The medium of Netspeak

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The medium of Netspeak

• Xiaofei Lu
• APLNG 083S
• September 6, 2007

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Outline

• Internet the medium and language
• Spoken and written language
• Netspeak speech or writing?
• Netspeak maxims

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Internet the medium and language

• Relation between medium and language
• Facilitations and limitations of the medium
• Aims and expectations of linguistic use
• Is Netspeak written speech?

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Spoken and written language

• Time-bound vs. space-bound
• Spontaneous vs. contrived
• Face-to-face vs. visually decontextualized
• Socially interactive vs. factually communicative
• Loosely structured vs. elaborately structured
• Immediately revisable vs. repeatedly revisable
• Prosodically rich vs. graphically rich

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Netspeak Speech or writing

• Does Netspeak manifest features of both?
• How does Netspeak differ from speech?

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Differences from speech

• Lack of simultaneous feedback
• Lags interrupt turn taking and adjacency-pairs
• Lack of prosodic features
• Emphasis spelling and punctuation
• Lack of kinesics and proxemics
• Facial expression smileys
• Lack of spontaneity
• Comment clauses and signals

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Netspeak and speech

• Web, e-mail and IM
• Time-bound?
• Spontaneous?
• Face-to-face?
• Loosely structured?
• Socially interactive?
• Immeidately revisable?
• Prosodically rich?
• What about other Internet situations?

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Netspeak and writing

• Web, e-mail and IM
• Space-bound?
• Contrived?
• Visually decontextualized?
• Elaborately structured?
• Factually communicative?
• Repeatedly revisable?
• Graphically rich?
• What about other Internet situations?

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A new species of communication

• Is it more similar to speech or writing?
• How can we answer this question empirically?
• AntConc demo
• Unique electronically mediated properties
• Simultaneity and non-degradability in copying
• Transcends limitations in textual dissemination
• Intertextuality through linking

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Netspeak maxims

• Grices principles of cooperative conversation
• The maxim of Quality
• The maxim of Relevance
• The maxim of Quantity
• The maxim of Manner
• Violating a maxim
• Flouting a maxim

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Flouting a maxim

• A truck loaded with thousands of copies of
  Rogets Thesaurus crashed as it left a New York
  publishing house last Thursday, according to the
  Associated Press. Witnesses were stunned,
  startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied,
  confused, punchy, shocked, rattled, paralyzed,
  dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed,
  dumbfounded, nonplused, flabbergasted, astounded,
  amazed, confounded, astonished, boggled,
  overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, and perplexed.

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Violating Netspeak maxims

• Spoofing and trolling
• Lurking, spamming
• Flaming and Internet situation operations
• Social function outweighing content

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