of Graphic Accents?

In the gender-bending world of computer-mediated communication (CMC), is it possible to determine the gender of a message sender from cues in the message? This study addresses the question by drawing on current literature to formulate and test three hypotheses: (i) women use more graphic accents than men do in their CMC, (ii) men use more challenging language in CMC than do women, and (iii) men write more inflammatory messages than do women. Results indicate that only the first hypothesis is partially supported and that women tend to challenge and flame more than do men in this sample group. The authors also discuss implications and pose questions for additional research.

Breaking out of Binaries: Reconceptualizing Gender and its Relationship to Language in Computer-Mediated Communication

Virtual environments provide a rich testing ground for theories of gender and language. This paper analyzes interactions in one virtual environment, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), to look at the extent to which research on face-to-face (FTF) talk and computer-mediated communication (CMC) can describe gender and its relationship to language. I find that neither the function of utterances nor the construction of gender adheres to dualistic descriptions, as past research has implied. Reconceptualizing gender as performative helps researchers break out of binary categories that have bound past research. Conceiving of gender as under constant construction also helps demystify and thus disrupt the binary gender system which naturalizes patriarchy.

The Effect of Topic of Discussion on Gendered Language in Computer-Mediated Communication Discussion

Gendered language in computer-mediated communication (CMC) is more than just a function of the gender of the participants because people are very flexible in the language style they use. In these studies, the use of gender-preferential language was examined in postings on public discussions where the topic was gender-stereotypical or gender-neutral. It was found that both men and women in discussions about gender-stereotypical topics were more likely to adhere to gender-based group norms and hence would use more gender-preferential language than in discussions about non-gender-stereotypical topics. The results of these two studies indicate that gendered language in CMC discussion is more a function of the context or topic of discussion than the gender of the participants.

Gender Schematicity, Gender Identity Salience, and Gender-Linked Language Use

Using self-categorization theory, the effects of sex, chronic gender accessibility (i.e., gender schematicity), and gender identity salience on gender-linked language use in e-mail are examined. Results confirmed interactive effects only. Gender schematic men and women whose gender was salient used typical gender-linked language (e.g., men used male language). With low gender salience, schematic men and women used countertypical gender-linked language (e.g., men used female language). The language of nonschematics varied minimally. Results are discussed regarding previous research on gendered language, the nature of gender identity salience, and examining gendered language in computer-mediated communication.

Protean Communication: The Language of Computer-Mediated Communication

Computer-mediated communication (CMC), which began in proprietary companies two decades ago, has developed into a worldwide medium of communication that ESOL learners encounter inside and outside the classroom. Because learners' participation in CMC is likely to increase in the coming years, it is important for TESOL professionals to understand the norms of language use developed by CMC-based speech communities. Research has found that CMC exhibits features of simplified registers associated with both oral and written language. It also exhibits its own norms for organizing conversation and accommodating threads of discourse. CMC, however, cannot be studied as a neutral linguistic phenomenon; instead, researchers and educators need to examine how CMC influences the dominance of English, access to knowledge and power, and equity in discourse. Distance learning, an application of CMC that has begun and will continue to serve a role in English language teaching and in ESOL teacher education, is an area in which these issues are relevant. CMC should be viewed not in terms of its functionality but in terms of the ways in which users shape a new medium of communication to fit the needs of their speech community.

A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present

A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present