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Chapter 1. Linguistic perspectives Language is everywhere and where we find language, we find linguists. Talking about internet linguistics, with this term, we're including all forms of communication, such as music, photographs and videos. In the “strict sense” of the term, linguists focus their courses on differences between spoken, written and signed language. So, the terms language and communication are not synonymous. According David Crystal, Internet linguistics is the scientific study of all manifestation of language in the electronic medium, making a balance between the study of the formal properties of internet language and the study of its communicative purposes and effects. Misconceptions An important part of linguists' job is to eliminate misconceptions, trying to avoid every linguistic worry to the new technology, regarding the disappearance of languages and the decline in written and spoken standards. Those worries arrived with the birth of text-messaging or SMS (short-messaging-service). When text-messaging became popular in the Uk, around 2000, many people saw it as a linguistic disaster and the same reaction appeared in the USA five years later. All of this because of a full of abbreviations of words. But only a smart part of text- messaging uses abbreviations (textisms). These abbreviations are not a modern phenomenon, they are not restricted to the young generation; young people do not pour them into their homework and exams. According some studies, text-messages are not “full of abbreviations”, indeed, less then 20 per cent of the text-messages showed abbreviated forms. Those “modern phenomenon” are not a consequence of text-messages, in fact, they were being used in chatroom interactions that predated the arrival of mobile phones.The most evident feature is the use of single letters, numerals and symbols to represent words or parts of words, as “C U” for “see you”, “2” for “to” and “CMB” for call me back”. They are called rebus. The omission of letters (“MSG” for “message”) are not all a new phenomenon. Eric Partridge published his Dictionary of Abbreviations in 1942. It contains dozens of SMS- looking examples. Moreover, texters also use deviant spelling, such as “WOT” for “what” or “COS” for “because”. Studies have proved that children who are better at spelling and writing use the most textisms. So, before we can write and play with abbreviated forms, we need to have a sense of how the sound of our language is related to the letters. According David Crystal, on the Internet there's an expansion of the expressive options available in a language, and new varieties of language are introduced such as new articles, advertisements, sports commentaries. The same thing has happened on the Internet with email, chat, blogging, tweeting and social networking. The difference is that Internet changes more rapidly. That's why we need to learn to use it, referring to the Internet content and the language used. On the Internet the interaction between sender and receiver is different from traditional conversation, because the anonymity of participants alters communicative expectations. Written language on the Internet is different from writing on a traditional page, and it's easier to be ambiguous, misleading or offensive. That's why we need to understand how electronically mediated language works.
Terminological caution Linguistics has proved to be useful to other intellectual disciplines, which borrow its terms and then change their meaning. The Internet has done the same thing, especially with the words “semantic” and “semantics”. Semantics began as a branch of linguistic science; indeed, it's the “science of meaning in language”. According Charles Morris, semantics is the interpretation of signs in general, and signs include everything that conveys information, including bodily gesture, road signs and other non-linguistic systems (1946). Psychologist Charles Osgood talk about “semantic differential” where words are judged as strong/weak, good/bad, active/passive (1953). Others talk about “semantic aphasia” where people lose the ability to use words after brain damage. And sometimes we talk about “semantic web” including all concepts and relationship within human knowledge. The semantics web is seen as an evolution of the web: the existing web is human readable, whereas the semantic web will be machine readable. Faced with the web in its current form, it is the human user who has to specify, find, implement the links between one page or site and another; in the semantic web, the links will be processed by computer without human intervention. A rather different terminological question is what to call the various entities which form Internet discourse, such as email, blogs, chats and tweets. A main aim is to establish the linguistic character of Internet linguistics and the terminology used while sending an email, chatting and tweeting. Research challenges There are several properties of Internet language which constitute a challenge to linguists wanting to explore this medium. There has never been a language corpus as large as this one. Secondly, Internet language is very complex and there's a diversity of language on it. In email, chatroom, tweeting or in social network, such as Facebook, we find different communicative perspectives, properties, strategies and expectation. So, it's difficult to find linguistic generalizations to apply to the Internet language as a whole. Part of the reason for this is another linguistically challenge property: the speed of change, because there are always new communicative opportunities offered by new technologies. Linguistic studies of the Internet always run the risk of being out of date as soon as they are written. Even a single output change fast. For example, talking about email, in the 1990, the average age of emailing was 20, in 2007 was about 40. Today it is in the late 30s. This means that many emailers are now senior citizens. The consequence is that the original colloquial and radical style of emails has been supplemented by more conservative and formal styles. Another example of rapid change comes from Twitter, which uses a prompt to elicit a user response. Indeed, in 2009 Twitter asked you “What are you doing?”, now ask “What's happening?. For most people, the Internet became a reality following the arrival of the web in 1991, and a searchable reality after the arrival of Google in 1999. Internet went through several changes, reflecting the technological development of the time, and it has linguistic consequences. But establish the start of a new language output is not so easy, because we can linked it with the innovative technology but we can't say it with precision. On the other hand, is more difficult to establish when a technology becomes outmoded or evolves into something different. Sometimes, the Internet is specific about its identity, other times not, and this can cause confusions. Moreover, dates are sometimes incomplete, giving (for example) the day and the month, but not the year.
unplanned discourse is desiderable). It is also good at expressing social relationships and personal attitudes. Writing is suited to the recording of facts and the communication of ideas and to task of memory and learning. With speech there is a opportunity to rethink an utterance while the other person is listening. However, errors, once spoken, cannot be withdrawn. Interruptions and overlapping speech are normal and highly audible. With writing, errors can be eliminated in later drafts without the reader ever knowing they were there. Unique features of speech: prosody (intonation, tempo, rhythm, pause..) Unique features of writing: pages, lines, capitalization, spatial organization, several aspects of punctuation. Several kinds of writing cannot be read aloud efficiently (timetables, graphs). The internet as a mixed medium Internet language outputs vary with respect to their similarities with speech and writing. At one extreme is the web, which in many of its functions is no different from traditional situations that use writing. Many varieties of written language can be found on the web with little stylistic change. On the other hand, email, chat and instant messaging have some properties of speech. Indeed, they are transient, because they can be immediately deleted. In relation to speech, the visual interaction of such packages as Skype is the closest we get to face-to-facw communication; And with social networking, Twitter and blogging and other web pages, responses are optional, even when solicited. The outputs vary greatly with respect to their linguistic idiosyncrasy and complexity. On Twitter, for example, the character limits reduce the grammatical and graphic options, so the elaborate sentence don't appear. With blogging, outputs vary greatly in their constructional and graphic complexity. Some blogs are highly crafted, others are wildly erratic. Emails vary enormously.. On the whole, Internet language is better seen as writing which has been pulled some way in the direction of speech rather than as speech has been written down. Internet language is identical to neither speech nor writing, but selectively and adaptively displays properties of both. Differences with speech Simultaneous feedback The most important difference between speech and Internet is the lack of simultaneous feedback. Indeed, in a conversation, listeners perform an active role, using vocalizations, facial movement and gestures. In the Internet, simultaneous feedback is absent. Indeed, when someone is writing an email, the recipient is unaware of the impending message. The feedback will arrive later. So, linguists investigate about the consequence of the absence of feedback and how changes the way language is used. For example, during an informal conversation speakers use reaction signals, comment clauses and tag questions, while these are absent in the Internet communication, and that's why according some writers that Internet interactions are misperceived as cold and distant. Emoticons Internet interactions can be misperceived so new symbols (the so called emoticons) are introduced to remove ambiguity. But the truth is that also emoticons can provoke
misunderstanding. For example, the basic smile can mean sympathy, delight, but at the same time it could be used in an ironic way, and so the recipient could not understand it. According some studies, emoticons seemed to be used more by young people, and that's may be because adults have better communicative skills. On the other hand, adults are quite prepared to use an emoticon to replace an entire utterance in a situation where speed of response is at a premium, such as an instant messaging exchange. A lot depends on the output. The more serious the content is, the fewer the emoticons are.. In one instant messaging study, 3 quarters of the 16 females used emoticons but only 1 of the males. Multiple conversations We are referring on several conversations that are taking place at the same time with the consequence that we can't pay attention to all of them and interact with all of them. We can decide to respond depending only on our interest and motivation. A reaction to a particular stimulus (such as response to a question) can be separated by an unpredictable number of other utterances. Even in a two-way interaction the usual linear organization of face-to-face conversation can be disrupted by a range of factors. Messages are posted to a screen linearly, in the order in which they are received by the system, and one of the main characteristic is “talking at the same time”. Overlapping is also likely to occur at the point where one party introduces a change of topic. Differences with writing Hypertext links Hypertextuality is the property of a text to be linked with other texts. A hypertext is a set of documents put in relation to each other through “key words”. The main characteristic of a hypertext is that the reading may take place in a nonlinear manner: any document of the network may be the “next”, depending on the choice of the reader. Indeed, it's possible to read with a hypertext all documents linked by the same key-word, creating different ways of reading. After the birth of “Word Wide Web” in 1993, hypertext had a great development. All web was designed by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, as a global hypertext in which all sites can be accessed by anyone, where the web page is the single document and the “navigation” is the transition from one site to another via “links”, and the interface to display the web site is the browser. Persistence One on the most important properties of traditional writing is its space-bound character, that is the text is static and permanent on the page. By contrast, a page on the web often varies: its factual content can change in front of our eyes. Many web pages have content which remains unchanged. For example, in a newspaper archive, the pages are an electronic replica of their printed original. Outputs display different kind of persistence. For example, comment to a website stay on a page for as long as the site exists, unless deleted by the web site-owner for some reason; email stay until removed by the receiver. On the other hand, the original sentences may be altered or deleted. For example, in a chatroom or public forum a third person might be involved (the so called moderator),
Under the social facets, Herring identifies these variables: Participation structure : the number of participants in an interaction, the speed in which something is said, if the interaction is private or public. Participant characteristics : such as age, gender, education, cultural background and beliefs Purpose : the reasons for a message Activities: the means whereby the purpose is achieved Topic : the kind of content felt to be relevant or appropriate to a message Tone : the manner of spirit of an interaction Norms of language : the linguistic conventions accepted by participants Norms of organization : the way participants organize themselves Norms of social appropriateness : the behavioral standards accepted by participants Code : is the language or language varieties used by participants, whether spoken or written Herring's list is an inventory, valuable as a tool for promoting the description and classification of Internet texts, within various outputs. Chapter 3. A microexample: Twitter Twitter is a social network created in 2006 that allows users to send and receive text- based post (tweets) of up to 140 characters. The figure of 140 is because the aim was to allow “tweeters” to read and tweet in its entirely. Indeed, if a tweet exceeds the limit, it's automatically truncated. Tweets are published on author's profile page and they are visible to his followers, and can be read be anyone (for example) using an #hashtag, unless the author's profile is accessible just for his followers. The tweet is formed by two parts: the first contain the author's identity and the message; the second contains the data about the tweet with all the other options, such as “respond”, “retweet” and “add to favorites”. The more such references are included, the less room there is for fresh content. The same problem arises if the sender appends a web source to the tweet. A retweet is the possibility to an user to re-post on his wall a tweet of another user, but the identity of the original author will be explicit. The phenomenon of retweeting introduce an element of repetitiveness of the data. Repetition is an unusual linguistic behaviour because it's used when adults talk to little babies and it's an important language teaching strategy, but obviously we don't repeat ourselves. The question is if the retweet has the same function. Another function of Twitter is the use of the hashtag. Writhing down an hashtag on “search on Twitter” will find the last 200 tweets that have this hashtag. In 2010, Google introduced a Twitter archiving service, and the Library of Congress announced plans to maintain a digital archive of all public tweets. It is evident that the service is rapidly adapting to meet the needs of users so that linguistic generalizations are likely to date quickly. But the core technological facets are: Synchronicity: asynchronic, but time-source is in real-time Granularity: message-based Persistence:an archive of all tweets planned Length : 140 characters Channels : text with pictures (logo or avatars) Identity : name, often opaque by using a nickname Audience : publicly accessible with optional restrictions Adaptation: forwarding (retweets), address shortening Format: new tweets at the top of the screen Methodological issues
One of the most important characteristic of the Internet language is the distinction between the onscreen features that are automatically introduced by the software, over which the user has no control, and those features which are the result of linguistic choices made by the user. For example, in a tweet, the first word (the nickname) and the final line (replay, view tweet) are introduced by the software and only the rest is from the user. The focus of linguistic interest has to be on the user's contributions. The phenomenon of retweeting introduces an element of repetitiveness in the data which is itself an important stylistic feature of Twitter, viewed as a language variety. Another important aspect of Twitter is the limit of 140 characters otherwise the tweet is truncated. The main part of users compose a tweet using exactly 140 characters, but for who don't do this, the other part of the tweet is lost. Content issues tweets are characterized by two kinds of material: a message element, which provides its primary linguistic content, and one and more optional identifiers with a fixed internal structure. Tweeters don't make maximum use of the 140 character space. They only use about 100 characters. Moreover, the use of ellipsis dots may indicate an unfinished thought. The number of dots and spaces is erratic, with some tweeters avoiding the use of a space on either side of the dots, and some reducing the number of dots to two. The pressure to convey information within the length constraint results in users adopting a variety of shortening techniques. Writers on Twitter forums recommend several strategies, such as the use of contractions, logograms, abbreviations, the use of single spaces at sentence ends, elliptical sentences (ex. Omitting I) and avoiding unnecessary words or unnecessary punctuation marks. We might expect punctuation to be the area where it is easiest to save some characters. What is surprising is to see traditional punctuation conventions generally respected. Grammatical issues On Twitter, because of the restriction of characters, users tend to use some strategies such as non-standard words or punctuations that makes difficult to do a syntactic analysis to the utterance and sometimes words are juxtaposed in a way in which an immediate interpretation is impossible. It is likely that such strings would become clear when they are seen in context within the writers' tweet stream. Presumably elements such a lol, omg, btw and emoticons should be classed as minor sentences, even though some etymologically represent something more complex. Tweets contain some marker of grammatical cohesion, such as: Conjunctions : and, but, cos Connecting adverbs : so, well, also Response utterances : lol, yeah, ok, ahahah, I agree Clarificatory utterances : I meant.. really? Anaphoric forms : that is a shame Commands : cheer up, mind your language Direct address forms : hey girl, you/u Direct questions Pragmatic issues Pragmatic always tries to provide explanations for uses of language and to identify factors that govern a person's choice of utterance.
as blog, blogging and blogger. Or in 2010, around 600 neologisms were added in Twittonary (the Twitter dictionary), that is all the new words that have been invented with Twitter. Those terms usually have the first two consonants “TW” (for example, tweologism, twiddiction). We can find the same process with other social networks or websites, such as Instagram and blogs. Most of these are likely to have a short linguistic life. Just a few will be long-term additions to the language (ex. Vlog, blog client, blog archive). We find also old words with new applications (edit, help, format, tools). Some forms have been especially productive such as cyber-, hyper-, e-, web-, …. Also abbreviations are a characteristic of technology and are a very frequent feature. For example URL (uniform resource locator), www (world wide web). Another important aspect is how Internet terminology has had an influence on everyday speech and writing. Indeed, there are words that are used in a figurative way during a conversation. For example, using “download” in the sense of “fullreport”(Give me a download of what's going on) “offline” as an adjective in the sens of “unavailable”. Orthography One of the most important features of Internet language is the major use of a non- standard form of language. Indeed, we can see a reduced system- messages which omit punctuation or avoid capital letters. Anyhow, factors such as age, gender, educational background and personality influence this aspect. In fact, older people tend to be linguistically more conservative than younger and women tend to use more punctuation marks than men, women use more exclamation marks that men (indeed, exclamation mark underline an increase of emotional intensity). However, according to a study, exclamation marks are more an indication of supportiveness rather than emotionality (pag.63). A distinctive feature of Internet graphology is the way capitals are used within words or using exclamation mark to express negation (!interesting=non interesting). Most of the Internet is not case sensitive so there is a strong tendency to use lower-case everywhere. Messages entirely in capitals are considered to be shouting and netiquette guides strongly recommend they should be avoided. We might expect to see rather more change taking place in the spelling system. In the case of English, the variants (judgement vs judgement, color vs colour..) have several origins..The choices they make are partly conditioned by their educational background but are also influenced by what they see around them. Young people today see more written language on the Internet than anywhere else. Grammar About grammar in Internet, its variation is less noticeable. Apart from a few cases where computer programmers allow their knowledge of programming syntax to influence the way they write, syntactic constructions on the Internet seem to be the same as those found in non-electronic mediums. But of course there are significant differences in sentence length, type and complexity, especially on Twitter where there are limited characters. Some blog posts are thousands of word long, broken down into paragraphs which are themselves of considerable length. In blogs we see discourses of sometimes substantial length which have ad no such editorial interference. It is a syntax that reflects the way writers think and speak. In blogging, we see the same fluidity of expression taking place in typeset writing. Pragmatics Pragmatics studies the choices available to people when they speak or write, and the factors which govern their choice, such as the intention they have in mind and what they want to convey. On internet we can find the so called “troll”, that is someone whose aim is writing
irritant, offensive or no-sense messages just to disturb the communication. Offences against the maxim of quantity are illustrated by the sending of unwanted information (spam) or by spending time in a chatroom without communicating with the other people (lurking). The sending of aggressive or threatening messages (flaming) contravenes the maxim of manner.Anonymity is an important factor. It is often extremely difficult to say what the intentions are behind a particular web page. At one extreme, we find texts where no adaptation to digitally mediated communication has been made (pdf).At the other extreme, we find texts which have no counterpart in the offline word. Texts whose aim is to defeat spam filters Spam is an unwanted information. Spamming means sending undesiderated messages (commercial or generally offensive), also known as “junk email”. It can be realized through any communication system but the most used is the Internet, through email, chat, forums and Facebook. There are several anti-spam software with the aim to block those messages but it's also true that is possible that texts defeat themselves from spam filters changing, for example, words with letter space, duplicating letters or separating them with symbols. Texts whose aim is to guarantee higher rankings in web searches A non-linguistic technique: frequency of hypertext links: the more pages that link to my site, the more likely my page will move up the rankings. A linguistic technique: is the listing of key words or phrases which identify the semantic content of a page in the page's metadata. Third technique: where the text is manipulated to include key words, especially in the heading and first paragraph, to ensure that salient terms are prioritized. Texts whose aim is to save time, energy and money The limitation to 160 characters has motivated an increased use of non-standard words, using logograms, initialisms, shortenings and other abbreviatory conventions. Another example of a new type of text arising out of considerations of convenience is the email which uses framing: we receive a message which contains 3 different points in a single paragraph. Related to framing is the intercalated response. Someone sends me a set of questions, or makes a set of critical points about something I have written. I respond to these by intercalating my responses between the points made by the sender. Texts whose aim is to maintain a standard In Internet there are controls and constraints that want to avoid every abuse of the freedom of speech. Indeed, there are the so called moderators that can deny the access to pages and messages. Style With Internet, new linguistic forms are introduced into language and we're talking about vocabulary, grammar and orthography, even if is a little part. Indeed, for the most part, what we see online looks and sounds similar to what we see offline. An example of these changes are the various structural elements of blogs (posts, links, comments...), the limit of texts (160 characters) and tweets (140 characters) and the hypertextuality and graphic richness of web pages. So, the web is stylistically so diverse that it makes little sense to talk about “the language of web” at all. In between there are outputs whose stylistic status is unclear.
