Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication 9783110214468, 9783110214451

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Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication HoPs 9

Handbooks of Pragmatics

Editors

Wolfram Bublitz Andreas H. Jucker Klaus P. Schneider Volume 9

De Gruyter Mouton

Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication Edited by

Susan C. Herring Dieter Stein Tuija Virtanen

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-021445-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-021446-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ” 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: ooyoo/iStockphoto Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 앝 Printed on acid-free paper 앪 Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface to the handbook series Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider The series Handbooks of Pragmatics, which comprises nine self-contained volumes, provides a comprehensive overview of the entire field of pragmatics. It is meant to reflect the substantial and wide-ranging significance of pragmatics as a genuinely multi- and transdisciplinary field for nearly all areas of language description, and also to account for its remarkable and continuously rising popularity in linguistics and adjoining disciplines. All nine handbooks share the same wide understanding of pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour. Its purview includes patterns of linguistic actions, language functions, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude and belief, as well as organisational principles of text and discourse. Pragmatics deals with meaning-in-context, which for analytical purposes can be viewed from different perspectives (that of the speaker, the recipient, the analyst, etc.). It bridges the gap between the system side of language and the use side, and relates both of them at the same time. Unlike syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics and other linguistic disciplines, pragmatics is defined by its point of view more than by its objects of investigation. The former precedes (actually creates) the latter. Researchers in pragmatics work in all areas of linguistics (and beyond), but from a distinctive perspective that makes their work pragmatic and leads to new findings and to reinterpretations of old findings. The focal point of pragmatics (from the Greek prãgma ‘act’) is linguistic action (and inter-action): it is the hub around which all accounts in these handbooks revolve. Despite its roots in philosophy, classical rhetorical tradition and stylistics, pragmatics is a relatively recent discipline within linguistics. C.S. Peirce and C. Morris introduced pragmatics into semiotics early in the twentieth century. But it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that linguists took note of the term and began referring to performance phenomena and, subsequently, to ideas developed and advanced by Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and other ordinary language philosophers. Since the ensuing pragmatic turn, pragmatics has developed more rapidly and diversely than any other linguistic discipline. The series is characterised by two general objectives. Firstly, it sets out to reflect the field by presenting in-depth articles covering the central and multifarious theories and methodological approaches as well as core concepts and topics characteristic of pragmatics as the analysis of language use in social contexts. All articles are both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of their topic in the light of recent developments. Secondly, while we accept its extraordinary complexity and diversity (which we consider a decided asset), we suggest a definite structure, which gives coherence to the entire field of pragmatics and provides

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Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider

orientation to the user of these handbooks. The series specifically pursues the following aims: – it operates with a wide conception of pragmatics, dealing with approaches that are traditional and contemporary, linguistic and philosophical, social and cultural, text- and context-based, as well as diachronic and synchronic; – it views pragmatics from both theoretical and applied perspectives; – it reflects the state of the art in a comprehensive and coherent way, providing a systematic overview of past, present and possible future developments; – it describes theoretical paradigms, methodological accounts and a large number and variety of topical areas comprehensively yet concisely; – it is organised in a principled fashion reflecting our understanding of the structure of the field, with entries appearing in conceptually related groups; – it serves as a comprehensive, reliable, authoritative guide to the central issues in pragmatics; – it is internationally oriented, meeting the needs of the international pragmatic community; – it is interdisciplinary, including pragmatically relevant entries from adjacent fields such as philosophy, anthropology and sociology, neuroscience and psychology, semantics, grammar and discourse analysis; – it provides reliable orientational overviews useful both to students and more advanced scholars and teachers. The nine volumes are arranged according to the following principles. The first three volumes are dedicated to the foundations of pragmatics with a focus on micro and macro units: Foundations must be at the beginning (volume 1), followed by the core concepts in pragmatics, speech actions (micro level in volume 2) and discourse (macro level in volume 3). The following three volumes provide cognitive (volume 4), societal (volume 5) and interactional (volume 6) perspectives. The remaining three volumes discuss variability from a cultural and contrastive (volume 7), a diachronic (volume 8) and a medial perspective (volume 9): 1. Foundations of pragmatics Wolfram Bublitz and Neal R. Norrick 2. Pragmatics of speech actions Marina Sbisà and Ken Turner 3. Pragmatics of discourse Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron 4. Cognitive pragmatics Hans-Jörg Schmid 5. Pragmatics of society Gisle Andersen and Karin Aijmer

Preface to the handbook series

6. Interpersonal pragmatics Miriam A. Locher and Sage L. Graham 7. Pragmatics across languages and cultures Anna Trosborg 8. Historical pragmatics Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen 9. Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen

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Preface to this handbook The creation of this volume represents a convergence of circumstances on several fronts. In 2000, Tuija Virtanen organized a symposium at the 7th International Pragmatics Conference in Budapest, Hungary, at which six papers were presented, including by Susan Herring, Brenda Danet, and Tuija herself, with Alexandra Georgakopoulou as the discussant. The event having been well received, Tuija had the idea to organize a second symposium on the pragmatics of CMC at the 2005 International Pragmatics Association Conference in Riva, Italy, and she approached Susan with a proposal to co-organize it. Susan agreed; however, shortly thereafter Dieter Stein approached her with a similar proposal, so she suggested that the three of them join forces, although Tuija and Dieter were not previously acquainted. That was the first convergence. The Riva symposium featured eight presentations, including by volume contributors Jannis Androutsopoulos, Loukia (Prasinou) Lindholm, and Dieter himself. Alexandra Georgakopoulou was again the discussant. Another convergence involved the publisher and the format for the volume. We were first invited to edit a volume on the theme of the symposia for the John Benjamins Pragmatics & Beyond series, for which Andreas Jucker was a series editor at the time. We agreed and put out a call for papers for a peer reviewed volume of original research studies. After we had accepted submissions, but before we had signed a contract with Benjamins, Susan was contacted by Andreas Jucker, now an editor for Mouton de Gruyter’s Handbooks of Pragmatics series, about editing a handbook volume on CMC. Concerned that research on the pragmatics of CMC was not sufficiently advanced to support two high-quality volumes that would come out at approximately the same time, Susan persuaded Andreas that we should convert our volume of research studies into a handbook, with the three of us as co-editors. With the new target of a handbook in mind, we put out a second call for papers, as well as inviting recognized experts to contribute chapters, and undertook a second cycle of peer reviews and revision. This introduced a necessary delay in the publication of the volume. The change in the genre of the volume is also crucial to note, as many of the chapters preserve the trace of the earlier project in that they include original empirical research. Ultimately, with the blessing of our new series editor, Andreas Jucker, we encouraged all the authors to include a case study in their chapter, along with a substantial review of the issues and literature on their topic. This was both to promote a consistent format across the chapters and to illustrate, with examples, core principles of the chapters that the authors themselves were often responsible for introducing into the literature. In this respect the present handbook differs from handbooks on pragmatic topics with a long tradition of research: Here the literature reviewers are in many cases the original knowledge creators.

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Preface to this handbook

We wish to thank the Handbook of Pragmatics Series Editors, especially Andreas Jucker, for helpful guidance at every stage of the preparation of this handbook, and Barbara Karlson and Wolfgang Konwitschny at Mouton for their professionalism, patience, and good humor throughout the long process of bringing this volume to press. Thanks are also due to the external reviewers for their insightful comments on the chapter submissions, and to our student assistants – Malia Willey, Susanne Erhardt, Nini Behrendt, Marcel Kowalewski, Wiebke Ostermann, Bastian Heynen, and Sebastian Groth – for their help in copyediting the chapters. We hope that the final product will not disappoint any of them.

Table of contents

Preface to the handbook series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preface to this handbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.

Introduction to the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen . . . . . . . . . .

v ix

3

I.

Pragmatics of computer-mediated modes

2.

Email communication Christa Dürscheid and Carmen Frehner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35

Mailing list communication Helmut Gruber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

55

Blogging Cornelius Puschmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

Real-time chat John C. Paolillo and Asta Zelenkauskaite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109

Instant messaging Naomi S. Baron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135

Text messaging Crispin Thurlow and Michele Poff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

163

Mobile phone communication Rich Ling and Naomi S. Baron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

191

Synchronous voice-based computer-mediated communication Christopher Jenks and Alan Firth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

217

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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Table of contents

II.

Classic pragmatic phenomena in computer-mediated communication

10.

Relevance in computer-mediated conversation Susan C. Herring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

245

Performativity in computer-mediated communication Tuija Virtanen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

269

Address in computer-mediated communication Sandi Michele de Oliveira . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

291

Apologies in email discussions Sandra Harrison and Diane Allton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

315

Internet advice Miriam A. Locher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

339

Deception in computer-mediated communication Jeffrey Hancock and Amy Gonzalez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

363

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

III. Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication phenomena 16.

17.

18.

19.

Email hoaxes Theresa Heyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

387

Authentication and Nigerian Letters Martin Gill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

411

The maxims of online nicknames Loukia Lindholm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

437

Micro-linguistic structural features of computer-mediated communication Markus Bieswanger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

463

Table of contents

xiii

IV.

Discourse pragmatics of computer-mediated interaction

20.

Rhythm and timing in chat room interaction Rodney Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

489

Conversational floor in computer-mediated discourse James Simpson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

515

Conversational coherence in small group chat Kris M. Markman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

539

Repair in chat room interaction Jennifer Baker Jacobs and Angela Cora Garcia . . . . . . . . . . .

565

Responses and non-responses in workplace emails Karianne Skovholt and Jan Svennevig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

589

Small talk, politeness, and email communication in the workplace Amelie Hössjer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

613

Flaming and linguistic impoliteness on a listserv Brenda Danet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

639

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

V.

Broader perspectives

27.

Code-switching in computer-mediated communication Jannis Androutsopoulos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

667

Narrative analysis and computer-mediated communication Alexandra Georgakopoulou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

695

Genre and computer-mediated communication Janet Giltrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

717

28.

29.

About the authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 739 Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 747

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Table of contents

For Brenda Danet (1937–2008), a groundbreaking scholar and enthusiastic connoisseur of computer-mediated language.

1.

Introduction to the pragmatics of computermediated communication Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen

1.

The state of the field

Computer-mediated language research represents a new and dynamically evolving field. Although a few pioneering studies were published in the 1980s,1 linguistic study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) began attracting serious attention only about 20 years ago, with a classification question that is now regarded as overly simplistic: Is CMC more like speech or writing? (e.g., Ferrara, Brunner, and Whittemore 1991; Maynor 1994). Those early days were also characterized by a fascination with superficial structural features, such as acronyms, abbreviations, and emoticons, that purportedly characterized CMC (e.g., Murray 1990; Reid 1991). Since then, however, the field – if an area of study that is still so new can be described as such – has grown dramatically. The early research mentioned above was followed in the 1990s by contextualized discourse studies of language use in online textual environments such as mailing lists, newsgroups, and chat rooms. Politeness (or the lack thereof) in the former was one of the first topics to attract attention, along with gender differences in politeness behaviors (e.g, Herring 1994, 1996; Kim and Raja 1991). Chat rooms raised issues about how interaction (turn-taking, topical coherence, etc.) was managed in computer-mediated environments (e.g., Garcia and Jacobs 1999; Herring 1999; Rintel and Pittam 1997). In the latter connection, it was observed that the textual record left by CMC allows communicators to engage in multiple simultaneous threads of conversation, as well as giving rise to a meta-awareness that fosters language play (Danet 2001; Danet, Ruedenberg-Wright, and RosenbaumTamari 1997; Herring 1999). Research addressing sociolinguistic concerns started to appear in the mid1990s. Some of the earliest studies examined language choice and code switching (e.g., Androutsopoulos and Hinnenkamp 2001; Georgakopoulou 1997; Paolillo 1996); this was later followed by studies of variation in usage – especially of typography and orthography – according to participants’ status, regional dialect, gender, and CMC mode (e.g., Androutsopoulos and Ziegler 2003; Herring and Zelenkauskaite 2009; Ling and Baron 2007; Paolillo 1999; Siebenhaar 2003; Tagliamonte and Denis 2008).2 Meanwhile, interest in classifying CMC as a whole was, for the most part, abandoned in favor of classification of modes or genres of CMC, on one hand (Herring 2002),3 and classification approaches that cross-cut modes based on scalar dimensions or facets, on the other – the latter often inspired

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by earlier work on speech and writing (e.g., Collot and Belmore 1996, with reference to Biber 1988).4 Until recently, the vast majority of language-oriented CMC research had as its subject matter English-language CMC – a reflection, in part, of the origins of the Internet in the United States. This, too, has been changing, especially as regards discourse analysis and sociolinguistic research (see, e.g., the papers in Danet and Herring 2007), in accordance with the rapid diffusion of the Internet to other countries starting in the mid-1990s. Native-language traditions of research into computer-mediated language have now become established in Germany, France, and the Nordic countries, and are starting to emerge in Japan, China, Spain, Italy, and Greece.5 Cross-linguistic research has identified both similarities and cultural specificities as regards language use online. While most of the topics mentioned above can be subsumed under the broad heading of pragmatics, studies focusing explicitly on pragmatic issues are a more recent phenomenon. When the first author, Susan Herring, was putting together a keynote lecture for the 2007 International Pragmatics Conference on “The Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication: Prospectus for an Emerging Research Agenda”, she found few high quality published works to review – or rather, few that could be classified as pragmatic first and foremost,6 as opposed to the many studies that could also be classified as discourse analysis, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, and the like. In that lecture, she argued that it is nonetheless useful to distinguish a “pragmatics of CMC” from other language-focused approaches to CMC, inasmuch as it can benefit from drawing on pragmatic theory, as well as methods of analysis developed within the tradition of linguistic pragmatics, to provide potentially unique perspectives. Specifically, she recommended that such an approach focus on three kinds of phenomena: 1) classical core pragmatic phenomena (e.g., implicature, presupposition, relevance, speech acts, politeness) in CMC, 2) CMC-specific phenomena (e.g., emoticons, nicknames, “Netspeak”), and 3) CMC genres or modes (blogs, SMS, wikis, chat, etc.). That proposal informs the broad organization of the present volume. However, in the end it proved difficult to separate out discourse-pragmatic from “core” phenomena, with the result that the volume includes a section on the discourse pragmatics of CMC as well. In short, the “pragmatics of CMC” is still in flux. Yet a handbook traditionally brings together comprehensive and canonized knowledge, blessed by the passage of time. Strictly speaking, given the speed of knowledge creation in the field of CMC pragmatics and its relative youth, this handbook should not be possible. There are gaps in its coverage, and the research presented in some chapters is new. For these reasons, the collection might perhaps better be viewed as presenting the “state of the art” in an emergent field rather than as a distillation of time-honored knowledge. One notable gap is in the coverage of Web 2.0 phenomena such as wikis, microblogging, and social network sites, about which significant bodies of

Introduction to the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication

5

language-focused research have yet to accumulate. Section 4 of this chapter discusses emerging directions that research on language use in Web 2.0 is taking thus far. In the face of so many apparently new developments, one might question whether the term “computer-mediated communication” is still appropriate to characterize the overall scope of the phenomenon. Communication technologies are increasingly moving beyond computers. Although mobile phones can be considered honorary computers where text messaging is concerned, voice calls challenge that characterization, as does television-mediated conversation via text messages (Zelenkauskaite and Herring 2008). Some recent language-focused publications use alternatives such as “digital media” and “new media” language. However, the term “new media” is lacking in historical perspective, and “digital media” is too broad, referring as it does to video games as well as communication devices, although “digital discourse” (e.g., Thurlow and Mroczek 2011) makes clear that language use is in focus. Conversely, the term “keyboard-to-screen communication” proposed by Jucker and Dürscheid (in press) is too narrow, in that it excludes communication input via audio and video technologies. It well may be that in the coming years, the dust will settle and a descriptive term that is neither too narrow nor too broad will emerge as the obvious candidate. For now, CMC still seems a useful term, in that it is based on established tradition and remains the term preferred among communication scholars, so it will continue to be used in this volume.

2.

Perspectives on pragmatics

A volume title such as the “Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication” begs the question of what our notion of pragmatics is. Given the tricky issue of the limits of the discipline and the interdisciplinary nature of CMC itself, some remarks are in order about the rationale for the selection of contributions to the volume. Generally speaking, the perspectives on pragmatics represented by the authors of this handbook are broad, yet not so broad that they include all of linguistics (cf. Verschueren 1999). At the same time, they are wider than the more narrow view represented by a classical textbook like Levinson (1983), which focuses on a limited set of phenomena that includes deixis, implicature, presupposition, and speech acts. For example, in the view adopted here, there is no clear boundary between pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Such a boundary, dictated by academic labels, would in any case be more heuristic than real. The decision to take a middle road between a wide and a narrow view of pragmatics seemed to us the best tradeoff between a reasonable coherence and relative representativeness. A further reason for avoiding too narrow a view is that language use on the Internet can only be

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characterized by a broader perspective that takes into account the complex interweaving between language use and its technologically-mediated forms. Another way to situate the approach represented here is suggested by Ariel’s (2010) overview of how the field of pragmatics might be internally structured. Ariel makes a useful distinction between two approaches to pragmatics. “Borderseekers” focus on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, restricting the list of topics that belong to each. For border-seekers, pragmatics is predominantly the domain of a particular set of topics that are defined as pragmatic, rather than syntactic or semantic. This orientation facilitates the description of grammar along relatively simple lines, as the “messy” stuff is moved out to a domain of its own. The theoretical approach adopted, however, imposes severe restrictions as to what can be included in pragmatics, resulting in core topics that can be accounted for using particular linguistic tools, such as Gricean pragmatics, neo-Gricean pragmatics, and Relevance Theory. Border-seekers are an Anglo-American tradition. In contrast, “problem-solvers” start out from linguistic puzzles that cannot be solved in terms of grammar, or “the grammar” in a Chomskyan sense. For problem-solvers the focus is on the identification of a problem for empirical study, and pragmatics is a matter of adopting a particular perspective on the object of study. The number or nature of topics to be explored in pragmatic terms is not limited. Problem-solvers are particularly popular in the European Continental tradition. The classical areas in the sense of Levinson (1983), the more narrow-scope approach to pragmatics, illustrate the “code” approach to pragmatics. They tend to concern aspects of language that have structure-external context “encoded” in them, or are closely related or “signaled” in relatively systematic or even grammaticalized ways by language. The point of departure for these approaches is basically the individual expression, whereas in problem-solving pragmatics the point of departure tends to be a certain mode or genre or phenomenon of externally defined language use, such as code-switching, in which language is embedded and receives its conversational, social, and interactional meanings. While narrow-scope, code-based approaches are covered in this handbook, a majority of the contributions, following contemporaneous interest in the field of pragmatics, adopt problem-solving approaches. Among these are discourse- and conversation-analytical approaches, approaches that consider various facets of the notion of “context” in language use. Some contributions address narrative and genre analysis, and more purely descriptive approaches to CMC-specific language phenomena are also represented. Excluded, in contrast, are approaches that have some connection to pragmatics but primarily belong to another domain, such as applied linguistics, corpus/computational linguistics, logic/formal semantics, cognitive linguistics/psycholinguistics, and variationist sociolinguistics. Including them, or trying to do justice to all subfields represented by such a wide approach, would have meant producing several volumes.

Introduction to the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication

7

Arguably the problem-solving class of approaches to the pragmatics of CMC includes the socio-technical constellations of the uses of language in CMC – the communication-pragmatic constraints as captured in concepts such as “mode” and “affordances”. The effects of the medium on, for example, the management of grounding, on uptake, and on the notion of context are important in identifying differences between the traditional media and CMC, and it is an empirical question to what extent – and in what ways – medium effects shape online language use. Thus we assume that medium effects are a priori an eligible subject of study within the pragmatics of CMC.

3.

Recurrent theoretical issues

3.1.

Technological determinism

The chapters in this handbook attempt to various degrees, implicitly or explicitly, to explain language in CMC: why the linguistic properties of CMC are the way they are, as well as how and why they are different from those of spoken and (traditional) written language. These questions are closely linked to the much-debated question of technical determinism: What is the role of the technological medium in shaping the behavior of users of that medium? The discussion (briefly summarized in Herring 2001: 614; extensively discussed in Döring 2003) in the context of CMC goes back to an article by Daft and Lengel (1984), who characterize spoken language as a “rich” medium and communication via computer as “lean”, with information only available through one channel, typed text. Although Daft and Lengel did not refer explicitly to CMC, this characterization soon attached itself to CMC and became the basis for claims that CMC was impoverished and ill-suited for certain purposes of communication (e.g., Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire 1984). Two topical lines of discussion can be distinguished here. The first is the deterministic perspective: User behavior is a result of the physical conditions of production and reception of the medium. In this view, language and language usage are shaped by the constraints and affordances of the medium. This claim, while intuitively true to some extent, has been made with various degrees of strength and exclusivity. A corollary of this view is that the stronger the claim of pure technical determinism, the stronger the implication of universality and convergence of different languages used on the Internet. The issue of media richness or media leanness is important theoretically for characterizing the medium fully, as well as for applied purposes. As Clark and Brennan (1991) point out, for a given communication purpose, the choice of medium is important: One channel may be too rich, another may be too lean. Döring (2003: 134) cites the example of face-to-face talk, which may necessitate deflection of attention and the need for relational small talk, as compared to a more

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Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen

impersonal and efficient short email message. Parts of Hössjer’s (this volume) findings in a study of professional communication that includes media switches can be explained by reference to this type of strategic medium choice. The second line of discussion, not unconnected to the first, is the notion that CMC is deficient compared to spoken and written language. This view dominated early research and application in CMC (e.g., Daft and Lengal 1984; Kiesler et al. 1984); it emphasizes the absence of a number of signal types, such as non-verbal, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile. “The problem”, Brennan (1998: 1) wrote, “is that electronic contexts are often impoverished ones”. CMC scholars who subscribe to this view often focus on “compensational” features such as emoticons, graphical devices, repetitions, and deletions, as discussed in the contribution by Bieswanger (this volume), and performative action words such as *waves* (as discussed by Virtanen in this volume). These can be interpreted as replacing paralinguistic and non-verbal cues that are absent from the written repertoire. An alternative explanation for these common features of CMC – so-called “Netspeak” features, as described by Crystal (2001) – is that they are playful and represent the inherently ludic character of language use on the Internet (e.g., Danet 2001; Danet et al. 1997). The written, persistent nature of CMC makes language more available for metalinguistic reflection than in the case of speech, and this, together with a tendency towards loose cross-turn relatedness in multiparticipant CMC, encourages language play (Herring 1999, this volume). According to this view, CMC is not so much impoverished relative to speech and writing as different in nature from them. Medium effects are addressed in most chapters in this collection in one way or another. For example, Simpson, citing Cherny (1999), notes the easier construction of multiple floors in synchronous CMC. Harrison and Allton (this volume) note that email is more economical in that the interaction is accelerated by combining several conversational moves into a single message (see also Condon and Cˇech 2010). At the same time, the rapid exchange of messages in multiparty chat interfaces that display messages in the order received can result in disrupted turn adjacency, loosened norms of relevance, and decreased conversational coherence, as discussed in the chapter by Herring. Finally, several of the chapters shed yet another light on the impoverishment question. A recent development in research on Internet language, manifested in several contributions in this volume, involves identifying emergent pragmatic functions of phenomena that were hitherto predominantly considered sociolinguistic, such as address terms (de Oliveira this volume) and code-switching (Androutsopoulos this volume), as well as the analysis of emoticons as “illocutionary force indicating devices” analogous to punctuation (Dresner and Herring 2010). These are examples of how existing forms can become endowed with new pragmatic meanings, a process of sign genesis that countervails ideas of “impoverishment” of Internet language. This approach holds that new expressive needs and

Introduction to the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication

9

forms arise from and adapt to specific conditions of the new medium. Such new functions result from the specific “faceting” structure (Herring 2007) – the affordances and the communicative situation – of the medium, together with an enhanced metapragmatic awareness arising from the textual nature of most CMC (Herring 1999; Thurlow and Poff this volume). However, unlike in technological determinism, these effects are variable rather than categorical, manifesting differently in different languages and cultures. 3.2.

Internet genres

Another pervasive, pragmatic-based theme in the CMC literature is Internet genres. The Internet enables new kinds of participation, new kinds of fragmentation, and new ways of co-constructing meaning that transcend traditional notions of conversation, narrative, exposition, and so forth. The issue of classifying Internet language into types has been a focus of linguistic CMC research since the 1990s, initially in relation to speech and writing (e.g., Baron 1998; Maynard 1994; Yates 1996) and later in terms of technological modes such as email, chat, and MUDs and MOOs (e.g., Cherny 1999; Herring 2002). A section of this volume is devoted to the mode-based approach. Given the proliferation and convergence of CMC technologies, however, such an approach cannot capture the full range of constellations that form around digital communication. A first explicit approach to a typology based on the medial features and external communicative setting is Herring’s (2007) faceted approach to classifying computer-mediated discourse (CMD). As she is careful to caution, however, “the scheme is not in itself a contribution to a theory of genre, but is rather a preliminary aggregation of factors that will have to find a place in a theory of CMD genres” (n.p). The chapter by Giltrow in this volume represents the current state of the art of discussion of the notion of genre in CMC from a point of view that is informed by both the new rhetoric and modern pragmatics. Giltrow (this volume) and Giltrow and Stein (2009) see the focus of genre studies – which traditionally has been the search for discourse invariants, how to identify the “type” – as moving away from statistical averages or privileging of form occurrences and becoming more complex, with linguistic forms seen more as manifestations and instructions to construct meanings in ad hoc processes. This drift in the theoretical orientation of the definition of genre recapitulates the drift in the study of language on the Internet from a surface, form-based approach to a more broadly pragmatic approach to an emphasis on users as social identity carriers in dynamic, ad hoc, cognitive states. A “constructionist” approach to social meanings is also discussed by Andoutsopoulos (this volume). A common theme of recent work on the subject is that genre definition is more fluid on the Internet than in spoken and written media. If genres are primarily defined by external function, Internet genres seem to be more multi-functional and

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open to changes and adaptations of societal and interpersonal functions, and it is harder to define invariants on the functional level. This applies to even seemingly technically constrained CMC modes such as text messaging. Thurlow and Poff (this volume) observe that the differences between texting, instant messaging, and emailing, modes that are quite distinct in terms of Herring’s faceted parameters, tend to blur when compared with respect to the range of functions they fulfill. To take another example, whatever the definition is of the blog (Puschmann, this volume), there are so many sub-types that it is harder to define the prototype than with most written and oral-based genres, as Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright (2005) conclude in their analysis of “weblogs as a bridging genre”. This receptivity to innovation and the in-principle openness of the set of genres are consequences of the rapidly-changing technical conditions of digital communication. Generally, as Giltrow points out, this openness and fluidity of the ecology of genres on the Internet has made for genres being named at a low level of generality, allowing genre theory “to assume an open set” in principle. Thus, rather than speaking of blogs as a single genre, one tends to refer today to “diary blogs”, “organizational blogs”, “travelblogs”, and the like. A related finding of several studies in the volume is that traditional, static categories of analysis have to be abandoned in favor of more fluid and flexible concepts that allow for local and ad hoc negotiation. The narrative is a case in point. Georgakopoulou discusses a class of narrative discourses, “small stories”, that challenge the traditional criteria of storyhood, such as “time told” and “telling time”, long posited as defining features of narratives. There are online genres – if the designation is appropriate – such as Internet sports narratives in which the difference between these two times is either absent or minimized, such that its existence is questionable (Jucker 2010). Traditional notions of story-telling also break down when tellers transition between different technical modes and share authorship through processes of interactional writing. In addition to having to modify genre concepts developed on the basis of ideas about spoken and written language, it appears that even basic pragmatic notions undergo modification and ad hoc innovation in CMC. Two examples of this are the notions of performativity (Virtanen, this volume) and relevance (Herring, this volume). These new types of meanings and functions, and their characteristic of being negotiated in a more ad hoc manner, are arguably a consequence of the higher degree of mediatedness of the communication situation, which diminishes the directly mutually observable and ascertainable information about the communicants, leaving more space open and available to be negotiated ad hoc.

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Pragmatic norms, variability, and language change

The fact that there is an emphasis on local negotiation of norms raises the very question of the rise and the status of norms in Internet communications. Even at the level of individual linguistic structures, creativity and ludic deviations from traditional norms of standard writing in CMC led early on to negative comments about the (further) decay of language (Thurlow 2006). Norms at the interactional level, as well, are different from those for traditional genres – less rigid and more open to development and local definition, at least in the early phases of their formation. This may change as CMC genres become more entrenched, but rapid technological development of modes and affordances, a hallmark of the Internet as against other language media, could militate against solidification of norms. A corollary of the discussions around technical determinism is the expectation that technological forces will result in a convergence of practices in interactional norms, as predicted several decades ago for email by Baron (1984). This point is taken up in several chapters, including by Thurlow and Poff in their chapter on text messaging, a mode with a much higher degree of technical constraints on the formal shape of messages than email. Even there, a comparison of research into several cultural contexts shows surprising divergence in usage, or at least much less convergence than one might have expected. There is even a tendency to establish regiolects (“regiolectal spellings”) in text messaging within a cultural area, such as the United States, an observation that is supported by recent work by Eisenstein, O’Connor, Smith, and Xing (2010). The issue of convergence versus divergence taps into another general theme that figures prominently among a number of contributions: innovation and development. Notions of linguistic change, at least in more traditional versions, have tended to focus on the development of individual linguistic expressions, a topic of speculation especially in earlier CMC research (see Herring 2001 for a brief survey). Linguistic innovation at the micro level is discussed in the chapters in this collection by Bieswanger (for textual CMC as a whole) and by Dürscheid and Frehner (for email). Several chapters also consider the emergence of larger units of discourse such as genres, as discussed above. There is evidence that CMC genre characteristics are not directly generated by external communicative conditions so much as by communicants re-articulating pre-existing forms in new media. Giltrow (this volume) cites evidence that points to the manifold ancestries of blogs, and Georgakopoulou notes that some of the features she identifies as characteristic of Internet stories have been previously described for conversational narratives. At the same time, pre-existing qualities are differently combined, emphasized, and articulated, resulting in an end product that is qualitatively different, with the potential to express new meanings and functions (Herring in press). A related theme is the extent to which communicants carry over strategies and practices from oral communication to the new medium, such as described by

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Markman (this volume) for topical coherence. Just as oral residue was a feature of early written language, so oral conversation management strategies appear to persist in coherence management techniques in electronic team meetings via synchronous computer chat. Finally, chat is another example of variation and change in affordances: A range of modes all go by the name of chat. Paolillo and Zelenkauskaite (this volume) note that multiparticipant text chat is increasingly migrating into other modes, such as online games. In such cases of media convergence, an interesting point raised by the authors is: Where does game chat get its pragmatic features from – traditional chat, such as Internet Relay Chat, or its new host context? This suggests a line of future research that can be carried out as an in vitro study of change in process: an opportunity afforded to a previously unprecedented extent by communication on the Internet.

4.

Web 2.0

From controversial beginnings, the term Web 2.0 has become associated with a fairly well-defined set of popular web-based platforms characterized by social interaction and user-generated content. The World Wide Web was pitched as a concept by physicist Tim Berners-Lee to his employers at CERN in 1990, implemented by 1991, and attracted widespread attention after the first graphical browser, Mosaic, was launched in 1993.7 The early websites of the mid-1990s tended to be single-authored, fairly static documents, and included personal homepages, lists of frequently-asked questions (FAQs), and e-commerce sites. The late 1990s saw a shift towards more dynamic, interactive websites, however, including, notably, blogs (Herring et al. 2005) and online newssites (Kutz and Herring 2005), the content of which could be – and often was – updated frequently and which allowed users to leave comments on the site. These sites foreshadowed what later came to be called Web 2.0. The term itself was first used in 2004 when Tim O’Reilly, a web entrepreneur in California, decided to call a conference he was organizing for “leaders of the Internet Economy [to] gather to debate and determine business strategy” the “Web 2.0 Conference” (Battelle and O’Reilly 2010; O’Reilly 2005). At the time, the meaning of the term was vague, more aspirational and inspirational than descriptive. As a business strategy, “Web 2.0” was supposed to involve viral marketing rather than advertising and a focus on services over products. One of O’Reilly’s mantras is “Applications get better the more people use them” (Linden 2006). Today the term refers, according to Wikipedia (2011b) and other online sources, to changing trends in, and new uses of, web technology and web design, especially involving participatory information sharing; user-generated content; an ethic of collaboration; and use of the web as a social platform. The term may also refer to

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the types of sites that manifest such uses, e.g., blogs, wikis, social network sites, and media-sharing sites. From the outset, the notion of “Web 2.0” was controversial. Critics claimed that it was just a marketing buzzword, or perhaps a meme – an idea that was passed electronically from one Internet user to another –, rather than a true revolution in web content and use as its proponents claimed. They questioned whether the web was qualitatively different in recent years than it had been before, and whether the applications grouped under the label Web 2.0 – including such diverse phenomena as online auction sites, photo-sharing sites, collaboratively-authored encyclopedias, social bookmarking sites, news aggregators, and microblogs – formed a coherent set. Tim Berners-Lee’s answers to these questions was “no” – for the inventor of the web, the term suffered from excessive hype and lack of definition (Anderson 2006). In response to such criticisms, O’Reilly (2005) provided a chart to illustrate the differences between Web 2.0 and what he retroactively labeled “Web 1.0”. This is shown in modified and simplified form in Figure 1. The phenomena in the second column are intended to be the Web 2.0 analogs of the phenomena in the first column. Web 1.0

Web 2.0

Personal websites

Blogging

Publishing

Participation

Britannica online

Wikipedia

Content management systems

Wikis

Stickiness

Syndication

Directories (taxonomies)

Tagging (folksonomies)

Figure 1. Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 phenomena (adapted from O’Reilly 2005)

Language use in Web 2.0 environments raises many issues for pragmatic analysis. There are new types of content to be analyzed: status updates, text annotations on video, tags on social bookmarking sites, edits on wikis, etc. New contexts must also be considered – for example, social network sites based on geographic location – as well as new (mass media) audiences, including in other languages and cultures. (Facebook, for example, now exists in “localized” versions in well over 100 languages [Lenihan, 2011].) Web 2.0 manifests new usage patterns, as well, such as media co-activity, or near-simultaneous multiple activities on a single platform (e.g., Herring, Kutz, Paolillo, and Zelenkauskaite 2009) and multi-authorship, or joint discourse production (e.g., Androutsopoulos 2011; Nishimura 2011). The above reflect, in part, new affordances made available by new communication technologies: text chat in multiplayer online games (MOGs); collaboratively edi-

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table environments such as wikis; friending and the “walled gardens” of Facebook; social tagging/recommending; and so forth. Last but not least, Web 2.0 discourse includes user adaptations to circumvent the constraints of Web 2.0 environments: for example, interactive uses of @ and #, as well as retweeting, on Twitter (e.g., boyd, Golder, and Lotan 2010; Honeycutt and Herring 2009) and performed interactivity on what are, in essence, monologic blogs (e.g., Peterson, 2011; Puschmann, this volume). Each of these issues deserves attention, and some are starting to be addressed, but on a case-by-case, rather than a systemic, basis. Herring (in press) recently proposed a three-part classification of Web 2.0 discourse phenomena: phenomena familiar from older computer-mediated modes such as email, chat, and discussion forums that appear to carry over into Web 2.0 environments with minimal differences; discourse phenomena that adapt to and are reconfigured by Web 2.0 environments; and new or emergent phenomena that did not exist – or if they did exist, did not rise to the level of public awareness – prior to the era of Web 2.0. She argues that this three-way classification can provide insight into why particular language phenomena persist, adapt, or arise anew in technologically-mediated environments over time. In so doing, she invokes technological factors such as multimodality and media convergence, social factors at both the situational and cultural levels, and inherent differences among linguistic phenomena that make them variably sensitive to technological and social effects. Web 2.0 phenomena in the first category are well represented in this volume. Examples of familiar Web 2.0 discourse phenomena include non-standard typography and orthography (Bieswanger), code switching (Androutsopoulos), addressivity (de Oliveira), flaming (Danet), and email hoaxes/scams (Gill; Heyd), as well as the continued predominance of text as a channel of communication among web users, whether it be in blogs, microblogs, wikis, comments on news sites, or web discussion forums. The latter, in particular, remain very popular, and illustrate many of the same kinds of phenomena as did asynchronous online forums in the 1990s. Examples of reconfigured Web 2.0 discourse phenomena include personal status updates (Lee 2011; cf. Cherny 1999), quoting/retweeting (boyd et al. 2010; cf. Severinson Eklundh and Macdonald 1994), “small stories” (Georgakopoulou, this volume; cf. Lindholm 2010), and blogging (Myers 2010; Puschmann, this volume; cf. Herring et al. 2005), which might on the surface appear new but have traceable online antecedents, as well as reconfigurations of such familiar phenomena as topical coherence, threading, turn-taking, and repair (cf. the chapters in this volume by Simpson, Markman, Herring, and Jacobs and Garcia). Less studied (as yet) are what Herring (in press) calls “emergent” Web 2.0 discourse phenomena – although since much of what has been claimed to be unprecedented on the web has been found, upon deeper examination, to have online and/or offline antecedents, caution must be exercised in asserting that any phenomenon is entirely new. Phenomena that can tentatively be identified as emergent and unprecedented, at least as common practices, include the dynamic collaborative dis-

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course that takes place on wikis (e.g., Emigh and Herring 2005; Myers 2010), as well as conversational video exchanges (Pihlaja 2011), conversational exchanges via “image texts” (MacDonald 2007), and multimodal conversation more generally. Aside from the works cited above, however, little language-focused analysis of these new phenomena has yet been published. A general challenge for emergent media environments is that they need to be analyzed descriptively first before more sophisticated, theoretically-informed analyses can be carried out; this often results in a lag between the emergence of new environments and scholarly understanding of them.

5.

Overview of the handbook

The coverage of this volume reflects the inherent interdisciplinarity of the pragmatics of CMC. Contributors approach the topic from the perspectives of classic pragmatics, discourse pragmatics, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, communication, rhetoric, and other (sub)disciplines in the academic study of language. Methods vary hand-in-hand with approaches, as is expedient in a new field of study. In what follows, the individual chapters of this handbook are encapsulated in terms of the five themes around which they cluster: (1) pragmatic characteristics of technologically-based CMC modes; (2) classic pragmatic phenomena in CMC environments; (3) pragmatic innovations emerging from the affordances and practices of CMC; (4) interactional phenomena in CMC; and (5) broader metapragmatic issues, including code choice, narrativity, and genre dynamics. PART 1: Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication modes In the first section of the handbook the focus is on a selection of established CMC modes, ranging from asynchronous to synchronous, from text-based to voicebased CMC and multimodality, and involving both traditional computers and mobile phones. The presentation of CMC modes in the eight chapters in this section roughly conforms to their chronology. The section begins with the oldest mode of CMC, email. Christa Dürscheid and Carmen Frehner note that email threads may manifest high concentrations of familiar features such as lexical and grammatical reduction, non-standard punctuation, and emulated prosody. Moreover, the heterogeneity of the discourses mediated through email reveals new communication practices. The chapter presents two models of analysis, one focusing on the conceptual distinction between the language of immediacy and the language of distance, the other on the contexts of email discourse. While the once-so-popular CMC mode has been largely replaced by other modes in private communication, email persists in text-based discussion forums and workplace communication.

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Another early mode of CMC is the discussion list. Adopting a broad, functional perspective on pragmatics, Helmut Gruber discusses listserv communication as a special kind of email communication, contrasting it with other forms of many-tomany asynchronous computer-mediated discourse. The research reviewed covers technological affordances, register and language choice, discourse coherence, genres, and interactive norms and practices, as well as community formation. Analyses of mailing list communication benefit from models that succeed in capturing and differentiating technical and socio-situational factors and showing causal relationships between them and the discourse pragmatics of listserv communication. Cornelius Puschmann’s concern is with blogging. Blogs differ from other modes of CMC in terms of the control that the blogger exerts on possible interaction. While a blogging option is made available by various public and semi-public hosts for professional purposes, blogs are mainly used for personal purposes, in particular for self-expression in view of a conceptually restricted, familiar audience. The purposes of blogging, as indicated by the discourse, appear to influence audience design, style, and content; studies also indicate relations between these aspects and age and gender. The chapter reviews research on deixis, givenness, addressivity, and politeness in blog language and presents two prototypical blogging styles: topic-centric and author-centric. John Paolillo and Asta Zelenkauskaite survey research on real-time chat. They discuss the social nature of technologically-differentiated chat modes such as MUDs/MOOs, AOL, IRC, and web-based chat, and identify four major domains of applications: recreational, educational, institutional, and business. The chapter describes great variation across the affordances of various chat modes and applications of chat, as well as across users and their communicative and social motivations, all of which are likely to be reflected in the linguistic landscapes of chat. The pragmatic phenomena in focus include interaction management, international and intercultural contexts, orthography, and participant gender. Naomi Baron surveys the history and evolution of Instant Messaging (IM). She points out that “the questions of language, context, and interpretation that IM initially generated are no less relevant today to students of CMC” (155). Such questions include user profile creation, as well as investigations of contexts and ways of use. Particular attention is paid to IM “away” messages, which reveal pragmatic information; the structuring of IM conversations; and gendered patterns of use. The chapter also reports user attitudes to IM as compared to Facebook and texting, and concludes by singling out a number of central pragmatic phenomena in need of further investigation. Crispin Thurlow and Michele Poff approach text messaging (texting, SMS) from the perspectives of cross-cultural, interactional, pragmalinguistic, and metalinguistic contexts. Texting “presents itself in the broadest terms as a social technology par excellence” (174), predominantly mediating “phatic communion”

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(Malinowski 1923). It provides users with recognized anonymity, mobility, discretion, intimacy, and play. The pragmatics of texting lies in the uses to which people put it, in various contexts mediated by the technology and a repertoire of genres involving brief messages. A research agenda is outlined for situated analyses of the discourse of text messages. Rich Ling and Naomi Baron focus on mobile phone communication, both voice-based and text-based. People use mobile voice telephony to coordinate activities, increase feelings of personal safety, and contribute to social integration through “connected presence”. The chapter discusses the influence of cost on the macro-pragmatics of mobile phone communication, its contributions to the emancipation of adolescents, and interlocutors’ attitudes toward voice-based and textbased communication. Texting allows multitasking and near-synchronous interaction through rapid-paced chained messages. Findings from Norwegian and U.S.based data indicate great variation in message content and the language of texting. The chapter by Chris Jenks and Alan Firth is concerned with synchronous voice-based CMC, analyzing interactional aspects of Internet telephony accomplished through the use of Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP). Adopting Conversation Analysis (CA) as their theoretical framework, Jenks and Firth investigate identification-recognition strategies, turn-taking mechanisms, and repair in VoIP data, drawing parallels to research findings concerning landline telephony and mobile phone communication where appropriate. An important finding is the difference in communicative strategies between audio chat rooms and text-based chat rooms. Users adapt their communicative behaviors to the affordances of the medium. PART 2: Classic pragmatic phenomena in computer-mediated-communication The focus in Part 2 of the handbook is on several classic pragmatic phenomena as they manifest in CMC environments. In Ariel’s (2010) terms, these include the border-seekers’ relevance and speech acts (performatives, apologies) and the problem-solvers’ addressivity, advice-giving, and deception. While the classic pragmatic phenomena originate in essentially monologic theories and models, they are examined here in dialogical terms, to do justice to the dynamic, interactional character of CMC. In each chapter the phenomenon in focus is approached from the point of view of CMC data of a particular kind. Susan Herring investigates relevance in synchronous CMC: multiparty chat using IRC and MUDs, and dyadic human-computer (bot) interaction. Relevance (or cross-turn coherence) is often problematic in such environments, and remedial strategies include use of explicit addressivity. The outcome of users’ adaptation to the problems posed by fast-paced multiparty chat is what Herring terms “loosened relevance”, which, she suggest, is becoming a norm in recreational, playful uses of chat. This communicational development challenges traditional pragmatic models (Grice 1975; Sperber and Wilson 1986), in that user-independent technological

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constraints lead to highly cooperative and socially gratifying conversations that raise the question of whether users are aiming at relevance at all. Tuija Virtanen approaches performativity in CMC from the perspectives of (i) “emoting”, the construction of third-person action, and (ii) “mock-performatives”, mediated institutional first-person performative utterances, as they are put to playful use on informal discussion boards. The form of a pre-programmed command “emote” in game environments has been adopted in a number of text-based CMC modes to refer to users’ online personae in typographically marked third-person predications. Mock-performatives, incorporating the performative marker hereby, readily trigger joint play sequences. It is argued that the two kinds of virtual performatives call for a rethinking of performative theory. The chapter on address terms, by Sandi Michele de Oliveira, reviews literature from contextually-oriented branches of linguistics but finds that very little has been written on address in CMC environments. In pragmatics the focus has been on politeness, where address is only part of the package. Three objects of study in CMC are identified: address forms in greetings, conversational norms emerging from the (cross-cultural) study of address forms across CMC modes and communicative situations, and address in educational online settings. The chapter warns against static views of address forms as conveyors of identity and (im)politeness per se, critiquing popular ideas regarding the homogeneous informality of CMC. Sandra Harrison and Diane Allton discuss distinctive patterns of apology in email discussion lists with academic or professional themes. Four kinds of apologies appear: (i) email-specific apologies, routinely used for cross-postings before committing the trivial offence in the same message; (ii) retrospective apologies for minor offences such as giving incorrect information or sending blank messages, which include some sign of genuineness in their formulations; (iii) retrospective apologies for serious offences such as word choice or sending private messages to the list; and (iv) subverted apologies. The more serious the offence, the more varied the forms of the apology. Miriam Locher’s concern is with advice-seeking and advice-giving on the Internet, with a focus on response patterns in professional health websites. The chapter explores a particular online advice column, Lucy Answers, in some detail. Response letters are investigated in the light of their content structure, syntactic characteristics, and pragmatic aspects related to politeness and self-presentation. The author then examines the role of computer mediation in health advice, using Herring’s (2007) classification scheme of medium and situational factors. It is assumed that people employ language differently in different advisory settings online, both in expert/non-expert interaction and in contexts of peer advice. Jeffrey Hancock and Amy Gonzales explore digital deception, “the intentional control of information in a technologically-mediated message to create a false belief in the receiver of the message” (364). The mode of communication is likely to have an effect on people’s decisions to lie or not, both in interactions with

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persons familiar to them and in anonymous online spaces. The chapter also deals with sets of linguistic features that are expected to reveal deception, in keeping with a shift in the study of deception from non-verbal cues to verbal elements. It is crucial to consider degrees of recordability, synchronicity, and co-presence of interlocutors in the naturalistic settings offered by CMC for the study of the pragmatic aspects of deceptive discourse. PART 3: Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication phenomena Part 3 is devoted to the pragmatics of linguistic phenomena that have emerged as new in CMC. Such phenomena are relatively scarce, which may seem surprising in view of the emphasis in the media on the novelties of CMC. Yet it is primarily the combinations of linguistic features, their clustering in some CMC modes rather than others, and the innovative uses of language for pragmatic purposes that characterize CMC. Part 3 focuses on several pragmatic phenomena that may be labeled CMC-specific. Theresa Heyd discusses the advantages of using classic pragmatics tools such as speech act theory and the cooperative principle to analyze deception in CMC. Studies of online discourse can indeed greatly benefit the development of pragmatic theory, as demonstrated in concrete terms by Heyd’s investigation of “email hoaxes”. After a discussion of their genre history, definitional criteria, and repertoire of types, email hoaxes are approached from the perspectives of their characteristic pragmatic mechanisms: They manifest dual patterns of (non)cooperation, felicity, and uptake. It is predicted that the model of analysis will also serve well in the study of future CMC genres that have a deceptive orientation. On a related topic, Martin Gill analyzes a corpus of Nigerian (scam) email letters for their “authenticity”. Gill identifies a set of basic conditions that authentication effects need to meet: consistency, quantity, spontaneity, plausibility or appropriateness, and engagement. All of these are crucially missing from Nigerian scam emails. Instead, their authentication cues give off disauthenticating information, while the authenticating work undertaken is sender and medium oriented, occurring in a communicational vacuum. Further, the authentication strategies employed have scope over local stretches of discourse, rather than the message as a whole. The five conditions identified in the chapter are offered as guidelines for future research on authentication in CMC. Loukia Lindholm adapts Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle for the analysis of online nicknames (“nicks”), arguing that these consist of mini-propositions that contribute to the discourse by serving central communicative goals in CMC such as self-presentation, negotiation of group identity, and triggering interaction. At times nicknames simply have the referential function of naming, but most instances in the two discussion forums investigated serve pragmatic functions in ways that offline nicknames do not, such as co-construction of online personae and establishing credentials for (verbal) actions. Participants readily discuss their and

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others’ nickname practices, suggesting conformity to or noticeable deviation from the four maxims of online nicknames identified for these communities. Markus Bieswanger discusses the micro-linguistic features that are often identified as characteristic of CMC, such as emoticons, non-standard spelling and creative use of writing systems, abbreviations, and non-standard punctuation. These features are an essential part of many online discourses. Yet the great variation in their frequencies of occurrences makes generalizations of a relatively homogeneous Internet language (cf. “Netspeak”, Crystal 2001) difficult to sustain. Moreover, some instances of each category are very common and others scarce, and variability in their (non-)use may be manifest in particular languages and scripts, CMC modes, communicative situations, and individual users. PART 4: Discourse pragmatics of computer-mediated interaction The chapters included in the fourth section revolve around issues central in interaction, testing and adapting concepts from the offline study of conversational discourse for the study of online discourse in various situational and institutional contexts. The final chapter in this section is concerned with the notion of “flaming”, one of the earliest discourse-pragmatic phenomena to be ascribed to CMC (Kim and Raja 1991). The chapter by Rodney Jones analyzes pragmatic uses of rhythm and timing in text-based chat by investigating gay chat room interaction. Rhythm and timing are exploited to produce shared “attention structures”, and a lack of “interactional synchrony” tends to terminate the exchange. Users make their turns short, break up messages across several turns, and type in filler terms such as ic (‘I see’). However, longer breaks may successfully indicate conversation management when topics and activity stages are shifted. The chapter also discusses “polychronicity”, i.e., multiple, simultaneous interactions not proceeding at the same pace, the effects of interactional roles and social power on the interaction, and the phenomenon of CMC users entering a state of “flow” and losing their sense of time. James Simpson focuses on conversational floors in text-based multiparty synchronous CMC, investigating the factors that account for the emergence of distinctive patterns in human interaction mediated by computers. The notion of conversational floor is first related to inter-turn cohesion and coherence and then defined in relation to the topic, communicative action, and participants’ sense of what is going on in the interaction. Different participant structures yield basic floor types: speaker-and-supporter floor, collaborative floor, and multiple conversational floor. The last of these is common in CMC environments, due to the occurrence of simultaneous conversations and multitasking. These floor types are illustrated through a case study of a virtual group dedicated to exploring ways of language learning online. Informed by the CA tradition, Kris Markman approaches small-group chat from the perspective of conversational coherence and turn organization. The chapter

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presents a case study of virtual student team meetings that reveals an orientation towards discourse topics as a means of designing and structuring turns online. Interactional coherence is examined in the light of conversational threads as well as speakership roles and turn allocation, while also paying attention to the size of the group, the technical features of the chat environment, and the purpose of the talk. The chapter argues for the difference between turns and chat messages, and presents a useful transcription method designed for the analysis of chat interaction. Jennifer Jacobs and Angela Garcia examine another central concept in CA, repair. Their study of educational chat in an intranet context of composition classes in the U.S. makes use of an innovative transcription system based on videotapes of participants’ computer screens to allow the analyst to keep track of what is visible to each student at a given point in the interaction and what keystroke actions they make in their postings. The case study focuses on avoidance and self/other repair of troubles in “quasi-synchronous” chat, as well as the technological solutions adopted by users for these purposes, such as short or split messages, delays in posting, addressivity, and format tying. Karianne Skovholt and Jan Svennevig investigate norms related to responses and non-responses in workplace email in Norwegian contexts. Informed by CA and classic speech act theory, the study relies on participant display of communicative actions. While a response is found to be conditionally relevant after questions and requests, non-response to requests for comments and corrections to a proposal signals acceptance of the proposal. However, users may volunteer responses that have an interpersonal function. The emerging norms of responding or not in workplace email are compared to earlier studies of other kinds of CMC dialogue and to the literature on offline conversations. Focusing on email use in Swedish workplace communication, Amelie Hössjer addresses the relationship between small talk and politeness in two editorial contexts: a physically-based and a digitally-based community of practice. In the former, email is one of several communication options, and its use is characterized by simple, routine matters. Small talk primarily appears in face-to-face contacts, reserved for complex or delicate issues. While not a “lean medium” in itself, email is used as such. In contrast, the digitally-based community of practice makes use of email as its primary form of communication. For these users it is a “rich medium”, allowing them to construct and maintain social relationships through the discourse strategies of “framing” and “chaining” in work-related interaction. The late Brenda Danet’s concern, in contrast, is with linguistic impoliteness and rudeness. The CMC phenomenon of “flaming” is provided with a historical context and related to (im)politeness theories, as well as issues of multilingualism, gender, and culture. The chapter shows that flaming can sometimes be used to express solidarity, perhaps jointly with hostility. A contextualized case study is pres-

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ented of “flame events” in listserv communication among English-speaking Israelis in the U.S., relating some of the findings to the traditional Jewish culture of argument and disputing. Such flame events, Danet suggests, can be fostered by technological, organizational, gender-related, personality-oriented, sociocultural, and linguistic factors. PART 5: Broader perspectives The last section of the volume takes the dialogical approach to CMC further to investigate code-switching, narrative, and genre dynamics. These phenomena, while somewhat loosely related, can all be considered metapragmatic, in that they involve constructs beyond the level of contexts of use, i.e., language systems and CMC types. Jannis Androutsopoulos opens the section with an overview of research on code-switching and code-mixing in CMC. Code-switching in digital discourse functions as a code-centred contextualization cue that constitutes unscripted, dynamically unfolding communication in its own right. The chapter discusses a number of ways in which code-switching and code-mixing are used as multilingual resources in CMC, focusing on the specific conditions of communication offered by digital media for (non)conversational discourse. Digital writing is dialogical, often vernacular, and simultaneously used with other semiotic resources, and codeswitching is affected by the affordances concerning planning and the modespecific resources of writing. The chapter by Alexandra Georgakopoulou provides a programmatic discussion of narrative in CMC. It is argued that the focus of narrative analysis in CMC should be on social practices, rather than textual and genre-related issues. In particular, it would seem expedient to adopt an approach that includes “small stories”, marginal in terms of the traditional Labovian narrative, given that the new media are teeming with distributed multi-authored stories and story fragments emerging in interactive and multimodal environments. Several of the basic characteristics of narrative need rethinking as analysis of online narratives, fictional or personal, reveal new practices and ways of telling. Finally, Janet Giltrow explores the elusive notion of “genre” in pragmatics, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, and her own field, rhetoric, in relation to CMC. Two possible common denominators are identified among myriad definitions: Genre is a typifying concept, and genre is located at the interface between language and sociality. The chapter singles out two constitutive phenomena in rhetorical genre theory: “exigence” and “motive”. Genre studies of CMC informed by various theoretical frameworks ideally contribute to the understanding of both “the extent and quality of newness of CMC” and “users’ experience of exigence, including the social motive for taking up new technologies and their mutual recognition of these motives” (733).

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The contents of the volume can be summarized concisely as follows. Part 1 shows important variation across CMC modes, Part 2 forcefully demonstrates how analyses of classic pragmatic phenomena in CMC data suggest developments to pragmatic theory, and Part 3 identifies a small number of unevenly distributed pragmatic phenomena that may be labeled CMC-specific, even though they, too, can be shown to have roots in offline communication. Part 4 raises the issue of the applicability to CMC data of models devised for the analysis of spontaneous faceto-face communication, and Part 5 addresses the broader metapragmatic issues of code alternation and genre in CMC.

6.

Directions for future research

The diversity of topics addressed in this handbook notwithstanding, gaps remain in the pragmatic phenomena covered for various reasons. For instance, there are no chapters on deixis, presupposition, inferencing and implicature, grounding, or ideology, mostly because not enough language-focused research yet exists on these phenomena in CMC to provide the substance for separate chapters. Linguists have tended to focus on more “exotic” phenomena in CMC (such as “Netspeak” and emoticons) first, areas where computer-mediated language appears self-evidently different from traditional written and spoken language. This could explain, for example, why there has been so little research on presupposition, inferencing, and implicature – no one has yet observed these to work differently in CMC, that we are aware of (although it is an empirical question whether they work differently or not). As research on the pragmatics of CMC expands and becomes more nuanced, we expect and hope that these gaps will be filled in the future. This explanation does not account for the gaps in coverage on deixis and grounding, however, in that CMC-specific issues associated with these are readily observable, especially in videoconferencing systems and 3-D graphical worlds where reference to shared objects must be negotiated.8 Most computer-mediated language research to date has not dealt with such modes, however, but rather has focused on conversational, textual modes of CMC. Finally, the volume contains no chapters devoted exclusively to speech acts or politeness; these are accidental gaps, in that the authors we invited unfortunately were not able to contribute. These topics have attracted research attention, however, as indicated by their inclusion in a number of chapters in the handbook as described in the previous section. The pragmatics of CMC being a new field of study, it is a truism that more research on almost all topics is needed. Further research is needed especially on pragmatic phenomena in languages other than English, as well as in multimodal CMC (voice, video, graphics), including in game environments (Esslin 2011), domains where research has as yet only scratched the surface of understanding. Newer domains, such as social network sites and microblogs, have emerged and

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evolved as this volume was in preparation. Clearly, “canonized knowledge” is not yet available on the linguistic pragmatics of these, although we can envision that a separate volume on the pragmatics of Web 2.0 will become feasible in the not-sodistant future. Nor is the evolution of CMC technologies likely to slow any time soon, underscoring one of the main challenges for researchers studying language usage in digital media environments: Such usage – and the environments themselves – are dynamically moving targets. Despite the likelihood that the coverage in this volume will soon become outdated, we nonetheless offer it as a multifaceted portfolio covering the first 25 years of computer-mediated language research, in the hope that it will weather the sands of time and remain as a sturdy foundation upon which future research can build.

Notes 1. Noteworthy among these are Baron (1984), Murray (1985), and Severinson Eklundh (1986). 2. For a useful (albeit now somewhat dated) overview of sociolinguistic research on CMC, see Androutsopoulos (2006). 3. See, e.g., Reid (1991) and Werry (1996) for IRC; Reid (1994) and Cherny (1999) for MUDs; Baron (1998) and Gains (1999) for email; Döring (2002) for German SMS; Thurlow and Brown (2003) for English SMS; Stein (2006) for business websites; and Herring et al. (2005) for blogs. 4. See also Weininger and Shield (2004) and Stein (2005) with reference to Koch and Österreicher (1994); Herring (2007) with reference to Hymes (1974). 5. In keeping with the rise in English as the lingua franca of scholarship, CMC scholarship from other countries published in English is also on the rise, especially on the web (Callahan and Herring 2012). 6. A notable, and early, exception is Yus (2001). An English version of this work became available in 2010. 7. On the creation of the World Wide Web, see Wikipedia (2011a). 8. In the literature on computer-supported cooperative work, however, deixis has been addressed in just such environments, e.g., by Hindmarsh and Heath (2000) and Suthers, Girardeau, and Hundhausen (2003), and grounding has been addressed, e.g., by Clark and Brennan (1991) and Brennan (1998).

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I.

Pragmatics of computer-mediated modes

2.

Email communication Christa Dürscheid and Carmen Frehner

1.

Introduction

With millions of emails sent every day, email has become a common mode of communication that is used by young and old. To have an email address – or even several – is something that is taken for granted; email has become as natural a communication channel as the telephone. Thus, one may assume that most readers are familiar with sending emails and with their structural elements, which include the header, the body, and an optional signature. Compared to other modes of computermediated communication (henceforth CMC), email is considered an old mode that is gradually losing popularity as new, competing modes have sprung up. Nevertheless, email is still the most important CMC application because it is the only one with which the average Internet user is familiar. Thus, when filling in forms, for instance, it is the person’s email address that is asked for and not their Skype user ID or Twitter account – a practice that is likely to persist for a while. Emails are used for various purposes, e.g., to exchange information, to submit greetings and invitations, or to send an Internet link or some digital data (ranging from simple word documents to photos and videos). Being less personal than a letter, it is a relatively unobtrusive form of communication and also encourages people who would not send letters otherwise to communicate in writing. What is more, its swift transmission makes it a preferred medium to communicate with people who are far away. While a letter would take much longer to be delivered, an email reaches its recipients in no time, no matter where they are located. The history of email dates back to the 1970s (see Baron 2000: 223–226). Until the late 1980s, email was used primarily in governmental, business, and computer science circles; subsequently, it gained widespread popularity with the rise of Internet Service Providers such as CompuServe and AOL. It has replaced telephone calls and letter mails to a certain extent and has further created new communication niches: People send each other emails in situations in which they would not have addressed each other earlier on, and so it has become much easier to approach another person when needing assistance. Teachers, for instance, frequently receive emails from their students who ask questions about homework assignments, upcoming exams, or personal matters, inquiring about problems for which they would have found a solution without the teacher’s help in earlier times. In this context, Baron (2003: 86 and 2008: 165) reports on a student who asked for further information on his research project while he was preparing his master’s thesis: “Apparently his library did not have many useful sources. After presenting me a long

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list of questions, he closed with ‘OK NAOMI … I really need your information as soon as possible’”. This example clearly illustrates that the inhibition threshold to write somebody has been lowered, but it also points to another phenomenon that seems to be typical of email, namely the tendency to use a rather informal style (see section 3). Whereas previous studies have often discussed issues dealing with the question of why people use email, this very question must be modified to inquire about the reasons behind the fact that some people still send letters, while in other situations they prefer email to letters. Indeed, there are some advantages of a letter over email: A letter can transport an object; the receiver might pay more attention to a letter than to an email; a letter can also be received by people who do not use the Internet. How, then, is it that people often choose email to make an appointment or discuss problems? Why would they not phone in such situations? An email does not disturb the recipients at work and permits the senders to think over their words and modify their sentences. Thus, it is not astonishing that people who work in the same office, for instance, frequently communicate via email. Another advantage is that “[email] enables people to communicate speedily the same information to many others”, as Waldvogel (2007: n.p.) points out. The interactants even get a record of the communication, which is not the case when discussing a topic over the phone.1 In fact, email has become so popular within the business sector that people often spend hours reading and answering emails, with the result that some employers have started to reduce the time their employees are allowed to spend with email in order to save working time. In section 2, we briefly sketch the history of email research from the 1980s until the present. In section 3, the features generally claimed to be typical of email are listed and critically discussed. We argue that there is no reason to assume a language that is unique to email and show that it is rather inaccurate to use terms such as “Netspeak”. Nevertheless, there are new communication practices when it comes to emailing – practices that influence people’s social and communicative behaviour. This particularly applies to email dialogues, which can be regarded as a typical characteristic of CMC. In this context, we also refer to the numerous style guides on the composition of emails. Section 4 focuses on theoretical approaches to CMC in general and email communication in particular: On the one hand, we describe a model which is well known in the work of German and Romance scholars, namely the orality-literacy model of Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher (1994). On the other hand, we refer to Susan Herring’s (2001, 2007) discourse analysis approach to CMC. The last section provides an outlook on the future of email; we advance the thesis that email will persist in certain areas only, while it will be replaced by more synchronous means of (online) communication in many others.

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History of email research

As Stein (2003) points out, many linguistic and communication studies of Internet language in German are available these days. Accordingly, it is important to focus not merely on linguistic studies that have been carried out in the Anglophone area but also on available German research material. The following overview therefore provides both an overview of English studies and a description of the major German works.2 Even though linguistic research on CMC in the Anglophone area dates back to the beginning of the 1980s, it was only around 10 years later that it received serious attention by linguists and scholars, and so “CMC was still a novelty topic of research in the early 1990s” (Herring 2008: xxxv). The same is true for the German-speaking research community. The earliest CMC studies that came to be known by a broader public were published in the late 1990s; among these are Weingarten’s volume Sprachwandel durch Computer (‘Computer-Driven Language Change’) (1997) and Runkehl, Schlobinski, and Siever’s frequently cited book Sprache und Kommunikation im Internet (‘Language and Communication on the Internet’) (1998). To start with the Anglophone linguistic email research, three major names must be mentioned in this context, these being Naomi Baron, Susan Herring, and David Crystal. a) Naomi Baron published an essay on “Computer mediated communication as a force in language change” as early as 1984, and she studied the linguistics of email more closely in her article “Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of email”, which appeared in 1998. In the latter article, she also discussed the difference between writing and speech and considered email against the background of this difference, concluding that while some features “distribute themselves neatly on the dichotomous writing/speech spectrum”, others “have mixed profiles” (Baron 1998: 155). Two years later, Baron came out with a rather comprehensive study on the history of writing technologies, a book called Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading (2000). Always On (2008) is another important study worth noting in this context. The question Baron approaches in both books is how technology is changing the way we write. She claims that “[i]n the fast-moving world of email, content is far more important than spelling and punctuation” and finds that “the line between the spoken and written language continues to fade” (Baron 2000: 259). Similarly, in her article “Why email looks like speech. Proofreading, pedagogy and public face”, which was published three years later, Baron (2003: 92) argues that “[e]mail resembles speech”, thereby, however, ignoring the fact that there is actually a wide array of text types, ranging from informal to formal, as well as a great variety of situational factors that have to be considered, both of which have a significant influence on email style. Baron (2003: 92) then points out that “writing in general has become more speech-like, thanks in part to conscious pedagogical decisions and in part to

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changing social attitudes about how we present ourselves to others”. To support this strong thesis, she provides a few intuitive examples concerning the United States’ (henceforth U.S.) education system and social attitudes. It goes without saying that more substantiated studies are necessary to ascertain whether these supposed modifications in language use are in fact a reflex of a more general development, that is, whether it is justifiable to speak generally of a “growing American tendency for all writing to become more informal, less edited, and more personal” (Baron 2003: 88). b) With the numerous books and articles she has edited and written on computer-mediated communication, Susan C. Herring has made a large contribution to linguistic research on email communication. She began studying CMC in 1991 (per her biographical note in Herring 2008) and continues publishing valuable research on the topic. One of her major works is the volume Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (1996a), which she edited. Herring’s theoretical frame in CMC is discourse analysis, an approach that was originally developed for oral communication and that has been applied to written interaction in computer-mediated discourses as well. A short overview of research on CMD (computer-mediated discourse) is given by Herring (2001). Here, she points out that social practices, communication purposes, and situational and demographic factors (e.g., social class, race, and ethnicity) have to be taken into account when analysing CMC, and she presents the main properties of CMD following these factors. In a contribution to Language@Internet, a journal of which she later became the editor-in-chief, she presents a CMC classification scheme that brings together relevant aspects of the technical and social context that influences discourse usages within CMC (Herring 2007). The scheme does not rely on communication modes such as email, chat, blogs, etc., but is organised in terms of clusters of features that are independent of each other but tend to combine in predictable ways. This makes the scheme highly versatile, so that it can even be applied to new communication modes that have yet to arise. Following Cherny (1999), Herring (2001, 2007) mentions an interesting difference between one-way transmission communication modes (e.g., chat) and two-way transmission communication modes (e.g., Unix talk systems): Whereas the recipients can see how the messages are typed by the senders in two-way systems, this is not the case in one-way systems. Messages are displayed on the recipients’ screens only after being dispatched, which also prevents the recipients from interrupting or taking over the turn.3 According to Herring’s typology, email is an example of asynchronous communication with one-way message transmission: Neither must the communication partners be logged in simultaneously, nor can they see how the other person is typing the message. c) A frequently-cited volume on CMC is David Crystal’s Language and the Internet, which first appeared in 2001. In this book, Crystal devotes one chapter to the language of email, in which he describes its structural elements and various lin-

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guistic features and also defines the uniqueness of email. Crystal has become well known for coining the term “Netspeak” – a term which appears in many of his works, such as in the second edition of his volume The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language (1988, 2002). This term is critically discussed in Dürscheid (2004), who finds that “Netspeak” as such does not exist. She argues that the different kinds of text types written online make it impossible to draw any generalising conclusions by subsuming the various linguistic features under a single terminus technicus. Another book which deals with the topic is entitled The Language Revolution, in which Crystal (2004: 64) points out that “[t]he public acquisition of the Internet was [besides the emergence of a global language and the phenomenon of language endangerment] the third element contributing to the revolutionary linguistic character of the 1990s, and the one where the epithet ‘revolutionary’ is easiest to justify”. It is worth mentioning that Crystal (2001: 52–59) was one of the first authors to analyse CMC in terms of Grice’s conversational maxims (see also the chapters by Herring, Heyd, and Lindholm in this volume). He argues, for instance, that Grice’s maxim of manner (“avoid obscurity of expression”) may be violated in CMC: “[t]yping, not a natural behaviour, imposes a strong pressure on the sender to be selective in what is said […]. And selectivity in expression must lead to all kinds of inclarity” (Crystal 2001: 57–58). Indeed, it is interesting to apply the maxims to CMC in the way Crystal has done. According to Stein (2003: 160), this part is “one of the strongest and […] most innovative facets of the book”. There have been a number of other research articles, among which “Writing in cyberspace: A study of the uses, style and content of email” by Helen Petrie (1999) must particularly be mentioned. This study is one of the most extensive email studies quantitatively, comprising analysis of 38,000 emails. Further important works on the linguistics of email are Natalie Maynor’s article “The language of electronic mail: Written speech?” (1994), Judith Yaross Lee’s article “Charting the codes of cyberspace: A rhetoric of electronic mail” (2003), and Carmen Frehner’s volume Email – SMS – MMS. The Linguistic Creativity of Asynchronous Discourse in the New Media Age (2008). Frehner, like Crystal (2001), refers to Grice’s conversation maxims in her chapter about “netiquette” (2008: 41–43). German research on email was launched by two major works, namely Janich’s (1994) “Electronic Mail – eine betriebsinterne Kommunikationsform” (‘Electronic mail – a company internal communication form’) and Günther and Wyss’s (1996) “E-Mail-Briefe – eine neue Textsorte zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit” (‘Email letters – a new text type between orality and literacy’). Janich analysed emails from within the business sector and focused on the characteristic features of email correspondence in offices, while Günther and Wyss also paid attention to private email communication. As the title of the latter work suggests, the authors assume that email corresponds to one single text type. This might have been true at the time the article was drafted; however, email has long since become multifunc-

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tional with regard to its communication purposes. This is clearly demonstrated in another study by Schmitz (2002), who shows that the email corpus of just one person, consisting of 20,500 emails gathered over six years, covers almost every text type, ranging from felicitations to orders, condolences, applications, making appointments, and many others. Another important study is Pansegrau’s “Dialogizität und Degrammatikalisierung in E-mails” (‘Dialogism and degrammaticalisation in emails’), which was published in 1997. As one of the first articles, it discusses CMC in the light of Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1994) model, which deals with the difference between orality and literacy and considers the relationship between the characteristics of written and spoken language as a continuum rather than a dichotomy (see section 4). Koch and Oesterreicher’s terminology has become pivotal in German research on CMC (Dürscheid 2004); however, it is largely unknown within the Anglophone research community, having been closely discussed in this context only by Frehner (2008: 170–179), Jucker (2006: 118–120), and Landert and Jucker (2011: 1425–1428). While most works on email have pointed out the new features that have evolved from computer-mediated communication, Elspaß (2002) has provoked with a publication bearing the title “Alter Wein und neue Schläuche?” (‘Old wine and new skins?’), in which he argues that what has been considered new in CMC has, in fact, always existed in private written correspondence (Elspaß 2002: 7). This article contradicts all those studies which claim that some form of language change has accompanied the use of the new media (e.g., Weingarten 1997), stating that the only thing that has changed is the users’ attitude towards the norms of language usage, not the language use itself. Elspaß (2002) explains that at the end of the 19th century, German emigrants to the U.S. used a similar speech-like style in letters they sent to the “old world”, with the difference that these people, farmers and craftsmen alike, were often not able to do any better because they were ignorant of the norms of writing, whereas most of the writers nowadays are aware of the rules and regulations, but do not follow them. Elspaß further notes that while oral features in written language have been broadly treated in linguistic research of recent years, they were largely ignored in scholarly work 150 years ago. This may also be a reason for the general assumption that language use has profoundly changed. There have been a number of other German research studies of email worth mentioning, among them Ziegler and Dürscheid’s volume Kommunikationsform E-Mail (‘The Communication Form Email’) (2002), which consists of 13 articles concerning different aspects of email communication; Beutner’s (2002) dissertation, E-Mail Kommunikation; essays by Christa Dürscheid on the topic (Dürscheid 2005, 2008); and finally Höflich and Gebhardt’s edited volume Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel: Brief, E-mail, SMS (‘Communication Culture in Change: Letters, Email, SMS’) (2003). The research on email seems to have reached a certain saturation point now – it appears that further studies will focus rather on new CMC services such as Twitter and social network sites.

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Features of email communication

Identifying language use that is typical for email communication proves to be difficult “simply because the vast diversity of settings and purposes of [its] use outweigh any common linguistic features” (Androutsopoulos 2006: 420). Nonetheless, the following sections attempt to outline the nature of email and its characteristics. Section 3.1 discusses the terms “emailism” and “Netspeak”. With structural features at its core, section 3.2 focuses on the graphical, lexical, and grammatical levels of emails, while the pragmatic features in terms of email dialogues and the relation between interactants is addressed in section 3.3. 3.1.

“Emailism” and “Netspeak”

Two new terms have been coined in the context of email and computer-mediated communication respectively, these being “emailism” and “Netspeak”. The term “emailism” was coined by Petrie (1999: 26), who lists nine types of emailisms, namely trailing dots, capitalisation, quoting back the previous email, excessive use of exclamation marks or question marks, email abbreviations, lack of conventional punctuation, non-standard spelling, use of non-alphanumeric characters, and the use of smileys. Some of these features are graphostylistic strategies (e.g., excessive use of exclamation and question marks), others are a matter of the dialogical nature of emails (e.g., quoting back the previous email, see section 3.3). The term “emailism” has not actually caught on, but it is still worth mentioning because it shows the urge of researchers to conceptualise the nature of email in a general term in order to illuminate the concept more clearly. Similarly, Crystal (2001) has come up with the term “Netspeak”, by which he refers to CMC in general terms, including email. Typical Netspeak features in the context of email are various types of abbreviation, the tendency to use all lower case, new spelling conventions including all sorts of non-standard spellings, the rather minimalistic use of punctuation, which might even be completely absent in email exchanges, or else unusual combinations of punctuation marks (Crystal 2001: 134–138). Meanwhile, the term “Netspeak” has become a popular term in discourse about CMC; it has already made its way into the Urban Dictionary and has been referred to in various articles and essays. The terms “emailism” and “Netspeak” are both attempts to define email and, more precisely, its linguistic features. They suggest that the language of email is a new, previously unknown language with unique features, thus deserving its own term. It is questionable, however, whether email is indeed as new a phenomenon as is commonly claimed. If we consider what Petrie and Crystal subsume under their terms, we realise that most of these characteristics are not actually new – a fact which, as mentioned above, was clearly shown by Elspaß’s (2002) corpus of private letters dating back to the late 19th century. Undisputedly, the possibility for an addressee to read a message received immediately after its composition can be re-

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garded as a historical quantum leap in communication, and in this respect, the email setting is a new phenomenon: It enables near-real-time written communication. Yet apart from the technical aspect, it is doubtful whether one can consider email as something completely new, i.e., as a form of communication that is wholly different from any other communication form. 3.2.

Structural features

Various features are claimed to be typical of email; these include forms of lexical abbreviation (e.g., cu ‘see you’) and syntactic reduction (e.g., Exams over?), nonstandard punctuation, and emulated prosody. As mentioned in Crystal (2001: 136), for instance, there is a significant tendency to use lower-case spelling where capital letters would be the rule. Similarly, Thurlow (2001: 288) finds that people make “minimal to no use of capitalisation” in CMC, and so even though the whole message is not necessarily in lower-case letters, there is a considerable tendency to employ lower case. The reason why people neglect capital letters is that they can reduce typing effort and do not have to think about the correct upper-case and lower-case spelling. It is easier and more efficient to go with the lower-case default mentality. Another economic feature is lexical reduction. Crystal (2001: 134) explains that “[a]cronyms are so common that they regularly receive critical comments” and points out that they “are no longer restricted to words or short phrases, but can be sentence-length: AYSOS [‘Are you stupid or something?’], CID [‘Consider it done’], GTG [‘Got to go’], WDYS [‘What did you say?’]”. Yet these multiword sentences are not as widespread as other lexical reductions such as homophones, consonant spellings, the omission of apostrophes, and ad hoc abbreviations. Letter and number homophones are comparably frequent. Rather frequent is the letter homophone u for the pronoun ‘you’. Other homophones are c for ‘see’, r for ‘are’, 2 for ‘to/too/two’, and 4 for ‘four/for’. Another common way to shorten words is consonant spelling (Frehner 2008): Words are spelled without their vowels, so that from becomes frm, can becomes cn, and would becomes wld. Apostrophes have also largely become the victim of efficiency in email correspondence and may be omitted. (For further discussion of the micro-linguistic structural features of CMC, see the chapter by Bieswanger in this volume.) Frehner (2008: 63–69) shows that shortenings not only take place on the lexical level, but also on the syntactic level. Subject deletions are among the most frequent syntactic omissions; they may co-occur with auxiliary verb deletions or simply on their own. In German, it is usually the first person singular pronoun which is omitted (e.g., Bin spät dran, ‘am late’). Copula deletion and omitted articles and conjunctions (e.g., Exams over?) are further means of economy, and the same applies to omitted punctuation marks. Despite this recognisable tendency to economise the language of emails, one feature does not serve economy at all, this being emulated prosody: To add extra emphasis or to emulate prosody, letters of a word

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can be repeated or capitalised, and whole words can be reduplicated or else be put between asterisks or underlined spaces. The creative use of punctuation may also add emphasis or indicate loudness, silence, rising intonation, or even emotion. Another typical email feature is the so-called thread. In email, a thread is a technical feature, being automatically generated by the mailing programme once the user replies to a received message by pressing the reply button.4 Nevertheless, such a thread still has a certain influence on the pragmatic level of emailing (see section 3.3). It consists of all the sent and received messages on a topic that was named and inserted into the subject line by the sender of the initial message. It is thus the subject line which creates a tie among these messages and establishes some text-external coherence. Having older messages included in one’s answer allows the respondent to refer to some previously mentioned issue by, for instance, some anaphoric pronoun only (e.g., Oooh D, that’s not on our agenda for a while you know, worth trying though […]). In this way, a quasi-dialogue is performed (cf. Severinson Eklundh 2010), and for this reason, it is also justified to consider email as a target of discourse analysis. Apart from this, there are qualitatively no new features that were not familiar to us before the advent of email. What seems to have changed is their quantity. While each of the linguistic characteristics described above had been present before email became popular, there are now more of these elements at once. Smiling faces, for instance, have been around since 1963 when Harvey Ball, a graphic artist, invented the yellow smiley face upon being given the task by the State Mutual Life Assurance Company “to design a logo that would uplift its employees after a company merger had hurt company morale […]. Thinking about what would inspire employees to smile, Harvey decided the most simple and direct symbol would be a smile itself and that is what he drew” (Cates 2003: n.p.). Abbreviations have also been around for many decades, and emulated prosody is very similar to what can be found in comics, where the same or similar features exist. As for the lack of conventional punctuation marks, even this feature is not new: Telegrams, for instance, used to have an unusual typeface, often lacking any punctuation marks. What computer language has certainly encouraged is the great variety of abbreviations – just as it has led to a huge variety of smileys – but in the end, the way in which words are abbreviated is not new from a qualitive perspective; quite on the contrary, it is a quantitative change. 3.3.

Pragmatic features

Regarding the history of CMC research, Androutsopoulos (2006: 421) states that “a shift of focus from medium-related to user-related patterns of language use” has taken place. Similarly, the medium-centred email perspective has given way to a user-centred one focusing on the pragmatic level of email communication. One of the major pragmatic effects caused by email is evident in email dialogues. Thanks

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to the Internet, it is possible to exchange messages in the written mode in an almost synchronous way if two people are at the computer at the same time. This has led to some new behaviour in written communication, mainly concerning greeting and farewell formulas (Waldvogel 2007), as well as the way in which people quote back a previous message: The faster a reply follows a message, the more similarities it bears to a turn in an oral dialogue. If a person responds to an email quickly, they will often just add their new information to what has been communicated before without explicitly naming the reference object or addressing the recipient anew. Whereas it is a typical characteristic of a non-electronic letter to contain a greeting and some form of farewell formula, these features are not always present in emails.5 Emails may or may not have a greeting and may begin in an elliptical way, not necessarily mentioning the reference object, but simply adding to what has been communicated before. As the reference object is usually present in the subject line, the receiver knows what the message is about so that no information concerning the subject matter is needed. In paper-based letters, subject lines are only common in formal letters, i.e., business letters, and in memoranda (cf. Cho 2010; Orlikowski and Yates 1993), while there is usually no subject line in informal letters. This is different in emails: A blank line invites the sender to mention a subject regardless of the degree of formality. In fact, should the senders not fill in this line, they will usually be asked by the email system if a subject should be added. The reason why there is not always a greeting can be explained when we consider the to-and-fro of email dialogues that are similar to oral dialogues. The more quickly the emails are exchanged, the more they can be compared to oral dialogues and the less probable it is that there will be greeting formulas. They are not needed, just as they are not necessary in turns of an oral dialogue. The tendency is that the greater the time span between two messages, the more information is required; the shorter the time span, the more information can be assumed to be available from the context of the interaction. The absence of greeting formulas is not something that is new to email; memoranda do not usually include greeting formulas either. They were also often omitted in telegram messages: In order to save costs, people tried to cut out words when composing telegrams, and greeting formulas happened to be omitted – as well as farewell formulas, at times. Emoticons are another of the features associated with email. Focusing merely on the term, which is a blend of “emotion” and “icon”, one may assume that emoticons add emotion to what has been written. Yet they also indicate the illocutionary force of the utterance with which they are associated, as Dresner and Herring (2010) point out. Accordingly, an emoticon may be used to downgrade a complaint to a simple assertion or to indicate humour or irony. There exists a great variety of emoticons, ranging from the original happy smiley :-) and sad smiley :-( to more complex ones such as the smiley with its tongue sticking out :-P or the chef smiley C=:-). Popular as they might be, emoticons do not appear as often in emails as is

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commonly believed. Frehner’s empirical study (2008) reveals that in a corpus consisting of 342 emails, there were only 3.16 occurrences of smileys per 1,000 words, whereas in a corpus of 983 single (fewer than 160 signs) and linked (more than 160 signs) text messages (SMS), emoticons appear 4.88 and 3.98 times per 1,000 words, respectively. No studies so far have explained why emoticons are not so frequent in emails, especially since they are undoubtedly native to CMC. Androutsopoulos (2006: 425) reports on “emoticons being more often used by females in Witmer and Katzman (1997), and by teenage males in Huffaker and Calvert (2005)”. Beutner (2002: 78), in contrast, assumes that it is mainly newbies (i.e., inexperienced users) who make use of emoticons. This would imply that newbies (i.e., inexperienced users) first overuse emoticons and then, the more accustomed they get to the communication mode, the less they use them to modify their statements. At this point, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at the “etiquette” of email, because it reveals characteristic pragmatic features compared to the etiquette of other CMC modes, on the one hand, and to that of offline (written) communication, on the other hand. We do not imagine that people are actually aware of these guidelines, but their regulations nevertheless allow for conclusions about everyday email use. If email etiquette tells us, for instance, to avoid certain elements (e.g., the use of words spelled in all capitals), we can deduce that these have already become a feature of emails. Another common piece of advice is to not send an email when feeling emotional. As emails are easily composed and dispatched, email writers are likely to send messages written in the heat of the moment – messages that would never have been written or sent if they had to be taken to the post office.6 The first set of guidelines, titled “Towards an ethics and etiquette for electronic mail”, dates from 1985 and is still available. The authors, Norman Shapiro and Robert Anderson, based their recommendations on personal observations of inappropriate and counterproductive uses of email. Since then, numerous guidelines have been composed dealing with email use. They can be found on the Internet, codified in FAQ documents or Netiquette guidelines, but also in print newspaper articles and in print books on Netiquette. Indirectly, these guidelines postulate the cooperative principle and Grice’s (1975) four conversational maxims: the maxims of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner. Some guidelines recommend, for instance, not sending emails with large attachments – a rule that concerns the maxim of quantity (“Do not make your information more informative than is required”). However, there is a difference between the theoretical status of Grice’s conversational maxims and the status of the Netiquette guidelines: The maxims describe presumptions about utterances, i.e., they express the ideal ways in which cooperative interactants should communicate. The guidelines, in contrast, have a strong prescriptive character. The following instruction concerning the feature of quoting in emails is based on the maxims of relevance and quantity (e.g., say things related to the current topic of the conversation; do not say more than is needed): “Only quote the needed parts (deleting the remainder) and reply directly after the item you wish to respond

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to” (Johns 1996: n.p.). The maxim of manner is reflected in the following advice: “Please remember that you are sending a text-based communication to possible strangers. They may not know your sarcasm or witty sense of humor like your family and close friends do” (Johns 1996: n.p.). Other recommendations concern non-verbal behaviour in CMC. For example, people are advised not to forward an email without the agreement of the sender, send a carbon copy to several recipients in which everybody’s address is indicated, or send a large attachment file without announcing it beforehand.7 These rules clearly demonstrate that there are sociocultural factors associated with interaction in CMC that have to be taken into consideration.

4.

Theoretical approaches

This section focuses on two approaches that have already been mentioned, these being Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1994) orality-literacy model,8 which was developed in the 1980s before the rise of email communication, and Herring’s (2001, 2007) discourse approach to CMC. Koch and Oesterreicher distinguish between medium and conception, explaining that while a piece of writing can be written from a medial perspective, the same piece of writing can be oral from a conceptual perspective and vice versa. While there is a dichotomy within the medial dimension (language is either phonic or graphic), there is a continuum within the conceptual dimension (see also Biber 1988). The two poles of the continuum are called “language of immediacy” (which is conceptually oral) and “language of distance” (which is conceptually written). The language of immediacy is typically associated with private settings (see Landert and Jucker 2011) in which there is a high degree of familiarity as well as a lack of emotional distance between the interactants; it is further set in a dialogic situation and characterised by unplanned discourse, while the opposite is true of the language of distance. Note that labelling these poles as “oral” and “written” may be misleading even if they are qualified by the attribute “conceptually”. One must always keep in mind that this dimension is logically independent of the medial dimension, although there might be a prototypical correspondence between the two. Figure 1 illustrates the model. In the prototypical case, there is a correspondence between the choice of linguistic features and the medial dimension. This means that written language is more typically used in situations of distance and when a formal style is required. A legal text, for instance, is classified as written both from a conceptual and a medial perspective (position A), while private talk within one’s family or among friends is spoken and tends to use an informal style (position B). At the same time, some correspondences do not follow this regularity and must be located somewhere between the conceptual and the medial dimension. Accordingly, a church sermon is spoken, but tends to be stylistically formal, whereas a greeting postcard is written,

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Figure 1. Koch and Oesterreicher’s model; A= legal text, B = private talk, C= private email

but is of a more colloquial style. For this reason, the model is highly interesting for CMC research: In CMC, we are often faced with texts that do not meet our expectations concerning the relationship between medium and conception. Private emails, for instance, are written from the medial point of view, but may be situated next to the immediacy pole from the conceptual point of view (position C). It is impossible to generalise about where email communication is located along the conceptual continuum due to the fact that a wide range of text types is realised in emails, each of them being associated with its own characteristic linguistic features. A business email, for instance, is usually less conceptually oral than a private email to a friend. This means that the model is suitable for the classification of email (or other) text types, but not for the classification of communication modes as a whole. However, the approach provides a precise terminology for CMC research, enabling researchers to describe a message’s closeness to spoken or written language. When Baron (2000: 258) states that “[t]he line between spoken and written language continues to fade in America”, she is referring to the conceptual dimension only. Within the medial dimension, the line cannot fade – despite the fact that on a screen, for instance, phonic and graphic signs may be combined. Email is not speech; email is exclusively text-based. There may be oral features, but these features are situated on the conceptual level and not on the medial one. All in all, Koch and Oesterreicher’s model is a suitable approach to situate written interactions such as business and private email messages along the continuum of communicative immediacy and communicative distance. However, it

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does not offer a tool to analyse the context in which the interactions are embedded. To analyse dialogical situations, it is useful to consider the computer-mediated discourse analysis approach (CMDA) presented by Herring (2001). Research studies that are situated within this frame focus on communication purposes, situational factors (such as one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many communication), and the role of demographics (e.g., social class, race, and ethnicity). Indeed, it does make a difference whether an email is sent in a one-to-many-communication system (e.g., within a newsgroup) or in a one-to-one-communication system, within a business (formal) or private (informal) context. All these factors must be taken into consideration. Herring (2007) presented a classification scheme that brings together the relevant aspects of the technical and the social contexts that influence discourse usage in CMC (see section 2). In this article, she clearly points out that two main dimensions, medium and situation, jointly influence language use. Among the medium dimensions, one factor that conditions CMC is one-way or two-way message transmission, and another is synchronicity of participation (Herring 2007). Concerning the latter, it is useful to check the degree of (a-)synchronicity of a communication mode because this may influence language use. In fact, there is a continuum between asynchronous computer-mediated discourse (CMD), which occupies a position closer to writing (i.e., conceptually written in Koch and Oesterreicher’s terms), and synchronous CMD, which occupies a position closer to speaking (i.e., conceptually oral). However, this factor does not only depend on the medium, it also depends on the situation, i.e., the interactants’ use of the medium (Androutsopoulos 2007). The more synchronous the communication is (i.e., the shorter the delay between messages), the more likely it is to be conceptually oral.

5.

Outlook: Email in competition with newer CMC services

The future of email research is closely linked to the future of email communication itself. Although the first email message was sent as early as 1971 (Bryant 2011), email did not become a widely used means of communication by the public until towards the end of the 20th century, at which time it quickly advanced to become the most frequently used Internet application. Until recently, figures for email usage have risen consistently ever since email became available to the general public in the early 1990s. Yet it seems that the quick rise in email usage might be followed by an equally quick fall: Newer and more synchronous services such as the various forms of Instant Messaging,9 as well as the numerous social network sites among which Facebook and Twitter are the most popular, have started to compete with email. According to a study in the U.S. by compete.com, Facebook is currently the most visited social network site, with 700,000,000 estimated unique monthly visitors in November 2011.10 Compared to email, social network sites are more personal because one can read the profiles of the addressees, check their status

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updates (see Lee 2011), flip through their photo albums, and learn about their personal lives. In other words, they provide many features other than just email addresses and messages through which users can represent themselves. Social network sites have another advantage in comparison to email: As is generally known, one of the major problems with email is the amount of spam (or unsolicited messages) that is sent to email accounts. According to Pingdom, a service provider that checks the availability of online services for major companies, spam accounted for 89.1 % of all email traffic in 2010.11 Similar problems do not (yet) exist with Instant Messaging services or with social network sites, which makes these services even more popular. Accordingly, a telephone survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project as early as 2005 stated that “email may be at the beginning of a slow decline as online teens begin to express a preference for instant messaging” (Lenhart, Hitlin, and Madden 2005: 5). In a newer Pew Internet Project study, a 9th grade boy is quoted as saying: “[You go to MySpace12] when all of your friends have gone to MySpace and they aren’t emailing anymore” (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, and Macgill 2008: 61). The figures presented in the report show a clear tendency: “Email remains the least popular choice for daily communication: [J]ust 16 % of teens send emails to their friends on a daily basis” (Lenhart et al. 2008: 53). It may be assumed that at the time of this writing, the shift is even more pronounced: Email is no longer the privileged mode of online communication among young people. However, another point must be taken into consideration that partly speaks in favour of the future of emailing: While email has been linked to stationary computers for a long time, technology trends are towards increasing mobility. Especially with the diffusion of Apple’s iPhone and its high-speed data connection, emails can be received almost as easily as text messages, which may lead to a new boost in email figures. Be that as it may, information technology experts regard email as an “old-fashioned” way of communication, and some people predict that email use will die off. Lorenz (2007), for instance, published an article on “The death of e-mail” in which he summarised the decline of email as follows: “Those of us older than 25 can’t imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it’s hard to imagine a life of only e-mail […]. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant” (n.p.). These reports seem to predict doom for email communication. Yet they mainly concern private email communication. It is possible that the situation is different in the business sector, where traditional email communication serves important functions and may persist. There are also email-based systems such as web forums and discussion lists that are active at present and might continue to be used. It can be concluded that email research will have a future as long as email as a communication mode finds its niches.

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Notes 1. For further details about this kind of “multi-party interaction” see Skovholt and Svennevig (2006). 2. Due to limitations of space, this chapter focuses on these two languages only. 3. In contrast to one-way systems, there exist only a few two-way systems in the written mode (Google Wave, for instance, offered real time communication, but Google discontinued its development in 2010, only one year after it was released). Yet it is important to mention this distinction, as – in contrast to Anglophone studies – there is a general agreement among the German research community that online chat is not synchronous. Some consider it “quasi-synchronous” (e.g., Dürscheid 2004: 154), while others (e.g., Beißwenger 2007: 37) distinguish between simultaneity (i.e., the participants are able to see the message as it is produced) and synchronicity (i.e., sender and addressee are logged in at the same time). 4. This is not the case for online chat, however. On cross-turn coherence in chat, see the chapters in this volume by Herring and Markman. 5. For an empirical study on this issue (although only public emails are analysed), see Herring (1996b). 6. It would be interesting to investigate whether the sociocultural factors that underlie these rules are universal or whether they vary across cultures. 7. As the speed of data transfer has increasingly become faster in recent years and people often have high speed Internet connections, this rule may no longer be relevant. Even large data files can be downloaded quickly and easily these days. 8. This is our translation from the German “Mündlichkeits-/Schriftlichkeitsmodell”. 9. In contrast to email, Instant Messaging is a more synchronous communication mode: The interlocutors have to be online at the same time to receive each other’s messages. 10. http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites [accessed 4/30/2012] 11. http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/ [accessed 11/14/2011] 12. Until Facebook took over in popularity several years ago, MySpace had been the most popular social network site.

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2006 Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 419–438. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2007 Neue Medien – neue Schriftlichkeit? Mitteilungen des Germanistenverbandes 54(1): 72–97. Baron, Naomi S. 1984 Computer mediated communication as a force in language change. Visible Language 18(2): 118–141. Baron, Naomi S. 1998 Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of email. Language and Communication 18: 133–170.

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Baron, Naomi S. 2000 Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading. New York/London: Routledge. Baron, Naomi S. 2003 Why email looks like speech. Proofreading, pedagogy, and public face. In: Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis (eds.), New Media Language, 85–94. New York/London: Routledge. Baron, Naomi S. 2008 Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Beißwenger, Michael 2007 Sprachhandlungskoordination in der Chat-Kommunikation. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Beutner, Yvonne 2002 E-Mail Kommunikation. Eine Analyse. Stuttgart: ibidem Verlag. Biber, Douglas 1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bryant, Martin 2011 The first email message was sent 40 years ago this month. The Next Web, October 8. http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/10/08/the-first-email-was-sent40-years-ago-this-month Cates, Ken The Harvey Ball smiley face: A short history on the 40th anniversary – 2003. The Smiley Store. http://www.smileystore.com/smiley-face-history Cherny, Lynn 1999 Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Cho, Thomas 2010 Linguistic features of electronic mail in the workplace: A comparison with memoranda. Language@Internet 7, article 4. http://www.languageatinternet. org/articles/2010/2728 Crystal, David 2001 Language and the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David 2002 The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language, 2nd Edition. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Crystal, David 2004 The Language Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Dresner, Eli and Susan C. Herring 2010 Functions of the non-verbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocutionary force. Communication Theory 20: 249–268. Dürscheid, Christa and Arne Ziegler (eds.) 2002 Kommunikationsform E-Mail. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Dürscheid, Christa 2004 Netzsprache – ein neuer Mythos. In: Michael Beißwenger, Ludger Hoffmann, and Angelika Storrer (eds.), Internetbasierte Kommunikation. Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 68, 141–157. Duisburg: Gilles & Francke.

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Dürscheid, Christa 2005 E-Mail – verändert sie das Schreiben? In: Torsten Siever, Peter Schlobinski, and Jens Runkehl (eds.), Websprache.net. Sprache und Kommunikation im Internet, 85–97. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dürscheid, Christa 2009 E-Mail: eine neue Kommunikationsform? In: Sandro Moraldo (ed.), Internet.kom. Neue Sprach- und Kommunikationsformen im World Wide Web, 39–71. Rome: Aracne Edititrice. Elspaß, Stephan 2002 Alter Wein und neue Schläuche? Briefe der Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert und Texte der neuen Medien – ein Vergleich. In: Ulrich Schmitz and Eva Lia Wyss (eds.), Briefkultur im 20. Jahrhundert. Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 64, 7–31. Duisburg: Gilles & Francke. Frehner, Carmen 2008 Email – SMS – MMS. The Linguistic Creativity of Asynchronous Discourse in the New Media Age. Bern: Peter Lang. Grice, H. Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, 41–48. New York: Academic Press. Günther, Ulla and Eva Lia Wyss 1996 E-mail-Briefe – eine neue Textsorte zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. In: Ernest W. B. Hess-Lüttich, Werner Holly, and Ulrich Püschel (eds.), Textstrukturen im Medienwandel, 61–86. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Herring, Susan C. (ed.) 1996a Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Herring, Susan C. 1996b Two variants of an electronic message schema. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), 81–108. Herring, Susan C. 2001 Computer-mediated discourse. In: Deborah Tannen, Deborah Schiffrin, and Heidi Hamilton (eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 612–634. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Herring, Susan C. 2007 A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet 4, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761 Herring, Susan C. 2008 Foreword. In: Sigrid Kelsey and Kirk St. Amant (eds.), Handbook of Research on Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 1, xxxv–xxxvi. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. Höflich, Joachim and Julian Gebhard (eds.) 2003 Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel: Brief, Email, SMS. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Huffaker, David A. and Sandra L. Calvert 2005 Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication 10(2), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html

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Janich, Nina 1994 Electronic Mail – eine betriebsinterne Kommunikationsform. Muttersprache 3: 248–259. Johns, Kass 1996 Basic electronic mail netiquette (Network etiquette). http://www.kassj.com/ netiquette/netiquette.html Jucker, Andreas 2006 Live text commentaries: Read about it while it happens. In: Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, Jens Runkehl, Peter Schlobinski, and Torsten Siever (eds.), Neuere Entwicklungen in der linguistischen Internetforschung, 113–131. Hildesheim/ Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher 1994 Schriftlichkeit und Sprache. In: Hartmut Günther and Otto Ludwig (eds.), Schrift und Schriftlichkeit/Writing and its Use. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch internationaler Forschung/An Interdisciplinary Handbook of International Research, 587–604. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Landert, Daniela and Andreas H. Jucker 2011 Private and public in mass media communication. From letters to the editor to online commentaries. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1422–1434. Lee, Judith Yaross 2003 Charting the codes of cyberspace: A rhetoric of electronic mail. In: Lance Strate, Ron L. Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson (eds.), Communication and Cyberspace, 2nd Edition, 307–328. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Lee, Carmen K. M. 2011 Micro-blogging and status updates on Facebook: Texts and practices. In: Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek (eds.), Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, 110–128. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Lenhart, Amanda, Paul Hitlin, and Mary Madden 2005 Teens and technology. Pew Internet & American Life Project. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2005/Teens-and-Technology.asp x?r=1 Lenhart, Amanda, Sousan Arafeh, Aaron Smith, and Alexandra Macgill 2008 Writing, technology and teens. Pew Internet & American Life Project. http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Writing-Technology-and-Teens.aspx Lorenz, Chad 2007 The death of e-mail. Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to? Slate Magazine, November 14. http://www.slate.com/id/2177969 Maynor, Natalie 1994 The language of electronic mail: Written speech? In: Greta D. Little and Michael Montgomery (eds.), Centennial Usage Studies, 48–54. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama. Orlikowski, Wanda and Joanne Yates 1993 From memo to dialogue: Enacting genres of communication in electronic media. Technical Report TR 139–3525, MIT Sloan School. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/2451/SWP-3525-27731982.pdf

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Pansegrau, Petra 1997 Dialogizität und Degrammatikalisierung in E-mails. In: Rüdiger Weingarten (ed.), Sprachwandel durch Computer, 86–104. Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Petrie, Helen 1999 Writing in cyberspace: A study of the uses, style and content of email. Unpublished paper. University of Hertfordshire/Hatfield. Runkehl, Jens, Peter Schlobinski, and Torsten Siever 1998 Sprache und Kommunikation im Internet. Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Schmitz, Ulrich 2002 E-Mails kommen in die Jahre. Telefonbriefe auf dem Weg zu sprachlicher Normalität. In: Christa Dürscheid and Arne Ziegler (eds.), Kommunikationsform E-Mail, 33–56. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Severinson Eklundh, Kerstin 2010 To quote or not to quote: Setting the context for computer-mediated dialogues. Language@Internet 7, article 5. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2665 Shapiro, Norman Z. and Robert H. Anderson 1985 Towards an ethics and etiquette for electronic mail. http://www.rand.org/pubs/ reports/R3283.html Skovholt, Karianne and Jan Svennevig 2006 Email copies in workplace interaction. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1), article 3. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue1/skovholt.html Stein, Dieter 2003 Book review of David Crystal: Language and the Internet. Linguistics 41(1): 158–163. Thurlow, Crispin 2001 Language and the Internet. In: Rajend Mesthrie and Ronald E. Asher (eds.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics, 287–289. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science Ltd. Urban Dictionary n.d. http://www.urbandictionary.com [Retrieved 4/30/2012] Waldvogel, Joan 2007 Greetings and closings in workplace email. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(2), article 6. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue2/waldvogel.html Weingarten, Rüdiger (ed.) 1997 Sprachwandel durch Computer. Opladen/Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Witmer, Diane F. and Sandra Lee Katzman 1997 On-line smiles: Does gender make a difference in the use of graphic accents? Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue4/witmer1.html

3.

Mailing list communication Helmut Gruber

1.

Preliminary remarks

Linguistic pragmatic investigations of email communication have a long research tradition in the investigation of computer-mediated discourse (CMD, Herring 2001), because email was the first available means for message exchange between computer users. Unlike traditional mail, which is predominantly used in person-toperson communication, emails could be sent easily to more than one recipient from the very beginning. With the advent of mailing list programs and the establishment of Usenet newsgroups, this many-to-many (n:n) mode of communication1 soon gained popularity among computer users. Furthermore, the n:n communicative mode and the automatic storage possibilities of email programs made – and still make – email communication easily accessible data for linguists interested in new communicative practices. This chapter reviews research on email communication that took its data from electronic mailing lists (also known as “discussion lists”) in order to investigate communicative practices in the “new media” in general, as well as studies that explicitly investigate communicative features of mailing list communication. Investigations of person-to-person email communications or their cognitive and socio-organizational effects are not the focus of this chapter (see the chapter by Dürscheid in this volume and the overview in Ducheneaut and Watts 2005), nor are the (numerous) investigations of discussion lists in educational settings as a tool for achieving certain educational outcomes rather than on the communicative practices used to achieve those outcomes (for an overview of this strand of research, see Lamy and Hampel 2007). The chapter first characterizes mailing list communication with regard to several technical and communicative parameters, then provides a working definition of “pragmatics”, and then proceeds to review several research areas related to the pragmatics of mailing list communication.

2.

Defining mailing list communication

In this section, following a short historical overview of email discussion groups, mailing list communication is contrasted with other forms of n:n asynchronous CMD, such as Usenet communication. On the basis of its most relevant communicative features, listserv communication is then characterised as a specific kind of email communication.

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The first mailing list was established in the mid-1970s on the precursor of the Internet, the ARPANET. The ARPANET was set up as a computer network for advanced collaborative space research by the United States military (Hauben 1998–1999, 2000) in 1969. It connected governmental and non-governmental sites of research and grew rapidly. Soon a new format for communicative exchanges among users of this network was developed that was called “electronic mail” or “e-mail” (Hauben 1998–1999). In 1975, the first mailing list on the ARPANET was established, the “MsgGroup”. Net Manager Steve Walker’s message from June 7, 1975 to this group in which he proposed a discussion that would be based solely on the MsgGroup distribution list facility rather than on regular committee meetings is viewed as the starting point for email discussion lists (Hauben 1998–1999). In 1986, L-soft International, Inc. launched the first version of LISTSERV, its software for managing email distribution lists. It has since become the most widely used software for maintaining various kinds of automatized email distribution. Because of this widespread use, the term “listserv” is sometimes used as a cover term for all kinds of software-supported, public mailing lists, although other products for managing mailing lists like Majordomo, Procmail, and LISTPROC are also available. A listserv automatically distributes emails that are sent by one subscriber to all other subscribers of a list. The software also archives postings in an online searchable database. In order to become a member of a mailing list, prospective subscribers must send an email containing a subscription command to the server running the listserv software. Their email address is then either automatically included in the distribution list (in the case of public lists) or is manually added to the list by the list owner (in the case of private lists). Mailing lists are set up for communication among geographically dispersed persons who are interested in specialized topics. For this reason, mailing lists have been widely used in various academic disciplines, in professional contexts, and in distance education. Communication on mailing lists may be either moderated or unmoderated. In the case of moderated lists, a moderator – often the list owner – monitors all incoming emails (often supported by specific software which is set up to detect certain keywords in the mails) and selects those which do not conform to certain standards of the list (in terms of theme, tone, etc.) and suppresses their further distribution. All other incoming mails are then distributed to the subscribers of the list. In the case of unmoderated lists, all incoming mails are automatically distributed to all subscribers. Messages are distributed in ASCII2 text format by older versions of the program; newer versions also allow the distribution of messages in HTML3 format. Mailing lists differ from newsgroups in several respects. Newsgroups were originally set up for n:n email message distribution on Usenet, which was created in 1979 by graduate students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina and went online in 1980. Originally, it provided a network for users who had

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access to Unix systems and who could not connect to the ARPANET for technical reasons (Hauben 2000). Unlike mailing list software, which runs on a single server, newsgroups are maintained on clusters of servers which exchange incoming messages and which are hosted by Internet service providers (ISPs). Until 1995, users who wanted to become newsgroup members needed an ISP to access Usenet groups or other newsgroups,4 along with newsreader software. In 1995, Dejanews (which in 2001 was bought by Google) bought Usenet; since then Usenet groups are available on the web and can be accessed via standard web browsers (and resemble web forums; see section 8 below). In most newsreaders, newsgroup messages appear organized by “threads”, which are tree-like structures connecting an initiating message and all follow-up messages (answers). Threads thus provide a visual representation of the thematic and interactional relations between messages. In contrast, mailing list messages appear in the inboxes of subscribers’ email programs, and although their topical coherence is organized by subject headers, the relation between messages on a certain topic is not visually represented. Furthermore, in most cases newsgroups do not have administrators (and are therefore unmoderated). Newsgroups exist on a vast variety of themes/interests, and users often participate for recreational purposes; hence the social contexts of use differ between mailing lists and newsgroups, although there are also newsgroups on academic/scientific topics. Since newsgroups do not have any threshold of access (see below), they tend not to be considered serious discussion forums by most professionals in the disciplines. Mailing list communication is an asynchronous “many-to-many” mode of communication which is email based. Email communication, however, cannot be viewed as a single “genre” (or communicative mode); rather, it is a form of communication, and mailing list communication is one of its sub-forms (or a media class, in the terms of December 1996). Forms of communication (as opposed to communicative modes, channels, or genres) are defined by characteristic combinations of communicative possibilities in three general dimensions: (a) the specific sign types (e.g., spoken vs. written) they can process; (b) the direction of communication they permit; (c) the possibilities of transmission or storage of data they allow (for details of the concept of communicative forms, see Holly 1997; for a detailed characterization of various forms of communication in the new media, see Gruber 2008). The characteristic combinations of the relevant variables for mailing list communication are shown in Table 1:

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Table 1.

Relevant communicative features of mailing list communication

Communicative dimensions:

Characteristic features of mailing list communication:

conceptual mode of communication (cf. Koch and Oesterreicher 1994)5

conceptual literacy + conceptual orality

communicative modality available

primarily textual (HTML format possible under certain conditions)

primary communicative function

polylogue

n of communication partners

n:n

threshold of access

medium (public lists); high (private lists)

explicit hierarchy between communication partners

low (unmoderated lists); medium/high (moderated lists)

topical limitations

discussion topics limited to overall list topic

degree of persistence

high

mode of interaction

asynchronous

Many of the above features are determined by technological affordances of the distribution software and other hardware and software components that are involved in the production and dissemination of email messages on distribution lists. These features, however, also have wider consequences regarding the social contexts in which mailing list communication is used and with regard to which groups of users mainly use this communicative form. Thus technology, communicative features, contexts of use, and characteristics of user groups are intertwined, and investigations of mailing list communication are therefore always investigations of communicative practices under a pragmatic perspective. For this reason, before proceeding to an overview of the relevant literature on mailing list communication, a short definition of how “pragmatics” is understood for the purposes of this chapter is provided.

3.

Defining pragmatics

This section provides a working definition of pragmatics as it is understood in this chapter. I adopt a view of pragmatics “as a functional perspective on (any aspect of) language” (Verschueren, Östman, and Blommaert 1995: 13, emphasis removed). This view entails that language is studied under the perspective of its use for generating meaning, i.e., that all levels of language and all linguistic phenom-

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ena under consideration are investigated by taking into account relevant features of the contexts in which they occur and how these factors contribute to meaning-making practices of interlocutors. This conception of pragmatics views language users as making continuous communicative choices among available options. Language users are thus flexible in both constructing and interpreting utterances, but the probability of making certain choices is systematically skewed according to contextual features. This view entails that communicative choices are neither fixed options nor are they irrevocably tied to certain contexts: As contexts change, communicative choices also change and adapt. Patterns of language use, of course, also contribute to the creation of contexts, thus the relations between language use and the contexts of its use are dynamic and dialectical (for a more detailed outline of this conception of pragmatics, see Verschueren 1999; Verschueren, Östman, and Blommaert 1995). For the present chapter, this conception of pragmatics has the advantage that all linguistic features of mailing list communication which have been investigated so far can be systematically related to technological and social characteristics of the contexts of their use for meaning-making practices (provided that the relevant details are given in the respective studies). Levels of linguistic description and features of context provide a conceptual grid for the organization of the rest of this chapter: I start with investigations of the word/morpheme level and the question of language use in mailing list communication (register and language choices), and then proceed to investigations of features of discourse organisation (interactional coherence). Subsequently, I turn to the level of generic structures, and finally I address interactive norms and practices of mailing list communication.

4.

Register features and language choice in mailing list communication

In the early days of CMD research, the term “email communication” often served as a cover term for all kinds of messages transmitted via computer connections that receivers found in the inbox of their email programs. In most cases, however, these early investigations of “email communication” were based on corpora of listserv or bulletin board communications,6 as this kind of data was easily accessible for communication, and language scholars were most often university based and therefore themselves taking part in these early forms of CMD. The first discourse feature that attracted the interest of language scholars was the obvious “sloppiness” of many emails. In one of the first empirical investigations of a corpus of email and chat messages, Maynor (1994) showed that her data displayed features of spoken as well as of written language. They frequently lacked subject pronouns, copula verbs, and articles, and showed a high frequency of abbreviations, contractions, and lexical peculiarities. Maynor dubbed these features “e-style”, implicating that they would characterise all kinds of CMD. In a study of

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postings to two scholarly discussion lists, however, Herring (1996b) found that message characteristics varied with gender of discussion participants, i.e., that male and female list subscribers used different message forms. The hybrid mode characteristic of email language seems to be one of the most robust findings in CMD research. Linguistic features associated with the characteristics of spoken language include the use of 1st and 3rd person pronouns, discourse particles, modal elements, hedges (Du Bartell 1995; Gruber 1997a, 2000a; Uhlirova 1994; Yates 1996), and the number of prepositional phrases that are used (Gruber 1997a). The written language characteristics of email communication include a high type/token ratio and high lexical density, a high proportion of subordinate clauses, and a lower number of coordinated clauses (Gruber 1997a; Yates 1996). In a study of messages from an international BBS, Collot and Belmore (1996) also found that their text corpus combined features of written and spoken language in terms of Biber’s (1988) register model. Danet (1997) discussed the “orality” of different communicative genres in written CMD and the wider cultural implications of the change from printing to digital culture. Although almost all of these early studies investigated formal, grammatical features of public email communications and focused neither on the interactional dimension of CMD nor on the specific interactional practices that asynchronous public email communication facilitates, all of the authors interpreted their results within a functional and hence pragmatic perspective: The hybrid mixture of spoken and written language features in public email messages was seen as a result of the special contextual and situational frame of CMD. These pragmatically relevant situational features include the absence of paralinguistic and prosodic features of language; a lack of direct contact among discussants; the informality of the exchange situation, as well as the participants’ shared background knowledge; their common interest in discussing certain topics; and their awareness of the public nature of the communication situation. A second formal feature of public email communication that was investigated results from the above-mentioned limitations of the ASCII character set used for composing messages. Email users overcame these shortcomings very quickly in a rather creative way. In an email message posted on 19 September 1982 (11:44) to Carnegie Mellon Universities’ computer science general board, Scott Fahlman proposed to use two “emoticons” – combinations of ASCII characters, namely :-) and :-( – to convey meta-communicative meanings (“joking” and “non-joking” speaker intentions, respectively) in email messages (Fahlman n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Soon, the use of these emoticons spread to the ARPANET and Usenet, and many new emoticons have been invented since then (Argyle and Shields 1996; Baym 1995). Although most modern email programs allow users to produce emails in HTML format (and thus offer much richer design opportunities), ASCII emoticons are still used for conveying meta-communicative meanings (Dresner and Herring 2010), even in non-email texts.

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Another method of conveying non-verbal meanings in this relatively cue-less medium is the use of abbreviations (which are often written in uppercase or between brackets – e.g., LOL (or lol) for ‘laughing out loud’; Argyle and Shields 1996: 195). Emoticons and abbreviations serve to compensate for those communication channels that are lacking in asynchronous email communication: gaze, pitch, tone of voice, etc. Interestingly, English interpersonal meta-communicative abbreviations seem to be used more often than German ones, at least in public German email (Günter and Wyss 1996). The use of both emoticons and abbreviations has been interpreted in pragmatic terms as a way of communicating interpersonal meanings that are difficult to convey otherwise in this form of communication. Furthermore, they serve to create and maintain a sense of community among email discussants, who often do not know each other personally (Baym 1995). The use of English abbreviations in German email communication has also been viewed as a form of “in-group communication”, indicating that its users intend to create the impression of being seasoned computer (and Internet) users (Haase, Huber, Krumeich, and Rehm 1997). Another identity-related use of ASCII graphics is found in the so-called “signature files” that many users create for the automatic generation of the last part of their email messages, i.e., the signature. Signature files are stored and automatically added to outgoing mails by email programs. They can contain greeting formulas, the sender’s name and address, and any other information he/she wants to convey with every message. In the newsgroup and bulletin board communication of the 1990s, signature files were often used for impression management and selfpresentation purposes. To fulfil this interpersonal function, many users added slogans and elaborate ASCII graphics to their signature files (Wilkins 1991). Many netiquette guides (see below), however, proscribed the use of voluminous (and thus bandwidth wasting) signature files. Additionally, the increased use of HTMLcapable mail clients allows users to integrate “business cards” into their emails, which make the use of signature files superfluous. The rise and fall of the popularity of signature files thus illustrates an instance of a small scale diachronic change in a discursive practice that is influenced by various pragmatic factors: on the one hand, the need of users to convey (within the limited range of possibilities of the ASCII code) an expression of their personal identity with each of their messages and, on the other hand, the technical impact that the widespread use of elaborate signature files had (at least at a certain stage of the development of access technology for Internet users). The improved functionality of email clients, which allowed signature files to be replaced by other kinds of identity markers, as well as the lessened bandwidth constraints brought about by the widespread use of broadband Internet access, both contributed to solve this tension between users’ interpersonal needs and technical limitations of the medium. Although the investigation of register features of public email communication was conducted from a sociolinguistic perspective from the beginning, investi-

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gations of language choice in public email discussion started much later. One of the reasons for this might be that in the 1980s through the mid-1990s, the Internet was perceived as an English-speaking medium. This was especially notable in listserv discussion groups that were set up in academic contexts for international groups of scholars who shared an interest in certain topics and who also shared one language, in most cases English. One of the first investigations of language choice in public email discussions was Paolillo’s (1996) study of the use of English and Punjabi in a Usenet newsgroup for expatriate Punjabis. Paolillo’s results showed that although the newsgroup was set up for communication among Punjabis, the Punjabi language was used only rarely, while the use of English prevailed. Paolillo discussed four factors which in his view might be responsible for this: 1) Intergenerational language shift is responsible for a limited language competence in second generation Punjabis who live in English speaking countries and who might be (or at least feel) excluded if Punjabi were to be predominantly used in the newsgroup; 2) cultural ambivalence partly results from this first factor, as many expatriates feel that they can only preserve their culture in an English-speaking world if their cultural values are transmitted in English to second- and third-generation group members (i.e., the language that these persons speak in most situations of their lives); 3) the prestige status of English in South Asia as a macro-sociological influencing factor is probably relevant in many post-colonial multilingual countries and/or communities in which English is the lingua franca of an educated elite (see below). While the influence of Usenet language norms (Paolillo’s fourth influencing factor) has probably changed since Paolillo conducted his study, it surely holds true that a dominating language (and culture) will influence language choice in discussion groups that are established for minority members. In a study of language choice of young professional Egyptian Internet users, Warschauer, Said, and Zohry (2002) reported results that resemble Paolillo’s in some respects. Among the subjects of their study, English was also the predominantly used language in asynchronous and synchronous CMD, although all subjects were native speakers of Egyptian Arabic (and also fluent in Classical Arabic). On the one hand, the authors explain this result with reference to the business environment of the young professionals, who almost exclusively worked in software- or hardware-related businesses in which English was the established language of communication. On the other hand, the authors also mention that (at least at the time when the study was conducted) Arabic script was not available for the programs the subjects used for Internet communication. Thus, when they wanted to communicate in Egyptian Arabic, they had to write Arabic in Roman script, which is rarely done in other contexts. A third influencing factor which – according to the authors – was responsible for language choice in this context is the prestige of English as the language of an educated, non-Islamist elite in Egypt. This factor is reminiscent of Paolillo’s argument that the prestige status

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of English in South Asia was an influencing factor for language choice in his study. In the context of multilingual Switzerland, Durham (2003) investigated language choice on a mailing list for Swiss medical students over a period of three years. Subscribers to the list came from three linguistic backgrounds (which also represent three of the four Swiss national languages): Swiss-German, French, and Italian. Durham’s results show a shift towards the dominant use of English during the research period. Although French was used mostly at the beginning (as most of the initial subscribers came from the Geneva area where French is the dominant language), list communication switched mainly to English after about six months, even though English was not the mother tongue of any group of list subscribers. Durham attributes this shift to two main reasons. (1) Sometime after the list had been established, it was joined by a group of Italian speakers who had difficulties communicating in both German and French. Using English put everybody in the group at an equal disadvantage, but it also ensured that everybody would understand messages without requiring additional translations (as was the case with all three other languages). (2) English is a high prestige language in Switzerland, especially in educational and business settings, where many international Swiss businesses have switched to English as their company language. The studies reviewed in this section show that a variety of pragmatic factors influences language characteristics of mailing list communication, as well as the choice of language in mixed language groups. While features of the communication technology (the lack of visual, paralinguistic, and non-verbal cues) and of the communicative setting (shared background knowledge, theme-centred discussions) are responsible for register characteristics of mailing list communication, language choice is influenced by local factors such as the availability of certain scripts in email software, as well as by factors such as social identities, mutual intelligibility, and language prestige. While these latter factors often result in the choice of English as the lingua franca in multilingual discussion groups, this does not necessarily imply that linguistic imperialism is at work in all these cases. Empirical evidence from other multilingual settings (such as the states of the former Soviet Union, where Russian was the lingua franca for almost 50 years) would be needed in order to arrive at a closer understanding of the pragmatics of language choice in such settings. Furthermore, both register features and language choice contribute to the pragmatics of interpersonal meaning making in mailing list communication.

5.

Creating and maintaining discourse coherence

Having reviewed studies of pragmatic factors influencing the choice of linguistic features in monolingual exchanges and language choice in multilingual discussion groups, I turn now to the pragmatics of discourse organisation in public multiparty

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CMD. As Herring (1999) notes, there are two basic problems of interactional coherence in asynchronous (as well as in synchronous) CMD: (1) the lack of backchannel signals, which is caused by the reduced audio-visual cues and the impossibility of message overlap, and (2) disrupted turn adjacency, which is caused by the fact that messages appear in the order in which they are received and distributed by the listserv. One of the only ways of establishing topical coherence is thus the use of the same topic words in the message headers of a discussion. Two problems (on a more theoretical level) with the organisational features of CMD have less often been discussed, namely (1) whether we are justified in using the metaphor of “discussion” for mailing list exchanges and (2) whether theoretical frameworks that were developed for modelling face-to-face interaction are adequate for the analysis of mailing list “discussions”, or if we need an alternative (or at least modified) framework. In the following, I review studies that deal with several aspects of the interactional organisation of mailing list exchanges from a pragmatic perspective. In closing, I deal briefly with the latter-mentioned theoretical problems and ask whether the conceptual frameworks of conversation analysis and discourse analysis that have been used to analyse mailing list communication so far in fact provide appropriate conceptual and analytical tools for analysing these interactions. A first and basic problem of discourse organisation in mailing list interactions is the question of what constitutes a turn (in conversation analytic terms) or a move (in Sinclair and Coulthard’s discourse analytic terms) in a multiparty email exchange (Severinson-Eklundh 2010). As some authors (Gruber 1998; Harrison 1998; Herring 1999) have noticed, reactive contributions to email discussions often refer to more than one previous message, and discussion-initiating postings also often pose more than one question to stimulate further discussion (Gruber 1998). Thus, many mailing list contributions consist of several moves or speech acts, because in asynchronous CMD the right to “speak” is not contested, i.e., any participant can post as many messages as he/she wants (a similar point is made by Condon and Cˇech 2001 with regard to synchronous CMD). Mailing list contributions therefore often show characteristics of speech-act-chains (“Sprechhandlungsverkettungen”, Ehlich and Rehbein 1986), which in traditional interactions characterise written monologue texts. Under a conversation analytic perspective, these multi-move contributions – although they often contain explicit next-speaker selections (Gousseva 1998; Gruber 1998) – may be viewed as offering several transition relevance places, since every question in a multi-question contribution can be (and often is) interpreted as an invitation for an answer to this single question only, as the following extract from a lengthy posting to the LINGUIST list shows (author details omitted):

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Example 1. Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 10:21:41–0500 Reply-To: The Linguist List Sender: The LINGUIST Discussion List From: The Linguist List Subject: 6.1070, Disc: Sex/Lang, Re: 1023 […] I have three questions, each of which I provide some of my own views about. 1) What are some of the parameters of and who (authors) do you look to for your idea that all history has been male dominated? […] 2) Where does your concept of linguistic markedness come from, and on what basis do you establish a cause-effect relationship between patriarchy and markedness in pronouns? […] 3) Finally, you propose that in all past history they’ve had “no concept of sex equality”. […] If we take into account considerations of class, age, history, geography, etc., I would argue that on a DE FACTO level, women have had, and continue to have, COLLECTIVELY, an advantage over men. I know that saying so will upset a few of us, even give some of us a little gas and heartburn, my being the direct precipitation of which I apologize for in advance. […]

Each of these questions could (but, in fact, did not) receive an answer, and thus three adjacency pairs could have been established, each of which would have contributed to the interactional coherence in the LINGUIST list discussion on “Sex/ Lang”. Thus, the excerpt in example 1 above consists of three possible (or virtual) turns which could be turned into actual turns by subsequent answers. This example also shows that the conversation analytic concept of conditional relevance seems to be operative only in a very limited sense in asynchronous multiparty exchanges, in which many “dead-end” contributions occur (see Gruber 1997b; Herring 2010; Joyce and Kraut 2006). So far, I have discussed the properties of first pair parts of (virtual) adjacency pairs in mailing list discussion; in the following, I discuss the properties of second pair parts or reactive contributions. Like first pair parts (or initiating moves), reactive contributions in mailing list discussions may (and often do) consist of reactions to a variety of previous contributions (Gruber 1998; Wilkins 1991), as the extract in example 2 (again from the LINGUIST list discussion on “Sex/Lang”) shows (author references removed):

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Example 2. Date: From: Subject:

Sat, 12 Aug 1995 12:59:37 EDT [log in to unmask] Disc: Sex/Lang, Re: 1079

Subject: Re: Disc: Sex/Lang A writes: > I agree with this generally for the present state of standard English. […] B writes it makes no sense whatever to discuss the origin of the >epicene he phenomenon in the context of the story of >English prescriptive grammar, but only in the context of >the way in which perceptions of sex roles have informed >the structure of language (as of any other institution). Have perceptions of sex roles informed us on the structure of language, or does the structure of language enlighten us on socially acquired yet still subconscious sexist behavior of today’s Homo Sapiens? B/ [Affiliation details of B] >>> The “contructivist” view of sexuality is widely held in academia, but the view has the hauteur of an “in” religious tenet, and has no well-reasoned position, and only endures because its opposite can’t “really” be “proved”. […]

In example 2, the author of the actual contribution refers to two previous postings (contributed by A and B) by providing the exact quotations on which he comments in his own posting. In terms of interactional coherence, this example shows that mailing list discussions do not progress in a linear way (neither in time nor in any

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kind of “space”) but rather establish multi-dimensional networks in which single contributions function as nodes that can be connected to several other messages. The conversation analytic concept of adjacency pair may nonetheless be useful in capturing properties of interactional coherence in these discussions, but it may be necessary to separate the dimension of “adjacency” from the dimension of “linearity” of interactional progression that is inherent in the concept of “adjacency” when applied to face-to-face interaction (see also Condon and Cˇech 2001). A single contribution in a mailing list discussion may thus be part of several adjacency pairs, and every reactive contribution shows the (pragmatic) principles of co-construction of interactional meanings and of the next-turn-proof-procedures at work, albeit in a “multi-dimensional” way. Viewed from a pragmatic perspective, these phenomena show that participants in mailing list discussions transfer interactional practices from face-to-face situations to the new interactional settings of CMD and creatively adapt to these new conditions. The multi-dimensional adjacency of mailing list contributions also requires contributors to make connections between messages rather explicit. Example 2 shows the most common way of explicit inter-message linking, namely the insertion of a verbatim quote from a previous message into the actual message, which is called “quoting” (Severinson-Eklundh 2010). Quoting as a means of establishing interactional coherence has been observed in several investigations of mailing list discussions (Gousseva 1998; Gruber 1997b, 1998; Harrison 1998; Herring 1996b). Quoting is facilitated by email programs that offer to automatically include and edit the messages that the user refers to in his or her actual posting. Automatically generated quotes most often have the form of “author name + metapragmatic verb + quote”. Instances of multiple back reference (as in example 2), however, require users to manually copy and paste those portions of the previous messages to which they refer into their current contribution. In example 2, the author encloses each quote he is commenting on in a series of three opening and closing angle brackets. This is not the automatic, software facilitated way of marking quotes; it was obviously inserted manually by the author (just like the quotations he is referring to). The second quote in example 2, in contrast, shows the usual way of marking quotes with a closing angle bracket at the beginning of each quoted line. This second quote also shows an instance of an embedded quotation – the quoted portion of the previous message partly consists of a quote itself. Mailing list discussion contributions, thus, often show instances of multiple embedding (quoting), in the sense that quotes again contain quotes, enabling contributors to create subtle webs of multiply voiced back-references (Severinson-Eklundh 2010). Quoting is not the only means of establishing interactional coherence in mailing list discussions. Indirect quotations, paraphrasing of previous messages, recycling of words and/or phrases from previous messages, mentioning of the discussion topic, or simply mentioning a previous posting are also used as coherence estab-

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lishing devices by contributors (Gousseva 1998; Gruber 1997b; Wilkins 1991). These devices, however, are weaker in signaling connections to previous messages and therefore are often accompanied by the mentioning of the name of the author of the previous posting. The studies reviewed in this section have shown that specific features of the communication technology in mailing list discussions pose some pragmatic problems for establishing interactional coherence (and thus textual meaning making) in the traditional sense of face-to-face interaction. The review has also shown that email programs facilitate different ways of establishing coherence across messages, as well as enabling users to create forms of coherence that differ from face-to-face interactions. At the same time, the reviewed studies also show that email users creatively cope with the technical limitations and that they exploit the resources provided by software programs and the interactive practices they are familiar with from their everyday face-to-face interactions. Thus, two kinds of pragmatic factors (software affordances and users’ communicative creativity) influence the creation of coherence among contributions to mailing lists. On a theoretical level, the discussion suggests that concepts developed for the analysis of face-to-face interactions are not fully capable of accounting for the specific communication characteristics of CMD. Comprehensive theoretical accounts of, and theoretical concepts for, the analysis of the interactional dynamics of CMD are still lacking.

6.

Genre(s) of listserv CMD

As discussed in section 4, in the early days of CMD research, language features of mailing list communication were investigated and described as if email discussion contributions realised a single genre and belonged to a single register or style. This view of a “language of the Internet” that could be characterised by a common set of linguistic features is still present in some current accounts of CMD (e.g., Crystal 2001), but it has been criticised as superficial and too generalising (e.g., Androutsopoulos 2006; Herring 2007). Later approaches to analysing and classifying types of CMD relied mainly on features of the communication technology used to generate, transmit, and store messages. Correspondingly, they differentiated among chat, email, and MUDs and MOOs, and tried to describe their linguistic commonalities and differences (e.g., Cherny 1999; Schmidt 2000; Werry 1996). From a pragmatic perspective, these studies could be said to apply a “techno-pragmatic” perspective, as the only pragmatic factor they take into account is technology-related, whereas other pragmatic factors like the communicative purpose of messages or writers’ intentions are not considered. One of the first investigations of asynchronous CMD in which the concept of “genre” was used is an article by Günter and Wyss (1996) in which email texts

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were characterised as a “letter-genre”. The authors base their argument on the overall textual structure (“addressing of receiver – body of text – saying good bye”) of emails. That this generic characterisation is too general becomes immediately clear, however, when Günter and Wyss continue their article by sub-classifying their data into various (traditional) subgenres like “letters of information”, “New Year’s greetings”, “wedding announcements”, etc. Additionally, Günter and Wyss’s generic classification does not mention the specific textual and interactional properties of email communication such as quoting (see section 5). A global generic description of listserv email texts is proposed by Herring (1996b), who describes three consecutive phases in such texts: 1. link to previous discourse 2. contentful message 3. link to following discourse (Herring 1996b: 84) Compared to Günter and Wyss’s description, Herring’s account captures the “dialogical” properties of mailing list contributions more aptly. But “genres” are not only configurations of discourse features – a comprehensive approach to “genre” has to account for their available semiotic resources and the interactional and contextual dimensions that contribute to their emergence, temporal stabilisation, and dynamic adaptation to new contexts (for a detailed account of current genre theories, see Muntigl and Gruber 2005). In an attempt to provide a generic description of postings to two academic discussion lists, Gruber (2000b) compared a corpus of discussion list contributions to a small corpus of contributions to the “discussion” section of a scholarly journal and to academic book reviews. He investigated pragmatic features such as communicative purposes, mode, and threshold of participation in the discussions, as well as textual features, especially the choice of “theme” and “process types” in the sense of Systemic Functional Linguistics (cf. Halliday 1994; Martin 1992). His results reveal an “interdiscursive network” of genres in which linguistic, contextual, and technological features contribute to characterise individual genres. His results also show the interrelations among genres through the partial overlap of generic features in “traditional” and email genres. Discussion list contributions can thus be viewed as an emergent genre which combines genre conventions of existing academic genres with new, technologically facilitated modes of text production and with conventions of different semiotic modes. Furthermore, discussion listcontributions do not represent a single, stable genre, but can be divided into sub-genres according to the discussion list to which they were posted (i.e., the postings reflect specific features of the respective “list cultures”, see section 7). In order to provide a fuller picture of the various genres used on discussion lists, their connections to existing genres, and their developmental dynamics, additional comprehensive studies would be needed (an example of an investigation along this line in the area of hypertext document genres is provided by Bateman 2008).

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Herring (2007) argues for using flexible classification grids (“faceted classification schemes”) which combine feature sets that capture different technological and social aspects of CMD together with “mode”-based classifications in order to arrive at a flexible categorization of different kinds of CMD. From a linguistic pragmatic perspective, this classification scheme can be viewed as a complement to studies of generic features of CMD and mailing list communication respectively, as the features Herring proposes provide a valuable conceptual matrix for classifying relevant pragmatic factors that could in turn be accompanied by an investigation of the discursive features of certain message types. The obvious hybridity of mailing list genres, as well as their connection to certain groups of users (“online communities”; see below), seems to indicate that the pragmatics of mailing list genres contributes to interpersonal as well as to textual meaning-making processes. In general, although existing research seems to indicate that different mailing list communities develop group-specific variants of the discussion-list-posting genre, which vary in accordance with pragmatic factors such as familiarity with communication technology and narrow vs. wide scope of legitimate discussion topics, there is a need for further linguistic pragmatic studies in this area.

7.

Interactive norms and practices of mailing list CMD – the question of “online community formation”

Discussion groups have often been established in professional and educational contexts to enable geographically-dispersed groups of users to interact in order to solve common tasks or to provide each other with professional support. In this pragmatically-relevant aspect, mailing lists differ markedly from newsgroups, which are often used for recreational purposes (Baym 1995). One question that arises in this context, however, is whether the members of these groups develop a sense of community during their interaction history, or whether they simply remain a group of people who use a certain communication tool for interaction (Herring 2004). From the early days of Internet communication research, many authors have used the term “virtual community” to refer to these groups. But as Herring (2004) points out, in many publications the term has been overused to the point where it has become meaningless, as it may denote any group of persons who communicate via the Internet for a certain time. Herring (2004) therefore proposes using the term “online community” in a stricter way and also suggests using pragmaticallyinformed discourse analysis as a methodological tool to investigate online communities, because one of the main features of these communities is that communication is their major (in many cases the only) means of community formation. According to Herring (2004: 356), the following six criteria characterise a virtual community:

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1. Steady participation over a defined time interval and the possibility to identify core participants; 2. A shared history of the group, which leads to a group culture that can be identified through the investigation of group jargon, abbreviations, etc., and through the emergence of group norms; 3. The display of group solidarity among community members through various communicative practices; 4. Group-specific patterns of conflict and communicative conflict resolution; 5. A group’s display of self-awareness; 6. Evidence of roles and hierarchies in a group, which also relates to participation patterns and norms. In an illustrative analysis, Herring (2004) shows the degrees to which two online discussion groups display characteristics of virtual communities in the above sense and how pragmatic computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) can be used to identify these relevant characteristics. Various other studies have investigated some of the above features in order to address the question of community formation in discussion groups. Gruber (1998) developed a “reciprocity” measure that allows for computing the perceived relevance of list postings in order to differentiate between subscribers who post many contributions but receive only a few reactions and those whose postings have a high relevance for a discussion. This quantitative measure provides a differentiated view of group roles, hierarchies, and participation patterns. The importance of a moderator and of core members of a discussion group for establishing and continuing interaction and becoming a community is pointed out by Fayard and DeSanctis (2005). Cubbison (1999) discusses how list owners can influence various aspects of group structure and community formation by choosing specific configurations of listserv software settings. Although Cubbison’s article is not linguistically oriented, her paper is interesting in the current context, as it shows how software settings which, in most cases, are invisible to subscribers, set a technological – yet pragmatically relevant – frame for communicative practices and thus for the possibilities of community formation. The emergence of group norms was investigated as early as the mid-1990s when McLaughlin, Osborne, and Smith (1995) inductively arrived at a “taxonomy of reproachable conduct on Usenet”. The taxonomy was based on the analysis of a corpus of messages from various Usenet groups in which other users of the respective groups were criticised. McLaughlin, Osborne, and Smith grouped their data into seven categories that, in many respects, resemble the norms for CMC communication later formulated in many “netiquette” guides. In a qualitative study, Johnson-Eiola and Selber (1996) investigated one discussion group’s emerging definitions of an appropriate discussion topic. They concluded that a topic’s appropriateness on this list was defined in a framework that combined personal/profes-

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sional interests of users and power relations in the workplace settings in which the contributors were located. Topics that were collectively considered as inappropriate for the list were taken to other discussion forums. This marginalisation of (potentially threatening) topics represented – according to the authors – a technologically facilitated way of fragmenting a community into a majority who – by means of a “democratic majority vote” – forced “dissidents” to leave the community instead of dealing with potentially explosive topics. These studies of the emergence of groups norms (and of exclusion practices) in discussion groups are interesting insofar as they challenge the widely-held view of Internet communities as “egalitarian” groups in which each member has equal rights. Conflict communication in discussion groups has often been investigated in terms of “flaming”. “Flaming” was one of the first communicative practices to be observed and described in newsgroup (but also in discussion list) interaction (Kim and Raja 1991). The term “flaming” covers all forms of communicative behaviour in CMC through which discussants confront others in rude and hostile ways (Lea et al. 1992). For some scholars, the cause of flaming is the “reduced cues” characteristic of CMC (Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire 1984). They claim that it is easier to be rude to one’s interlocutor if one cannot see or hear him/her or, as in most cases, if one does not even personally know him/her. Herring (1996a, 1996b), however, claims that flaming is a typical male discussion list behaviour; she found women in general to be more supportive of others. Depending on the gender majority of list subscribers, discussion lists “exhibit an overall aligned or opposed orientation” (Herring 1996a: 104). This finding also shows that discussion groups are communities whose values are established/influenced by the majority of group members. Furthermore, Herring’s results caution against a “techno-pragmatic” view of CMD that would claim that technological affordances of computer-mediated communication have more influence on communicative practices than users’ characteristics. Several discursive features of a group’s self awareness were studied by Cassell and Tversky (2005) in their investigation of the online community formation of an intercultural, international youth forum that was set up to prepare an international youth summit in 1998. Their results show that the choice of English as a common language, the use of personal pronouns (“I” vs. “we”), and the development of conversation patterns (from providing information to giving feedback and responses to each other and planning future activities) reflect the emergence of a sense of community among the young adolescents. However, as the studied group was spread over four continents and several cultural areas, there also remained some characteristics of diversity. Cassell and Tversky’s study and the studies on language choice in discussion groups (see section 4) show that in multilingual groups language choice is also an indicator of community formation. As in the studies reviewed in section 4, Cassell and Tversky found that the young adolescents ultimately communicated exclusively in English in order to speed up communication.

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All of the studies reported here show how technical and social pragmatic features of mailing list communication can foster community formation among persons who in many cases do not know each other personally and whose only means of inter-communication is email. It would be interesting, however, to see how persistent these communities are, since mailing list communication is mainly used for professional and educational purposes, and the resulting communities are only relevant for their members as long as they belong to their respective professional or educational fields. This aspect differentiates most mailing list communities from newsgroups, which are joined by members who share an interest in certain recreational topics. Therefore, newsgroup communities may exist over longer periods of time (Baym 1995). Additionally, as Lamy and Hampel (2007) in their review of possible uses of CMC in the language learning classroom point out, there are also features of (the educational use of) asynchronous CMC that may hamper community formation, like the solitariness of users, pressure (exerted by instructors) to respond, or unnoticed silence (“lurking”7). These factors may lead to the formation of online communities that exclude certain potential members without this being noticed by others. Investigations of community formation on discussion lists should thus take into account a wide range of pragmatic factors such as voluntary vs. involuntary participation in community activities, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations of participants, and other relevant contextual aspects.

8.

Closing remarks

In closing, I attempt to connect the several strands of CMD research on pragmatic aspects of mailing list communication and give an overall interpretation, as well as sketch some possible directions for future research. As was shown above, mailing list communication can be viewed as “polylogue” email communication. This has consequences for two kinds of pragmatic factors that influence its linguistic characteristics: technical factors, on the one hand, and socio-situational factors, on the other hand. Additionally, I will focus on the kinds of meanings (ideational, interpersonal, and textual in the sense of Halliday 1994) that are generated by pragmatic factors. The specific “polylogic” properties of mailing list communication and the emergence of new communicative purposes and thus also new genres result in the emergence of particular kinds of textual meanings that are established by single messages as well as by message networks. In this concluding section, I therefore also discuss which kinds of pragmatic factors contribute to what kind of meaning making processes. In terms of medium characteristics (i.e., various technical features of message composition, transmission, and storage; see Herring 2007), mailing list communication practices reflect the limitations and affordances of email programs: In the

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beginning providing only a limited character set for composing messages and initially a purely textual communication channel, email programs now support the Unicode character set (which allows the use of 90 different scripts) as well as HTML text, which allows the integration of visual and other non-textual elements into email messages. Furthermore, listserv technology has increasingly been replaced by Internet forums that are integrated into websites and that support full HTML standards for messaging. Some of the studies reviewed above revealed how users dealt with the limitations of certain “techno-pragmatic” factors. For example, the invention and frequent use of “emoticons” in email communication shows clearly how users overcame the early limitations of email programs by inventing a set of new symbols (based on the available ASCII character set) that compensated for the narrowness of the communication channel and allowed users to add a layer of interpersonal meaning to their messages. Another relevant techno-pragmatic feature of email (and hence mailing list) communication is quoting. In contrast to the limiting effects of email communication, quoting is an “enabling” characteristic that allows users to establish references between messages easily. Especially in mailing list communication, quoting provides a straightforward way of establishing thematic connections between follow-up postings in multiparty discussions and thus contributes to establishing “textual meanings” that help interlocutors make sense of the foregrounding and backgrounding of information, as well as of the relevant connections between parts of a communicative exchange. In terms of social and situational pragmatic factors (Herring 2007) that are relevant in mailing list communication, the review of studies has shown that mailing lists are used for many-to-many, public interactions, hence their characterisation as “polylogue”. Although not all groups that communicate via mailing lists become virtual communities, many of the linguistic characteristics of mailing list communication can be viewed as corollaries of the group situation. The hybrid “written-like-spoken” register characteristics as well as the frequent use of acronyms in email communication can be viewed as users’ display of in-group identity markers. Language use in group discussions also plays a relevant role. As studies of language choice in multilingual discussion groups have indicated, group members may choose a common language that puts all discussants on an equal level of disadvantage (i.e., which is nobody’s mother tongue) or simply because they want to practise a certain language. Both results can also be viewed as contributing to interpersonal meaning making in mailing list discussions. Gender of discussion participants has been shown to be a relevant pragmatic factor that impacts group discussion styles (and hence implicit group norms). Different age groups of participants and their communicative practices in discussions have so far barely been investigated since, until the late 1990s, Internet communication was mainly the “playground” for a white middle-class population of educated males between 20 and 40+ years of age. With CMD now becoming an almost

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ubiquitously available means of communication (at least in developed countries), both older and less educated persons increasingly participate in CMD, and their communicative practices constitute an interesting topic for further investigation. The emergence of genres of mailing list communication is an area of research where socio-pragmatic factors (e.g., communicative purposes of a group, discussion topics, group norms) and techno-pragmatic factors (e.g., quoting, channel of communication, asychronicity; Herring 2007) are of equal relevance. Mailing list genres combine characteristics of “traditional” genres with features enabled by the technological affordances of the communicative medium and properties that reflect communicative norms and purposes of user communities. Message sequences of mailing list discussions have been shown to exhibit very specific characteristics in terms of interactional coherence that are also related to technological characteristics (i.e., the email software used for communication). However, the available research still lacks conceptions of such basic entities as “turn/move”, “adjacency”, and “sequence” in a way that accounts theoretically for the pragmatics of CMD. Both genre characteristics and message sequence properties contribute to the textual and interpersonal meanings of mailing list discussions, insofar as they provide interlocutors with a sense of what constitutes an appropriate posting on a list, what is accomplished with certain messages, and how they are understood by others. All in all, this discussion shows that the view of pragmatics as a functional perspective on language use that investigates interactants’ meaning making practices is useful, as long as it incorporates a differentiated classification of relevant technological and social-situational factors of the form of communication under investigation. The discussion also revealed that technological aspects of message composition and transmission and socio-situational factors of users’ communicative needs provide pragmatic resources from which the discursive characteristics of mailing list postings derive, i.e., technological factors pose limitations and opportunities for message production that users creatively appropriate in order to fulfil their communicative purposes. Further research on mailing list communication might proceed along this line and inquire, for example, which new discursive features result from the possibility of composing messages in HTML format in newer email programs and in web discussion forums. It will be interesting to see whether and how the new technological affordances will be used, and especially if aspects of “design” and “arrangement” become as relevant for mailing list communication as they are for other forms of multimodal communication (Kress 2010).

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Notes 1. There are two possible perspectives on the communication mode of mailing list and Usenet groups: From the perspective of the single user it is a 1:n mode, as one user sends his/ her message to a group of recipients. Viewed from the group’s perspective, however, the communicative mode is n:n, as any users can interact with any others. 2. ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”, a character encoding scheme which has been used for coding computer characters since 1960 and which includes 94 printable and 33 non-printable characters (plus the “invisible” space character). 3. HTML stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language”, the predominant markup language for web pages, which allows a structural description of headings, font types, etc. as well as the integration of images, sounds, etc. in texts. 4. An example of this is fidonet, which still is in use in areas where most computer users access the Internet via telephone modems, such as in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. 5. This dimension draws upon a distinction introduced by Koch and Österreicher (1994), who assume that the conception of a communicative product as “spoken” or “written” is independent of its realisation in the oral or written mode. Thus a speech delivered orally in front of an audience may have been composed in written mode very carefully by the speaker, having in mind the face-to-face communicative situation of the speech, resulting in a conceptually oral, i.e., a “written to be spoken” (Gregory and Carroll 1978: 47), text. The oral delivery of a pronouncement in court, in contrast, is a typical instance of the oral presentation of a conceptually written text. The conceptually literate pole of communication is associated with (and establishes) interpersonal distance, whereas the conceptually oral pole is associated with (and establishes) closeness between communication partners. 6. Bulletin boards (BBSs) became popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They consisted of a central server which was connected to several home computers of registered users. In the early days of computer communication, users connected to the server by telephone modems and then could upload and download files to and from the server. BBSs were used for communication among users, exchange of files, and for online gaming. Since the mid-1990s web forums have largely replaced BBSs. 7. Viewed from the standpoint of those members of an online community who actively participate in online discussions, lurking is often seen as undesirable behavior, as lurkers do not contribute to the ongoing discussions. Form the lurkers’ perspective, however, lurking is often viewed as a kind of participation, and lurkers may experience a sense of community with those persons who contribute to online discussions, even if they do not participate in the discussions for various reasons (Nonnecke and Preece 2000).

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Gruber, Helmut 2000a Scholarly email discussion list postings: A single new genre of academic communication? In: Lyn Pemberton and Simon Shurville (eds.), Words on the Web: Computer-Mediated Communication, 36–44. Exeter, UK: Intellect Books. Gruber, Helmut 2000b Theme and intertextuality in scholarly e-mail messages. Functions of Language 7(1): 79–115. Gruber, Helmut 2008 Specific genre features of new mass media. In: Ruth Wodak and Veronika Koller (eds.), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere, 363–383. Berlin: de Gruyter. Günter, Ulrike and Elisabeth L. Wyss 1996 E-mail Briefe – eine neue Textsorte zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit. In: Ernest W. B. Hess-Luttich, Werner Holly, and Ulrich Püschel (eds.), Textstrukturen im Medienwandel, 61–87. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Haase, Martin, Michael Huber, Alexander Krumeich, and Georg Rehm 1997 Internetkommunikation und Sprachwandel. In: Rüdiger Weingarten (ed.), Sprachwandel durch Computer, 51–86. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Halliday, M.A.K. 1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd Ed. London: Edward Arnold. Harrison, Sandra 1998 E-mail discussions as conversation: Moves and acts in a sample from a listserv discussion. Linguistik Online 1(1). http://www.linguistik-online.de/harrison.htm Hauben, Ronda 1998– ARPANET mailing lists and Usent newsgroups: Creating an open and scien1999 tific process for technology development and diffusion. Part I. The Amateur Computerist 9(1). http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/Back_Issues/Back_Issues% 5b1998-2002%5d/ACN9-1.txt Hauben, Ronda 2000 ARPANET mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups: Creating an open and scientific process for technology development and diffusion. Part III. The Amateur Computerist 10(1). http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/Back_Issues/Back_Issues% 5b1998-2002%5d/ACn10-1.txt Herring, Susan C. 1996a Posting in a different voice: Gender and ethics in CMC. In: Charles Ess (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication, 115–147. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Herring, Susan C. 1996b Two variants of an electronic message schema. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 91–109. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html

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Lea, Martin, Tim O’Shea, Pat Fung, and Russell Spears 1992 “Flaming” in computer-mediated communication. In: Martin Lea (ed.), Contexts of Computer-Mediated Communication, 89–113. Hemel-Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Martin, James R. 1992 English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Maynor, Natalie 1994 The language of electronic mail: Written speech? In: Greta D. Little and Michael Montgomery (eds.), Centennial Usage Studies. Publication of the American Dialect Society Nr. 78, 48–55. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Mclaughlin, Margaret L., Kerry K. Osborne, and Christine B. Smith 1995 Standards of conduct in Usenet. In: Steven G. Jones (ed.), Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, 90–112. London: Sage. Muntigl, Peter and Helmut Gruber 2005 Introduction: Approaches to genre. Folia Linguistica XXXIX(1–2): 1–19. Nonnecke, Blair and Jennifer Preece 2000 Persistence and lurkers in discussion lists: A pilot study. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Hawai International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. http://www.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/persistence.pdf Paolillo, John C. 1996 Language choice on soc.culture.punjab. Electronic Journal of Communication 6(3). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/006/3/006312.HTML Schmidt, Gurly 2000 Chat Kommunikation im Internet – eine kommunikative Gattung? In: Caja Thimm (ed.), Soziales im Netz. Sprache, Beziehungen und Kommunikationskulturen im Internet, 109–131. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Severinson Eklundh, Kerstin 2010 To quote or not to quote: Setting the context for computer-mediated dialogues. Language@Internet 7, article 5. http://www.languageatinternet.ord/articles/2010/2665/ Uhlirova, Ludmila 1994 E-mail as a new subvariety of medium and its effects upon the message. In: Svetla Cmejrkova (ed.), The Syntax of Sentence and Text. Festschrift for Frantisek Danes, 273–282. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jan Blommaert (eds.) 1995 Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Verschueren, Jef 1999 Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold. Warschauer, Mark, Ghada R. El Said, and Ayman Zohry 2002 Language choice online: Globalization and identity in Egypt. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol7/issue4/warschauer.html Werry, Christopher C. 1996 Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication; Linguistic, Social, and CrossCultural Perspectives, 47–65. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Wilkins, Harriet 1991 Computer talk: Long-distance conversations by computer. Written Communication 8(1): 56–79. Yates, Simeon J. 1996 Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer conferencing: A corpus based study. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 29–47. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

4.

Blogging Cornelius Puschmann

1.

Origins and definitions

The blog (a contraction of web log/weblog) is a form of online publishing, communication, and expression that has gained significant popularity since its emergence in the late 1990s (Blood 2002; Rosenberg 2009; Winer 2001). The terms blog (n.) and blogging (v.) were first included in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003, and blog (n.) was chosen as Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2004 (Merriam-Webster 2004). Princeton’s WordNet database defines a blog as “a shared online journal where people can post diary entries about their personal experiences and hobbies(; …) postings on a blog are usually in chronological order”, and describes blogging as “reading, writing, or editing a shared on-line journal”. Blogs are used to publish a wide array of content: In addition to textual blogs (the focus of this chapter), blogs are also used to share photos, audio clips, and video clips (Scheidt 2009). Although some degree of openness and sharing is usually associated with blogging, blogs with access restrictions exist in corporate and organizational spaces and where individuals wish for their blog to remain private. Associated terms such as blogosphere (n.) and bloggy (adj.) have also entered the vernacular in the course of the last decade, denoting blogs in their (implied) totality and the (implied) characteristics they share, respectively. Blogging is a global phenomenon, reaching across languages, communities, and organizational contexts (Bruns and Jacobs 2006; Russell and Echchaibi 2009; Schlobinski and Siever 2005). Definitions of what constitutes a blog from scholars in different disciplines highlight different aspects of blogs, such as genre antecedence (Karlsson 2006; McNeill 2003, 2005), structure and content (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright 2004), communicative function (Brake 2007), rhetorical practice (Miller and Shepherd 2004), and practitioner perspective (boyd 2006), or they attempt to establish theoretical frameworks which integrate several of these facets (Schmidt 2007). The divergent and at the same time overlapping scholarly approaches to blogs as text, discourse, social action, and cultural practice reflect both the perspectives of a range of academic disciplines and the shifting interpretation of the blog format by practitioners and non-practitioners. Simultaneously, there appears to be a gradual move away from definitions that tie blogs exclusively to a specific style or content closely resembling antecedent practices, such as diary-writing and journalism, to definitions that are more open and recognize what boyd refers to as “the efficacy of the practice” (2006: para 2). As blogs come of age and merge with

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even newer forms of CMC such as status updates on social networking sites like Facebook (boyd 2006; Joinson 2008) and microblogging services such as Twitter (boyd, Golder, and Lotan 2010; Honeycutt and Herring 2009; Java et al. 2007), they are increasingly defined in terms of themselves and without reference to precursors. Blood (2000) traces the origins of blogs to the practice of link sharing on the early World Wide Web. She emphasizes that the earliest practitioner definitions of what constituted a blog were based on the presence of dated entries containing links, commentary, and thoughts on a personal website: The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts. (para 5)

The function of sharing links and publishing information in a web feed, thenunique features likely to have spurred the popularity of blogs, are today integrated into virtually any component of the so-called social web. A variety of media contents (photos, music, video clips, etc.) can easily be embedded in blog entries or other hypertext-based services, while at the same time portals and multimedia applications integrate blog-like functions. What remains unchanged is that blogs structure digital content sequentially and that they are more frequently maintained by individuals than institutions or companies (McLean 2009). Definitions based on the structural characteristics of blogs are popular among researchers; for example, blogs are described as “frequently updated webpages with a series of archived posts, typically in reverse-chronological order” (Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht 2004: 222) and “modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence” (Herring, Scheidt, et al. 2004: 1). This approach to definition can be interpreted in light of the extreme topical, functional, and participatory variance of blogs, i.e., the fact that subject matter, purpose, and community are highly variable from one blog to another and, internally, from a single post to the next. Researchers from linguistics, rhetoric, and literary studies, but also from a variety of other disciplines, frequently apply the term genre to blogs, relating it to forms, such as the personal diary, which they propose as plausible ancestors (e.g., Karlsson 2006: 1, who calls the paper diary the blog’s “evident offline antecedent”). This approach is not without its conceptual difficulties, because while technical constraints and certain stylistic patterns can be considered somewhat stable (Puschmann 2010a: 109–114), the purpose and community of a blog are not, a problem that poses a challenge to contemporary genre theory (see Askehave and Nielsen [2005] and Giltrow [this volume] for a discussion of the complex relationship of medium and genre, and Lomborg [2009], Scheidt [2009], and Miller and Shepherd [2009]

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for analyses of blogs from the perspective of genre theory). Blogs share characteristics with genres that are author-centric in terms of mode and sequential in terms of text organization, such as the diary and the personal letter, and these common characteristics are sometimes suggested to have been inherited by the blog in a genealogical sense. However, this assertion seems questionable in light of the historical development of blogs. In those instances where they share traits with pre-digital antecedents, this may partly be a result of conscious imitation or genre migration and partly the symptom of a psychological desire for mediated self-expression that predates the implied antecedents (see Gurak and Antonijevic [2008] and Nowson, Oberlander, and Gill [2005] for psychological approaches to blogging).

2.

Interdisciplinary research and intersections with pragmatics

Blogs and blogging have attracted a growing body of scholarship since the popularization of the form in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the use of blogs has spread to a variety of contexts, such as academic research (Ewins 2005; Suzuki 2004), business (Puschmann 2010b; Sprague 2007), and education (Armstrong, Berry and Lamshed 2004), studies suggest that the prototypical use of blogs as a medium for personal publishing by private non-professionals still dominates over other scenarios (McLean 2009; White and Winn 2009). Blogging has been studied with a range of methodologies and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, among them ethnography (boyd 2006; Brake 2007; Gumbrecht 2004; Nardi, Schiano, and Gumbrecht 2004; Schiano, Nardi, Gumbrecht, and Swartz 2004), mass communication (Kelleher and Miller 2006; Schmidt 2007; Stefanone and Jang 2007), political science (Adamic and Glance 2005; Drezner and Farrell 2004; Trammell 2006), sociology (Ali-Hasan and Adamic 2007; Efimova, Hendrick, and Anjewierden 2005), geography (Gopal 2007), computational linguistics (Argamon, Koppel, Pennebaker, and Schler 2007; Mishne 2005; Schler, Koppel, Argamon, and Pennebaker 2006), linguistics (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright 2005; Puschmann 2009), rhetoric (McNeill 2005; Miller and Shepherd 2004; Myers 2010), psychology (Gurak and Antonijevic 2008; Nowson, Oberlander and Gill 2005), and organizational studies (Efimova and Fiedler, 2004; Efimova and Grudin, 2007; Jackson, Yates, and Orlikowski 2007). Figure 1 shows an array of methodologies used by scholars from a variety of fields. Dependent on the field, different questions are formulated and different data are used to answer them. Studies from disciplines such as communication, sociology, and ethnography regard blogging as a practice and process; accordingly, they tend to focus on the relations and motivations of bloggers, how they characterize their activity, and on their interaction with others in sociocommunicative networks, investigating these aspects by either quantitative or qualitative means. In contrast, studies from content-centric and technical fields tend to focus on the analysis and classification of

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Figure 1. Approaches to blog research

user-produced data (language or metadata such as links, tags, post frequency, lengths of posts), sometimes in relative isolation from the social dynamics of blogging that produce the content. An increasing number of studies seek to integrate both approaches, but building a bridge between “deep” sociocultural practice and “shallow” textual product presents a challenge. The following quote from Schmidt points to the usefulness of careful language analysis when approaching blogs: (…) speaking in one’s own personal voice and being open for dialogue rather than engaging in one-way-communication are core elements readers have come to expect from blog communication, be it in private online journals, corporate blogs, or political blogs. (2007: para 14)

What defines a “personal voice”, and how is “being open for dialogue” stylistically signaled? Is it even legitimate to associate the use of certain linguistic features with being conversational? (See Peterson 2011 for a critical discussion of this question in relation to blogs.) Linguistic research can contribute to the study of In-

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ternet communication by examining those characteristics that Schmidt notes are important for how blogging is interpreted, but that he describes only in very general terms. To date, it has primarily been the ease of obtaining language data from blogs for the purpose of corpus-based studies in traditional linguistic research areas that has attracted language scholars to them, but approaches beyond this limited scope are potentially even more rewarding and could contribute crucially to a broader interdisciplinary research agenda. Linguistic research can provide insight into implicit conceptualizations shaping the discourse that is produced and contribute to new techniques of analysis based on language data. What Schmidt refers to as “core elements” (how blogs are written) is a decidedly linguistic phenomenon and therefore relevant to linguistic analysis and pragmatics. Beyond putting to use language-based research in concert with sociological approaches, pragmatically relevant areas of study related to blogs include deixis, adressivity, politeness, and different stylistic approaches of bloggers (author-centric vs. topic-centric blogging). These are covered in the remainder of this chapter. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the understandings gained through careful language analysis do not extend to the intentions of practitioners, to why they consciously communicate in the way they do, or to what the activity of blogging means to them. Linguists studying blogs should understand the inherent limitations of content-based approaches. The motivation to blog, the role blogging plays for a community, and the reflection of practitioners on their practice are all outside the scope of an exclusively linguistic description and call for the addition of ethnographic, sociological, and psychological research approaches.

3.

Usage, style, and classification

In the course of the last decade, blogging has changed from a new practice into something mainstream, in many regards becoming the first mass instantiation of user-generated content (UGC) on the web (Schiano et al. 2004; White and Winn 2009). A variety of blogging services such as Blogger, Wordpress, and LiveJournal make it possible for anyone to run a blog without the need for a personal website. In addition, companies, schools, universities, and other organizations increasingly offer blog hosting to their constituents, while the mainstream news media also make extensive use of blogs integrated into conventional websites. Precise statistics on the number of blogs worldwide are difficult to assemble, and their relevance should not be overstated, given that many blogs are abandoned after a short time. Services such as Technorati tracked more than 70 million individual sources in Spring 2007, and as of 2009, estimates for the number of blogs in the United States and globally varied between 100 and 180 million (Kutchera 2008). The number of Internet users reporting having read a blog at least once or doing so on a regular basis also appears to be on the rise (Project for Excellence in Journalism 2008).

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Technorati’s 2009 State of the Blogosphere report (McLean 2009) found that the majority of the 2,828 U.S. bloggers surveyed were male, between 18 and 44 years old, and had a relatively high level of income and educational qualifications. However, user demographics vary considerably by country, region, language, and individual usage community, making it essential to investigate blogging practices within their respective cultural contexts (see Schlobinski and Siever [2005], as well as Russell and Echchaibi [2009], for publications on blogging from an international perspective). While blogging can be a source of revenue, and bloggers may be hired as ghostwriters, the most commonly cited reason for blogging given by those surveyed by Technorati was “personal satisfaction” (76 % of the respondents), and the most popular self-description of the blog’s content was “personal musings” (53 %). An even higher percentage (83 %) described the content of their blog as “personal musings” in a smaller study by Viégas (2005). Self-expression thus historically appears to be a core motivation for the majority of bloggers, not withstanding phenomena such as “A-list” blogging and professional journalism via blogs (see also Lenhart and Fox 2006). A possible shift in user demographics that may also impact how blogs are written was observed in a recent Pew Internet & American Life study: Fewer teenagers and an increasing number of adults are readings and writing blogs (Lenhart et al. 2010). The discourse on blogging and bloggers in the mass media is ambivalent. It highlights both the perceived value and potential of blogs as sources of free expression and public discussion and their dependence on secondary sources and lack of accountability (Baltatzis 2006; Niles 2007). Personal blogging is also often mischaracterized as vain or egocentric when critics apply expectations from perceived antecedents such as print journalism to blogs in an undifferentiated fashion. Furthermore, the public discourse often implicitly takes highly visible topical blogs and casts them as typical or model instantiations, effectively imposing prescriptive norms for how to write a “good” blog and creating a skewed perception of the mainstream, a problem emphasized by Herring, Kouper, Scheidt, and Wright (2004). Stylistically, blogs are a highly variable form of self-expression. Depending on a blogger’s conceptualization of the format, a blog entry can be speech-like or written-like, colloquial or formal, and can relate private or public (in the sense of addressing established topical areas of the mainstream media, such as politics, sports, entertainment, or technology) issues. It can target a wide audience or a small, select readership and be written for personal or professional reasons. The virtual context in which posts are presented and the metadata that is associated with them (title, author, time of writing, tags, categories) allow for a situatedness that makes blogs compelling to a wide range of users. This is in part because the metadata facilitates the use of first-person perspective and deictic expressions, making writing a blog relatively easy even for an inexperienced author. A range of stylistic and topical options are at the blogger’s disposal, whereas established and

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Figure 2. Form and function-based classification, reproduced from Krishnamurthy (2002)

institutionalized forms of publishing are often more restrictive in terms of style and content. The flexible communicative situation of blogs (Who is assumed to be among the readers? Who, if anyone, is addressed? Who might be eavesdropping?) also shapes their style and influences their authors’ rhetorical choices. Content-based approaches to blogs have often focused on the question of how to categorize them on the basis of language and the use of specific features such as linking, quoting, frequency of comments, or other structural criteria of analysis. In an attempt to combine the facets of form and function, Krishnamurthy (2002) suggests such a categorization along the scales personal – topical and individual – community for his analysis of blog discourse (Figure 2). His approach implicitly uses basic categories from genre analysis (communicative purpose and discourse community; cf. Swales [1990]), which are descriptively inclusive but also difficult to operationalize. Herring et al. (2005) extend the categories suggested by Blood (2002), who refers to the types filters, personal journals, and notebooks, and propose a categorization of blogs into the following types:

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1. diaries/personal journals, which record the personal experiences and thoughts of the blogger from a subjective viewpoint; 2. filters, which filter, quote, link, and/or comment on information from other sources; 3. k-logs, which store, tag, and/or classify information from other sources on a single topic; 4. mixed, which combine at least two of the primary three types; or 5. other, which cannot be associated with any of the primary types. This classification is based on purpose inferred from content (Herring et al. 2005: 147) via manual coding. The categories are defined a priori, and then the studied blogs are classified according to which category they are seen as fitting in best. This approach to categorization can be criticized on the grounds that the array of purposes is limited and based on Blood’s somewhat prescriptive categories, which take her personal view of blogging as a starting point. Another language-based approach is taken by Argamon et al. (2007), who investigate the relationship of style and content to age and gender of bloggers based on stylometric analysis. Via a process they label meaning extraction (Chung and Pennebaker 2007), the authors isolate 20 thematic lexical factors that are then related to the dimensions of age and gender (see Argamon et al. Table 3 for details). They summarize the findings of their large-scale textual analysis of 140 million words of running text by remarking: We find that older bloggers tend to write about externally-focused topics, while younger bloggers tend to write about more personally-focused topics; changes in writing style with age are closely related. Perhaps surprisingly, similar patterns also characterize gender-linked differences in language style. In fact, the linguistic factors that increase in use with age are just those used more by males of any age, and conversely, those that decrease in use with age are those used more by females of any age. (Argamon et al. 2007: para 4)

Argamon et al. approach blogs inductively and based on automation, while the approaches used by Herring et al. (2004, 2005) classify the content according to functionally-derived categories and manual classification. Both approaches are based on the style and content of blog entries and make inferences regarding the purposes associated with blogging on the basis of the data. However, Aragmon et al.’s strong claims regarding the influence of age and gender on style are problematic in several ways. First, they fail to take blog type into account. In an automated analysis of a corpus of blog entries balanced by gender (male and female bloggers) and blog type (filter and personal journal), Herring and Paolillo (2006: 453–455) found that blog type trumps gender as an influencing factor. Their analysis suggests that the gender differences observed by Argamon et al. are a result of failing to differentiate between different types of blogs based on purpose and audience design. Herring, Kouper, et al. (2004)’s finding that

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teen bloggers are more likely to write personal journals and adults are more likely to write filter blogs similarly problematizes Argomon et al.’s age results. There appears to be a broad consensus that in blogs there is a dynamic relationship between style, genre, age, and gender of the blogger, and behaviors such as linking and quoting, but clear and unambiguous causal relations between these dimensions have not been established. Males, females, and bloggers of different age groups may all be motivated by different perceived benefits of blogging. It seems likely that the purpose a blogger associates with his or her blog will have a strong impact on how it is written, and that at the same time purpose depends partly on age and gender, rather than there being an immediate relationship between these criteria and language use.

4.

Deixis and givenness

Despite the overall variability of blog style and content, some linguistic properties of blogs are highly stable. The core cohesive element of a blog is time. In contrast to the syntagmatic structure of wikis (elements are linked by relation), blog entries are paradigmatically linked by chronology. This chronology can be omitted, for example when looking at entries on the basis of categories or tags, or when an individual post is found via a web search, but it acts as the governing organizational principle for information in blogs. According to Winer (2001), blog posts canonically encode the following information: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Title Text Tags/Categories Author Time of publication URL

Author, time of publication, and the URL of the post differ from the other fields by constituting extra-textual information that is automatically associated with the situation and not manually assigned by the blogger. This information makes deictic language possible, i.e., use of the first person pronoun (always referring to the blogger-publisher credited with the post) and use of temporal adverbs (relating to post publication date as the point of reference) and spatial adverbs (either relating to the blogger’s location at the time of publishing or conceptualizing the blog or the Internet as a whole as a space). Furthermore, older blog entries function as co-text for newer ones, allowing certain information to be presented as given to the (hypothetical) consistent reader. Example 1, taken from the blog of Robert Scoble (http://scobleizer.com), a technology expert and former Microsoft employee, illustrates the rhetorical poten-

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tial of blogs. Despite being relatively informal in style, it is also clearly well planned and informative. It employs standard spelling, proper capitalization, and no use of emoticons or abbreviations typically found in synchronous CMC, although technical acronyms abound (e.g., HDTV, PVR, OPML).1 Example 1. Trial of Origin (band first linked here) beats 600 others This is cool, (hyperlink)Trial of Origin(/hyperlink) just won a BBC contest where they beat 600 other bands. I was one of the first blogs to link to this band and hope they go all the way! Speaking of music, last night Maryam and I watched American Idol on our new soopeerr-doopeer 60-inch Sony HDTV screen. Damn. That’s all I can think while watching that screen. We have to rip ourselves away from the TV to go to sleep. Blogging? Forget it. HDTV wins. It is just so stunning. Oh, funny aside. Remember my post about visiting Yellowstone National Park? So, what was on my PVR when I got home? That’s right. Sunrise show of Yellowstone’s Geysers. They look better on HDTV than they do in real life! They don’t smell, though. Question: I wanna watch the World Cup. Turns out most of the games are on ESPN2. That’s not in HD on Comcast. So, what’s the best way to get ESPN2? Since we’re talking about media, I like (hyperlink)the Podcast Readout of Share Your OPML site(/hyperlink). Is your favorite Podcast there?

Example 1 can be characterized as a relatively typical blog post as regards the use of short paragraphs, sentence fragments, interjections, deictic expressions, and first person point of view. The reader is addressed multiple times, a strategy regularly used by Scoble for involvement. Two items referred to in example 1 are set off by the use of hyperlinks (Trial of Origin, the Podcast Readout of Share Your OPML site). A referenced point in time (last night) is retrievable via the contextual (temporal) information automatically added by the blogging software, while some information (for example, Maryam, the name of the blogger’s wife) is treated as given based on an assumed familiarity of the reader with either the co-text (older blog entries in which she is introduced) or situational context (for those readers personally acquainted with the Scobles). The availability of deixis, hyperlinks, and a retrievable co-text partly combines the situatedness of speech with the permanence and stability of writing. The encoding of author and time of publication as metadata with each blog entry is the basis for the frequent analogy of blogging with interactive discourse (Puschmann 2010a – but cf. Peterson 2011 for a different characterization). The meta-information fixes a deictic center that allows reference to time and speaker/addressee relative to the point specified by the blog post.

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Audience design and adressivity

The previous section argued for the importance of metadata in relation to the composition and reception of blogs. While the blogger’s identity and the reference of spatial and temporal expressions are retrievable by the reader through this metadata, the identity of the intended recipients of a blog post is frequently much less clear. Bloggers are likely to conceptualize blog entries on a continuum between monologue and dialogue, as they can project their writing onto a variable audience. This fuzzy communicative setting is discussed in an ethnographic study by Brake (2007), who observes: To refer to ‘a-communicative’ practices built around a communications medium seems counter-intuitive, but the interviews clearly revealed a wide variety of motivations to start and to continue weblogging that had only a tenuous connection to communication. (15)

The term “audience” in this context does not, as Brake’s remark underlines, imply a specific, large, or external readership; functions such as using a blog to store information for personal use (personal knowledge management or PKM) or to record personal thoughts in the style of a diary are two uses where the blogger may have a generic, sympathetic listener, or even herself in mind. Qian and Scott (2007) and Viégas (2005) studied how bloggers conceptualize their readership and resolve potential conflicts related to the Internet’s opaque participative setting via surveys. Qian and Scott argue: The target audience is related to how much anonymity bloggers perceive themselves to have. Specifically, the bloggers in our study feel more identifiable if the audience includes people they know offline. At the same time, target audience also influences the way posts are written and what information is made available (Schiano et al 2004: 1144). When a blog is for people one knows offline (e.g., family/friends), the goal may be to identify oneself for them and to gain recognition for one’s ideas from others whose opinions matter to the blogger. (2007: para 37)

In discussing the results of her survey of practitioners, Viégas observes: Respondents’ open-ended essay answers reveal that a significant portion of the people who replied that they felt they knew their audience “fairly well” actually meant they knew their “core” audience well, that is, they knew those few people who are frequent readers and who, in many cases, leave comments on their blogs. They also noted that, for the most part, they did not know who the rest (i.e., most) of their audiences were. Although respondents were well aware that their “core” audience comprised a minor segment of their entire readership, they tended to think about their entire audience in terms of this small group of people. (2005: para 65)

Both studies agree that bloggers plan their writing with a specific (if potentially very small) audience in mind and that they consider the impact of their writing. In addition to this conceptualized audience (what Viégas calls the the “core”), a

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broader actual audience exists, which includes overhearers not anticipated by the blogger. As the conceptualized audience is what the blogger relies on when writing, problems can occur when a conflict of interest exists between conceptualized and intended audience (see Puschmann 2010a: 74 for an example). An alternative approach is to rely on the topic in order to get an idea of the audience, since knowledge of and interest in certain topics constrains a blog’s potential readership. This approach is used in example 1. A filter-style, topical focus makes sense because it acts as a domain-specific anchoring point for the reader, whereas an author-centric approach assumes that readers are at least somewhat familiar with the blogger. Nonetheless, bloggers’ expectations towards their audience frequently go beyond a mutual interest in similar topics. In her study of adolescent bloggers, Scheidt (2006) maps the style of blog entries onto projected readers in different roles: 1. A witness testifying to the experience 2. A therapist unconditionally supporting emotions 3. A cultural theorist assessing the contestation of meanings, values, and identities in the performance 4. A narrative analyst examining genre, truth, or strategy 5. A critic appraising the display of performance knowledge and skill Scheidt claims that there are gender differences in the extent to which each type of audience is addressed by teen writers, noting that the female adolescent bloggers she studied showed “a tendency toward seeking support for their individual struggles with appeals to the envisioned audience” (2006: 18), whereas boys show a tendency toward asking the audience to witness the event and notice their skill in performance. From these studies, it can be observed that audience design plays an important role in blogging and that bloggers integrate their conceptualization of the readership into their style. It is a widely held assumption that most bloggers address mass audiences, yet the findings of Brake, Qian and Scott, Viégas, and Scheidt all appear to suggest otherwise. Brake’s description of blogs as “a-communicative” and Qian and Scott’s characterization of diary blogs as secret or “near-secret” writings, aimed at very small audiences or even the self, particularly serve to emphasize this discrepancy between popular perception and everyday use. In less personal and more goal-oriented blogs, audience design and addressivity may be part of an elaborate rhetorical strategy. The use of explicit second-person address, for example, allows bloggers to negotiate complex relationships by shifting pronominal focus, in extreme cases from one clause to the next. Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, addresses both employees and external stakeholders in his blog in Example 2, illustrating this potential (personal pronouns and references to the company Sun are in bold print to highlight their prevalence).

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Example 2. We Think We Can Paraphrasing Henry Ford, “You think you can, or you think you can’t – either way, you’re right.” That quote struck me as the perfect summary of our fiscal year 2007 performance. We did what we said we’d do a year ago. As you may have seen, we’ve announced our fourth quarter and full fiscal year results (our fiscal year ends with the school year, in June). We exceeded the commitments made a year ago, to restore Sun to 4 % operating profitability in Q4, and did so by delivering our single best operational quarter since 2001. On an annual basis, we improved Sun’s profitability by over a billion dollars. A billion. We grew revenue, expanded gross margins, streamlined our operating expenses – and closed the year with an 8 % operating profit in Q4, more than double what some thought to be an aggressive target a year ago. We did this while driving significant product transitions, going after new markets and product areas, and best of all, while aggressively moving the whole company to open source software (leading me to hope we can officially put to rest the question, “how will you make money?”). And we’re not done – not by any stretch of the imagination. We have more streamlining to do, more commitments to meet, more customers to serve and developers to attract. But it’s evident we’ve got the right foundation for growing Sun – with real innovation the market values, as shown by Q4’s 47 % gross margins, the highest on record in five years. I’ll be with a variety of external audiences most of this week – and I’ll summarize their questions and comments in a few days. In the interim … to our customers, partners, and most of all, our amazing global employee base – thank you for thinking we could. You were right. Keep thinking that way. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Example 2 is clearly “more written” in style than example 1. Sentences and paragraphs are longer and more complex, and there are fewer interjections, less ellipsis, and limited, strategic use of orality markers (You ain’t seen nothin’ yet). As in example 1, first person point of view and deictic expressions (a year ago, next week) are used, but in contrast to Scoble, Schwartz addresses his readers more directly via second person pronouns. Schwartz uses we with rhetorical extension to refer to all employees of the company, including himself. But use of we in this function does not prevent him from using I to present himself as distinct from everyone at Sun or to use the full noun Sun as denoting something other than we. Instead, an intricate interplay of discourse roles is developed (see also Puschmann 2010b): –

–

We, used as subject with a range of dynamic verbs of action and movement and semantically as agent, denotes the employees of Sun Microsystems (or, in a more restrictive interpretation, the management team). I is used in contexts where agency of the institutional we would not result in a

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semantically well-formed proposition. For example, Jonathan Schwartz will summarize what external audiences have to say, since this is something that the collective company is not literally capable of doing. – You can denote the single blog reader (and all readers collectively), any single employee of Sun (and all employees collectively), and customers and partners in those contexts where Schwartz is the speaker, while it reflects back to him and the company where he paraphrases the speech of others (how will you make money?) – Sun, the company name, is used only three times and always in object position (restore Sun/grow Sun) or as part of a noun phrase in object position (Sun’s profitability), while we dominates in subject position. – The indefinite pronoun some is used once to refer explicitly to a third party, as is the expression external audiences to describe people who are not employees of the company. The rhetorical significance of institutional we becomes clear when one examines its verbal collocates, for example say, do, announce, grow, improve, and exceed, all of which are used transitively. The company’s annual earnings have not been announced by an indefinite collective of employees, but by the management team, and what we said we’d do a year ago refers to a controversial plan to refocus Sun that was formulated by Schwartz. But it is obviously of strategic value for the CEO to downplay his role and instead present the company’s success as the result of a team effort (using we instead of I). At the same time, the use of we is preferable to any other conceivable reference (you, Sun, the company, etc.) because it includes Schwartz himself, asserting an interactive discourse between bloggers and blog readers, and because it allows him to position the collective we as distinct from some outsiders who have been skeptical about the restructuring plans. While the rhetorical approach in Example 2 is not unique to blogs, the communicative setting of the blog allows almost any reader to feel addressed and adds personal credibility to Schwartz as the blog author. Although this is superficially true of many forms of mainstream media, blogs allow faster and more immediate feedback than newspapers or brochures, resulting in their frequent characterization as more democratic and direct (e.g., Trammel 2006), qualities that are of obvious benefit in organizational communication.

6.

Politeness

The observations made above about how bloggers conceptualize their audience and negotiate their relationship with it gain additional traction in relation to the concepts of face (Goffman 1955) and politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987), i.e., the desire to construct, uphold, and reinforce a positive image of the self, while at

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the same time being aware that our positive and negative face work brings us into conflict with the face work of others, leading to face-threatening acts (FTAs). Politeness is a central strategy for minimizing FTAs (Mills 2003: 6) and thus for demonstrating awareness and understanding of the need of others to construct themselves socially. The role of politeness in blogs has been investigated by Garcia-Gomez (2009), who studied the conceptualization of gender roles as expressed in the blogs of British and Spanish teenage girls, and by Kouper (2010), who explored the pragmatics of advice-giving, which she characterizes as an FTA, in a LiveJournal community. While a blog can serve as an effective tool for active face work from the perspective of the blogger, the capacity for FTAs is somewhat constrained by the fact that blogger and audience are relatively removed from each other. Inside the space of her own post, the blogger is in charge – she cannot be interrupted, pressured, threatened, or interrogated except via comments, over which she has a high degree of control. Likewise, no one person can be assumed with absolute certainty to be among the readers, therefore no reader can plausibly be interrupted, pressured, threatened, or interrogated by the blogger (but see example 4 for a case where assumed readers are addressed directly). Thus face threat understood in a way that presumes parties who are aware of each other’s presence does not really apply to blog posts, which may serve to explain their popularity as a personal space that is both visible to others and at the same time protected from undesired intervention. While bloggers quote and link to each other and engage in other activities that make FTAs possible, one’s own blog offers a certain degree of safety compared to forms of CMC that mandate interaction. As a result of what Brake (2007) refers to as the “a-communicative” approach to blogging, authors have the opportunity to express what could otherwise be interpreted as face threatening. Accounts of how blogs are conceptualized in an interactional context support this notion, as a 2004 study of bloggers’ expectations by Gumbrecht suggests: In face-to-face conversation or IM, responses are expected immediately or close to it. As a result, conversational partners may feel ill at ease when trying to broach a sensitive issue in these media. Lara said she would never tell people, “I’m really sad” in IM, yet she would have no qualms about stating it in her blog. Why? In blogs, people can choose to respond to a post or not – it is up to the reader. Over IM, conversational partners might feel obligated to respond – especially when the subject matter is as heavy as a depressed emotional state. In this way, the lack of both cotemporality and simultaneity factor into a blogger’s choice of communicative medium. (2004: 3)

The risk of a social penalty still looms when reacting in a way that can be interpreted as face-threatening, but the relative temporal and spatial distance between blogger and reader (in the virtual sense of not perceiving who else is “present”) makes certain types of FTAs implausible. In Gumbrecht’s study, this is anticipated by Lara, who prefers to articulate personal feelings in her blog rather than in chat.

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Those of her friends who do not want to articulate a reaction to Lara’s feelings can refrain from doing so without seeming insensitive. Blog readers can lurk without indicating that they have even received a message, and the blogger can likewise claim not to have addressed anyone in particular with her thoughts. Consequently, the kind of conversational offering that happens in blogs effectively removes the social pressure from the communicative partners that accumulates in a push-type mode of CMC such as email, where sending a message places pressure on the recipient to respond.

7.

Topic-centric vs. author-centric blogging styles

As has been argued in the previous sections, blogs combine a number of medial characteristics previously associated with distinct forms of public and private discourse. Findings such as those of Argamon et al. (2007) regarding the stylistic properties of blogs are suggestive of changes over the lifespan, as bloggers’ needs for different forms of expression change and expectations towards readers shift. With relatively few exceptions, a blog is a controlled discourse environment belonging to an individual and shaped largely by his or her personal tastes and needs; therefore, the needs a blog fulfills are more individually shaped that in most other genres of public expression. While readers can participate via comments and trackbacks, this occurs only if the blogger allows it. What is recorded in a blog is permanent and (again, with few exceptions) public, while at the same time being directed entirely by the blogger. These situational characteristics can be considered in concert with stylistic properties to make an argument for two distinct approaches to blogging: a topic-centric style and an author-centric style. These styles follow the basic distinction between diary-style and filter-style content proposed by Herring et al. (2005), but they attempt to capture purpose via the relationship between blogger and reader that is implicit in the text, rather than directly via content. A discussion of two examples illustrates this. Example 3. (topic-centric blogging style) “Cuil it?” I Don’t Think So. When I teach trademark law classes, I always advise that students select strong protectable marks, and the class invariably balks because they want to select marks that suggest or connote something about the goods or services at issue. That, I tell them, is the touchstone of a weak mark, and for examples I look to the Internet space: Google, Yahoo!, Zillow, and so on are perfect trademarks because they say nothing about the goods or services with which they are associated. And now along comes cuil.com (pronounced “cool”), the much-ballyhooed Googlekiller. Great mark, right? “Cuil” says nothing about “Internet search engine,” and is in fact apparently an old Irish or Gaelic word for “knowledge.” But here’s the rub: “Google” is becoming a verb in the lexicon very quickly, which is typically anathema to

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a trademark, but there’s not much Google can do to stop everyone from saying, e.g., “Go Google that.” But can you say, e.g., “I am going to ‘cuil’ it?” You could, but people would hear you say, “I am going to cool it,” and the meaning is lost. Moral – a great trademark has to be both non-descriptive AND sound cool (pun intended) and distinctive. Now let’s just see if Google goes the way of “escalator” and becomes generic for Internet search services … Example 4. (author-centric blogging style) My birthday Well, it was my first birthday away from the family. It was interesting … teasin! it wasnt as bad as i thought and i practiced for my mission. I woke up and texted sis because she was born on my b-day, for those of you who forogt. Teasin sis! Umm i talked to mom and dad and the rest of the family throughout the day. Thanks for the calls everyone. Uhh … i went to breakfast (the good ol Galley) with Jane and Mike and afterwards ran home to find a package sent from Mom and the famoly in cali. I went to a basketball game and we won. Then i went out to dinner with a bunch of friends and ate hecka food. Afterwards we came back to Jane’s and opened presents from Jane and Paul. Paul gave me a journal his mom gave him … that was special and i needed one so im thankful for it. Jane gave me the Spanish Book of Mormon. I was pretty excited cause now im gonna be fluent in Espanol! She also gave me an awesome CTR ring because I have been wearing Paul’s old one for the last year. Umm it also spins so it is way tight. Then I came back to my dorm and Paul and I opened the rest of my presents. The Johnsons gave me some nice notes and hecka food which is gettin me fat. haha thanks! O and thanks Sue for the Head and Shoulder bottle. You’ll be gettin it back sometime haha! And then I opened the fam in Cali’s package. I got a sweet shirt that had my Mission on the back. Linda gave me the hymn book in Spanish, its pocket sized. And then a CD and hecka more food. Grandma also sent a letter. Shes awesome! And that was my b-day! This might be boring sorry!

Examples 3 and 4, both taken from personal blogs with small audiences (rather than “pro” blogs), share certain properties: first-person voice and deictic expressions are used in both posts, in combination with particles and connectives (discourse markers) typically used in spoken language or in writing that consciously imitates speech. Both involve the reader directly via use of direct address (example 3: let’s, you; example 4: you, everyone) and indirectly by using oral style markers. Example 3 is more conservative and follows stylistic norms for written language more closely, while example 4 is more progressive in its use of expressions typically found in online speech production, such as fillers, reductions, and phatic exclamatives (uhh, umm, hecka, teasin, gettin, b-day, haha). The use of fillers in example 4 runs counter to the claim that blog entries are spontaneous and unplanned (Crystal 2006: 15), as there is no cognitive need in a blog entry to buy time while formulating an utterance. Rather, the fillers in this example make the text appear more speechlike and authentic, which can be assumed to conform with the blogger’s intentions and allows inferences regarding his conceptualized audience.

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The examples differ from one another in that example 3 is written in the style of an exposition: It presents an argument from the point of view of the blogger and offers his informed opinion on an aspect of trademark law. Example 4, by contrast, is written in the style of a personal oral narrative, relating a series of events to the reader. Crucially, the names and events in example 4 are not readily interpretable to a random reader, but only to those who are at least somewhat familiar with the author. The author of example 3 consciously provides contextual information in order to make his writing more accessible to a non-familiar audience – for example, by beginning his post with the relative clause When I teach trademark law classes instead of the main clause I always advise that students select strong protectable marks. His intended audience is therefore likely to extend beyond his students (to whom he refers in the third person) to a general readership interested in trademark law, while the conceptualized readership in example 4 seems more specific, including the blogger’s sister (Teasin sis!) and those people who called to congratulate him for his birthday (Thanks for the calls everyone). While the opinions articulated in example 3 are personally associated with the blogger, they are relatively independent of any single event, making them useful to a generic reader (assuming the reader is interested in the subject matter) regardless of when exactly the post is read or whether blogger and reader are personally acquainted. In contrast, the event related in example 4 is more specified not only in terms of audience, but also in terms of the time of its anticipated reception. It is important to note that the relevance of both examples depends entirely on the identity of the reader – example 4 is without doubt important to the intended audience of family and friends, which could well be larger than the readership of the trademark blog. Examples 3 and 4 represent two individual styles among countless possible approaches to blogging. Not only do the styles vary considerably across authors, but the style of a single blogger can vary over longer periods of time, from one post to the next, and even within a single entry. An author-centric blog post might conform to standard orthography and be stylistically in line with writing prescriptions, while a topic-centric blog one might not. The choice of topic and degree of cooperation with the reader (in terms of propositional explicitness; cf. Grice 1989) indicate the tendencies of topic-centric and author-centric blogging, but this is far from a black and white distinction. Table 1 summarizes the prototypical characteristics of the two styles. Fluidity of purpose (and, resulting from this, fluidity of style and content) is endemic to blogs, and therefore a wide area of intermediate forms of use lies between the two extremes. The distinction between topic-centric and author-centric styles is not intended as a clear-cut system of categorization, but rather as a way of systematizing the different audiences and intentions that bloggers associate with their activity. The distinction can be seen as an extension of the categories proposed by Blood (2002) and Herring et al. (2005), but with emphasis on the relationship of blogger, assumed reader, and purpose, rather than on developing a system of

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Topic-centric vs. author-centric blogging styles

Dimension

Topic-centric style

Author-centric style

Style

more formal and conceptually written

less formal and conceptually closer to speech

Favored topics

focus on the external world, e.g., politics, entertainment, business, religion, work

focus on the internal world, i.e., the blogger’s experiences, daily life, thoughts, emotions

Self-editing

information is first presented to the reader and then evaluated and commented on; planned

information is presented in close relation to the blogger’s own thought process; spontaneous

Conceptualized audience

more distant, unfamiliar, and generic (liberals, republicans, lawyers, movie buffs, students)

closer, more familiar, and specific (self, family, friends)

Functions

inform others, indicate a stance or opinion to others, gain recognition, acquire expert status

make sense of and reflect on one’s life, stabilize self, control and record own thought process or other information, establish structure, causality, and order

Anonymity

generally attributable

may be anonymous or pseudonymous

Analogy

publishing

recording

Mode

exposition/argumentation

narration/stream of consciousness

Linguistic encoding/ decoding

hard to encode, easy to decode

easy to encode, hard to decode

Frequent linguistic features (cf. Herring and Paolillo 2006)

articles, demonstratives, complex noun phrases

personal pronouns

Hyperlinks, quotes, comments, and tagging

more frequent hyperlinks, quotes, comments, and use of tagging

fewer hyperlinks, quotes, comments, and use of tagging

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content classification. Findings on gender and age (Herring, Kouper, et al. 2004; Huffaker and Calvert 2005) can be associated with the distinction: older males tend to blog more topic-centricly, while females and teenagers of both genders more frequently choose an author-centric style. Rather than concluding that age and gender simplistically impact language use, it instead seems sensible to argue that users of different genders and age groups pick styles appropriate to their envisioned target audience (ranging from the self to a broad public) and their communicative goals (ranging from self-expression to the accumulation of social capital) and then write accordingly.

8.

Outlook

Weblogs have moved from a niche format to a well-known and thoroughly international genre of computer-mediated communication in less than a decade. They continue to thrive as personal publishing platforms, while newer, even more rapid forms of “lifelogging” such as Facebook status messages and microblogging services such as Twitter may be overtaking them as tools for self-documentation. Multimedia blogging on platforms such as YouTube continues to thrive, showing that a need for mediated self-expression extends well beyond writing. Blogs are written in an ever-increasing number of languages, calling for more research on blogs in languages other than English (cf. Russell and Echchaibi 2009; Schlobinski and Siever 2005). Linguistic analysis of blogs reveals a wide variety of uses and contexts, with potential for research that, while using language as the diagnostic, is able to address questions that go beyond structural linguistics. A challenge for researchers investigating blogs continues to be striking the right balance between text and practice, especially since large-scale analyses based on content are ever easier to conduct in the age of cheap and ubiquitous computational resources. Such imbalances can be avoided by incorporating findings from neighboring disciplines such as communication, ethnography, sociology, and social psychology, using them to contextualize language-based approaches. This chapter has sought to characterize blogs as a form of mediated language use that affords its users a range of communicative options. Blogs dynamically combine characteristics of speech and writing due to their format, mode of production, and the communicative situation they create via the encoding of metadata. This makes them a versatile tool for expression and communication that is likely to continue to interest scholars from a variety of disciplines in the future.

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Note 1. HD = High Definition, HDTV = High Definition Television, PVR = Personal Video Recorder, OPML = Outline Processor Markup Language. BBC and ESPN2 are British and American TV stations.

References Adamic, Lada A. and Natalie Glance 2005 The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: Divided they blog. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery, 36–43. Chicago, IL: ACM. Ali-Hasan, Noor F. and Lada A. Adamic 2007 Expressing social relationships on the blog through links and comments. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Boulder, CO. http://www.icwsm.org/papers/paper19.html Argamon, Shlomo, Moshe Koppel, James W. Pennebaker, and Jonathan Schler 2007 Mining the blogosphere: Age, gender and the varieties of self-expression. First Monday 12(9). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ article/view/2003/1878 Armstrong, Laurie, Marsha Berry, and Reece Lamshed 2004 Blogs as electronic learning journals. e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology 7(1). http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol7_No1/ CurrentPractice/Blogs.htm Askehave, Inger and Anne E. Nielsen 2005 Digital genres: A challenge to traditional genre theory. Information Technology & People 18(2): 120–141. Baltatzis, Patrick 2006 Is blogging innovating journalism? Innovation Journalism 3(4): 85–95. Blood, Rebecca 2000 Weblogs: A history and perspective. Rebecca’s Pocket. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html Blood, Rebecca 2002 The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining your Blog. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. boyd, danah 2006 A blogger’s blog: Exploring the definition of a medium. Reconstruction 6(4). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/boyd.shtml boyd, danah, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan 2010 Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. http://csdl.computer.org/dl/proceedings/hicss/2010/3869/00/03–06–04.pdf Brake, David 2007 Personal webloggers and their audiences: Who do they think they are talking to? In: Marika Luders, Lin Prøitz, and Terja Rasmussen (eds.), Personlige

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Medier. Livet mellom skjermene (Personal Media. Life Between the Screens), 141–163. Oslo: Gyldendal. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Bruns, Axel and Joanne Jacobs 2006 Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang. Chung, Cindy and James W. Pennebaker 2007 The psychological function of function words. In: Klaus Fiedler (ed.), Social Communication, 343–359. New York: Psychology Press. Crystal, David 2006 Language and the Internet. London: Cambridge University Press. Drezner, Daniel and Henry Farrell 2004 The power and politics of blogs. Paper presented at the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, September 2–5. http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/blogpaperfinal.pdf Efimova, Lilia and Sebastian Fiedler 2004 Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks. In: Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference Web Based Communities, 490–494. Vienna: INSO Publications. Efimova, Lilia and Jonathan Grudin 2007 Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 86–99. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Efimova, Lilia, Stephanie Hendrick, and Anjo Anjewierden 2005 Finding “the life between buildings”: An approach for defining a weblog community. In: Proceedings of Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations. https://doc.novay.nl/dsweb/Get/File-55092/AOIR_blog_communities.pdf Ewins, Rory 2005 Who are you? Weblogs and academic identity. E-Learning 2(4): 368–377. Garcia-Gomez, Antonio 2009 Teenage girls’ personal weblog writing: Truly a new gender discourse? Information, Communication & Society 12(5): 611–638. Goffman, Erving 1955 On face-work; an analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. Psychiatry 18(3): 213–231. Gopal, Sucharita 2007 The evolving social geography of blogs. In: Harvey J. Miller (ed.), Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access, 275–293. Berlin: Springer. Grice, H. Paul 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gumbrecht, Michelle 2004 Blogs as “protected space”. In: Proceedings of the WWW 2004 Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics. New York. http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/www2004gumbrecht.pdf Gurak, Laura J. and Smiljana Antonijevic 2008 The psychology of blogging: You, me, and everyone in between. American Behavioral Scientist 52(1): 60–68.

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Herring, Susan C., Inna Kouper, Lois A. Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright 2004 Women and children last: The discursive construction of weblogs. In: Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman (eds.), Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs [Internet volume]. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html Herring, Susan C. and John C. Paolillo 2006 Gender and genre variation in weblogs. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 439–459. Herring, Susan C., Lois A. Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus, and Elijah L. Wright 2004 Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 101–111. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Herring, Susan C., Lois A. Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus, and Elijah L. Wright 2005 Weblogs as a bridging genre. Information Technology & People 18(2): 142–171. Honeycutt, Courtenay and Susan C. Herring 2009 Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1–10. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Huffaker, David. A. and Sandra L. Calvert 2005 Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(2), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html Jackson, Anne, JoAnne Yates, and Wanda Orlikowski 2007 Corporate blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 80–97. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Java, Akshay, Xiodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng 2007 Why we twitter: Understanding microblogging usage and communities. In: Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis, 56–65. San Jose, CA: ACM. Joinson, Adam N. 2008 Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people?: Motives and use of facebook. In: Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1027–1036. Florence, Italy: ACM. Karlsson, Lena 2006 Acts of reading diary weblogs. Human IT 8(2): 1–59. Kelleher, Tom and Barbara M. Miller 2006 Organizational blogs and the human voice: Relational strategies and relational outcomes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(2), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/kelleher.html Kouper, Inna 2010 The pragmatics of peer advice in a LiveJournal community. Language@Internet 7, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2464/index_html/

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Krishnamurthy, Sandeep 2002 The multidimensionality of blog conversations: The virtual enactment of September 11. Paper presented at Internet Research 3.0, Maastricht, The Netherlands, October. Kutchera, Joe 2008 Navigate the blogosphere’s biggest ad networks. iMediaConnection.com. September 12. http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/20486.asp Lenhart, Amanda and Susannah Fox 2006 Bloggers: A portrait of the Internet’s new storytellers. Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 19. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/Bloggers.aspx Lenhart, Amanda, Kirsten Purcell, Aaron Smith, and Kathryn Zickuhr 2010 Social media and young adults. Pew Internet & American Life Project, February 3. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Mediaand-Young-Adults.aspx Lomborg, Stine 2009 Navigating the blogosphere: Towards a genre-based typology of weblogs. First Monday 14(5). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/ fm/article/viewArticle/2329/2178 McLean, Jennifer 2009 State of the blogosphere 2009. Technorati.com, October 19. http://technorati.com/blogging/feature/state-of-the-blogosphere-2009/ McNeill, Laurie 2003 Teaching an old genre new tricks: The diary on the Internet. Biography 26(1): 24–47. McNeill, Laurie 2005 Genre under construction: The diary on the Internet. Language@Internet 2, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2005/120 Merriam-Webster 2004 Merriam-Webster announces 2004 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Online, November. http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/pr/2004-words-of-year.htm Miller, Carolyn R. and Dawn Shepherd 2004 Blogging as social action: A genre analysis of the weblog. In: Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman (eds.), Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs [Internet volume]. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_ action_a_genre_analysis_of_the_weblog.html Miller, Carolyn R. and Dawn Shepherd 2009 Questions for genre theory from the blogosphere. In: Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein (eds.), Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre, 263–290. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mills, Sara 2003 Gender and Politeness. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 17. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Mishne, Gilad 2005 Experiments with mood classification in blog posts. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2005 Workshop on Stylistic Analysis of Text for Information Access. http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gilad/pubs/style2005-blogmoods.pdf

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Myers, Greg 2010 The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis. London: Continuum. Nardi, Bonnie, Diane J. Schiano, and Michelle Gumbrecht 2004 Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 222–231. Chicago, IL: ACM. Niles, Robert 2007 Are blogs a ‘parasitic’ medium? OJR: Online Journalism Review, March 2. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070301niles/ Nilsson, Stephanie 2003 The function of language to facilitate and maintain social networks in research weblogs. Unpublished manuscript, Umeå Universitet, Engelska lingvistik. http://www.eng.umu.se/Stephanie/web/LanguageBlogs.pdf Nowson, Scott, Jon Oberlander, and Alastair J. Gill 2005 Weblogs, genres and individual differences. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1666–1671. Project for Excellence in Journalism 2008 The state of the news media 2008: An annual report on American journalism. http://stateofthemedia.org/2008/ Peterson, Eric E. 2011 How conversational are weblogs? Language@Internet 8, article 8. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2011/Peterson Puschmann, Cornelius 2009 Lies at Wal-Mart: Style and the subversion of genre in the Life at Wal-Mart blog. In: Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein (eds.), Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre, 49–84. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Puschmann, Cornelius 2010a The Corporate Blog as an Emerging Genre of Computer-Mediated Communication: Features, Constraints, Discourse Situation. Göttinger Schriften zur Internetforschung. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen. Puschmann, Cornelius 2010b “Thank you for thinking we could”? – use and function of interpersonal pronouns in corporate web logs. In: Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner (eds.), Approaches to Syntactic Variation and Genre,167–194. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. Qian, Hua and Craig R. Scott 2007 Anonymity and self-disclosure on weblogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(4), article 14. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/qian.html Rosenberg, Scott 2009 Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. New York: Crown. Russell, Adrienne and Nabil Echchaibi 2009 International Blogging: Identity, Politics and Networked Publics. New York: Peter Lang. Scheidt, Lois A. 2006 Adolescent diary weblogs and the unseen audience. In: David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett (eds.), Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media, 193–210. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Scheidt, Lois A. 2009 Diary weblogs as genre. Indiana University School of Library & Information Science doctoral qualifying paper. http://professional-lurker.com/linked/2008/quals/diary_weblog_genre.pdf Schiano, Diane J., Bonnie Nardi, Michelle Gumbrecht, and Luke Swartz 2004 Blogging by the rest of us. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1143–1146. http://home.comcast.net/~diane.schiano/CHI04.Blog.pdf Schler, Jonathan, Moshe Koppel, Shlomo Argamon, and James W. Pennebaker 2006 Effects of age and gender on blogging. In: AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs (AAAI–CAAW), 199–205. Schlobinski, Peter and Torsten Siever 2005 Sprachliche und textuelle Aspekte in Weblogs. Ein internationales Projekt. Networx, 46. http://www.mediensprache.net/de/networx/docs/networx-46.asp Schmidt, Jan 2007 Blogging practices: An analytical framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(4), article 13. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/schmidt.html Sprague, Robert 2007 Business blogs and commercial speech: A new analytical framework for the 21st Century. American Business Law Journal 44(1): 127–159. Stefanone, Michael A. and Chyn-Yang Jang 2007 Writing for friends and family: The interpersonal nature of blogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1), article 7. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/stefanone.html Suzuki, Renata 2004 Diaries as introspective research tools: From Ashton-Warner to blogs. TESL-EJ 8(1). http://www-writing.berkeley.edu:16080/TESl-EJ/ej29/int.html Swales, John 1990 Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. London: Cambridge University Press. Trammell, Kaye D. 2006 Blog offensive: An exploratory analysis of attacks published on campaign blog posts from a political public relations perspective. Public Relations Review 32(4): 402–406. Viégas, Fernanda B. 2005 Bloggers’ expectations of privacy and accountability: An initial survey. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(3), article 12. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/viegas.html White, David and Phillip Winn 2009 State of the blogosphere 2008. Technorati.com, August 21. http://technorati.com/blogging/feature/state-of-the-blogosphere-2008/ Winer, David 2001 The history of weblogs. UserLand Software, September 9. http://www.userland.com/theHistoryOfWeblogs

5.

Real-time chat John C. Paolillo and Asta Zelenkauskaite

1.

Introduction

Chat is a computer-mediated communication (CMC) mode in which users who are simultaneously sharing a computer system exchange text messages. Messages tend to be short, and they appear for users as soon as they are available. The immediate display and consequent interchange of chat messages has an immediacy that has been called “conversational” (hence “chat”), “interactive”, and “synchronous”, although these terms have acquired distinct technical meanings. Chat may involve two or more participants, with large chats sometimes having hundreds of participants. Technical protocols supporting chat are varied, so chat occurs in a broad range of contexts, especially on the Internet, where it can be found in dedicated chat networks such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC), associated with specific websites via special chat “applets” or server scripts, integrated into general connection software such as that provided by the United States Internet Service Provider AOL, as part of multiplayer online games and virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, or built into online courseware tools, among other places. The applications of chat are similarly varied, and its presence on the Internet is nearly ubiquitous. In this chapter, we primarily address multiparticipant text-based chat, leaving dyadic forms of interactive CMC (e.g., instant messaging, ICQ) to be addressed elsewhere. The interactive or conversational nature of chat, alongside its long-standing association with recreational uses, makes chat interesting from a pragmatic perspective. As an interactive text-based form of discourse (Cherny 1999; Ferrara, Brunner, and Whittemore 1991; Werry 1996), it invites linguists to speculate on and test their assumptions about the relationship between linguistic form and communication mode. The demands of real-time interaction constrain opportunities to edit, and hence one might rely on more automatic processes than in writing (Reid 1991), although non-automatic processes might still be dominant (Zitzen and Stein 2004). Interaction in chat invokes the possibility of control or transfer of control of the discourse via claiming and yielding the floor, turn-taking, repair, and other mechanisms (Herring 1999; Herring and Nix 1997; Markman 2005; Rintel and Pittam 1997; Schonfeldt and Golato 2003). In addition, multiparticipant chat, with potentially larger numbers of participants than other modes of conversation, challenges theories of conversation management (cf. Dresner and Barak 2006). Finally, chat users, their broad-ranging demographic backgrounds, and the numerous contexts and purposes of chat offer a range of linguistically relevant contextual vari-

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ation ripe for investigation (e.g., Androutsopoulos and Hinnenkamp 2001; Paolillo 2001; Siebenhaar 2006; Zelenkauskaite 2004). Codeswitching commands considerable attention in chat research, as the research contexts are often international, multilingual, and multicultural. The linguistics and pragmatics literature often exhibits a somewhat coarsegrained approach to chat. It is common to find general statements about chat language, as if it were one monolithic entity (e.g., Crystal 2001; Ferrara et al. 1991). However, as we explain in this chapter, chat has many different forms, with different technical and social characteristics, which may be distinguished as different modes of chat (Murray 1988; Herring 2001, 2002), i.e., conventional clusters of social and technical features around which people orient. Different chat modes have different pragmatic properties in a way that depends on the technical features of the mode. The linguistic and other social science literature related to chat revolves around the technical contributions to the types of interaction observed; indeed, it is impossible to ignore the issues raised by technical features of chat. Hence, the exposition in this chapter foregrounds technical features of different chat modes as a starting point for the framing of pragmatic research questions about chat. In this chapter, we survey the current and past literature on chat, aiming to highlight its pragmatics, to consolidate the evidence explaining the nature of chat, and to indicate gaps in scholarly understanding needing to be addressed by future research. We focus exclusively on multiparticipant text-based chat, as opposed to instant messaging (discussed by Baron in this volume) or multimedia chat, and emphasize the central role of IRC as a historical reference point for different chat modes. This chapter is organized as follows. In the next section, we consider what chat CMC modes have in common, following which we discuss specific modes of chat in historical, social, and technical contexts to illustrate how its pragmatics varies according to mode. In section three, we describe several pragmatic phenomena associated with chat. Finally, we synthesize these findings to generalize about the pragmatics of chat and identify a range of research questions that remain open for investigation.

2.

The technical and social nature of chat

On a technical level, chat is a synchronous form of CMC, meaning that participants must be online at the same time to communicate. Chat communication is “oneway” (Herring 2007) or “half duplex” (Cherny 1999), in that messages are only transmitted when identified as complete by the user (by hitting return or enter), instead of character-by-character as they are composed (“two-way” or “full duplex”). Chat is displayed with each user’s messages on separate lines, in the order in which the messages were received by the system, each prefixed with the name of

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the sending user. A chat display thus superficially reads like a dramatic script, a format that easily represents multiparticipant as well as dyadic exchanges. Chat is typically organized according to “chat rooms” or “chat channels”, which delineate the bounds of participation. Users present in the room can participate; those not present or excluded from the room cannot. Chat rooms can be either moderated, in which case moderators with special privileges control participation in the chat room, or unmoderated. Chat rooms typically have an identifying title or name, possibly indicating a specific geographic region, ethnicity, sub-cultural group, hobby, fan group, or other affiliation. The name advertises a chat room to potential participants with appropriate interests. A room may also have a “topic of the day”, but the existence of a topic does not necessarily imply that users spend time discussing it, and topics are sometimes used for other purposes, such as teasing (e.g., Erickson 2000). Chat participants have various options in representing their identities. Because chat systems seldom require authentication, and users can choose any name for themselves, users can easily conceal their off-line identities. Often users have multiple nicknames, thus further obscuring identity. Anonymity may make users more willing to reveal personal information; other times, play with identity permits experimentation for personal or merely ludic reasons (Danet 1998, 2001; Danet, Ruedenberg-Wright, and Rosenbaum-Tamari 1995). The textual nature of chat means that information otherwise conveyed nonverbally, such as intonation, facial expressions, and proxemics, must also be represented as text. Hence, chat uses textual paralinguistic cues, including repetition of characters for emphasis (e.g., “nooooo!”), emoticons or smileys (e.g., “:-)” or “:)” representing a rotated smiling face; “O.O” representing a wide-eyed stare), ASCII art (e.g., “@>--,-’- ->--” and similar “rose” variants, often “given” to others; these are generally assigned to hotkeys or pasted in from files), as well as specialized abbreviations (e.g., “lol” for “laugh out loud”). At times, these strategies are combined: “lolololololololol”, for example, represents a sustained burst of laughter. These features of chat language were among the earliest to receive scholarly attention (Danet et al. 1995; Werry 1996). Chat communication thus encourages informal, spontaneous communication, while the presence of multiple participants makes it more public than private. Hence, chat interaction has much in common with casual social interaction at parties or public settings. At the same time, its unusual structure and requirements for interaction management, and the wide variation in its contexts and content, make chat pragmatically complex. Chat’s historical roots go back to the early 1970s, when timesharing computing systems first became widespread. Such systems generally provided programs for simultaneously connected users to communicate with one another. Early examples of these facilities are programs like the Unix command write, which, as its name suggests, writes a message directly to another user’s screen, and Unix talk and

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VAX phone, which provided a split-screen interface with full-duplex transmission for two users to communicate. The system described in Ferrara et al. (1991) is essentially a modified version of VAX phone. Most later versions of software for synchronous communication, which become collectively known as “chat”, eliminated both the split screen and character-by-character transmission in favor of a scrolling script and one-way transmission. 2.1.

MUDs and MOOs

Beginning in the late 1970s, the technical and social evolution of chat was influenced by designers of interactive fiction or “Adventure” games,1 through the development of multiparticipant variants. These became known as “MUDs” (“multiuser dimensions” or “multiuser dungeons”, after the Dungeons and Dragons game they often emulated) or “MOOs” (“MUD object-oriented”,2 after the programming language embedded in them). As multiuser computer environments, they permit simultaneously connected users to interact via the system. This makes chat a central feature of the environment. At the same time, they regulate who can interact via chat according to the players’ state within the environment, such as their locations within the fantasy world (Cherny 1999). While MUDs and MOOs were originally developed as games, users generally observe a sharp distinction between MUDs/MOOs intended for gaming and those intended for social interaction (“social MUDs/MOOs”), a use which came nearly a full decade after the first MUDs. Users tend to have a strong preference for one or the other type of interaction, but it is unclear to what extent the distinction plays a role in the nature of MUD/MOO communication, e.g., linguistic pragmatics. Linguistic distinctions are observed across different social MOOs (Cherny 1999) but have yet to be demonstrated for the social/gaming distinction.3 Regardless, all MUDs and MOOs have a set of features that reflect their origin in games. A user is represented by a “character”, with a complex set of attributes (clothing, artifacts, skills, magic, etc.) conveyed via textual descriptions displayed by appropriate commands. The environment constrains what commands are available, and some commands advance the narrative or game; e.g., “west” is a command to move one’s character to the west, causing that room’s description to be displayed and the environment’s state to be altered. Unlike in other chat modes, communication is not a default action; it requires an explicit command (e.g., “say”). A transcript showing the results of some typical command types is given in (1), from Cherny (1999: 42). (1) An example transcript from ElseMOO, a social MOO Command type Displayed (system message) 1 Karen arrives from the eastern end of the patio emote 2 lynn waves emote 3 Shelly waves

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emote emote emote say say

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4 ls [to Karen]: Hi. I just walked you here at your request, since you’re in the car and nowhere near a computer on the net. 5 Penfold whuggles Karen. 6 Tom eyes Karen warily. 7 lynn eyes Karen and ls warily. 8 Tom says, “WHY” 9 ls says, “she, uh, thought it would be cool to hang out with you guys.”

Example (1) illustrates the three most important messages types in chat. Line 1 represents a system message, triggered in response to events beyond any user’s immediate control, as when someone enters of leaves a room. Lines 8 and 9 represent the “say” command, used for normal communications among users, and lines 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 represent “emotes”, also called “actions”. Emotes permit users to describe imagined activities in a third-person perspective, as in written fiction, and the user’s text is displayed in a form distinct from that of “say”. Says and emotes have different saliencies, and emotes are involved in many linguistic innovations, e.g., those affecting the semantics of present tense inflection (Cherny 1999: 199ff). Most chat systems support these three types of messages, though they may convey them differently. Line 4 represents a directed speech command found in ElseMOO, but not supported by all chat systems. Many commands simplify typing commonly-used text through substitution of ritualized elements. For example, in an emote, the user types “emote waves” (or its shorthand equivalent “:waves”); the system substitutes the user’s name for the command, so that it comes out “lynn waves”, as in line 2. (On the performative nature of this usage, see Virtanen, this volume.) Since all commands produce text after some suitable computation, MUDs and MOOs can permit extending the command set via “scripts” written in a computer programming language. Objects are programmed in much the same way, as repositories of textual descriptions displayed using common commands (such as “get” and “drop”) or commands specific to that object. Consequently, in MUDs and MOOs, but also in other chat environments, programming skill can be an important social resource, as it is necessary for customizing the environment. The programmed nature of the text can also have effects of its own on the nature of the language used in the chat environment (Cherny 1999). MUD and MOO culture is highly diverse, and the community has some sharp social boundaries, even where they are regularly traversed (Cherny 1999: 33–38). ElseMOO even has an abbreviation “tinflm” (“this is not fucking LambdaMOO”) that is used to identify such boundaries of acceptable activity (LambdaMOO is a large MOO originally established as a research project at Xerox PARC; ElseMOO was formed by participants from LambdaMOO who tired of certain interactions

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there, resulting in much sensitivity to boundaries as well as effort for their maintenance). In addition to the distinction between gaming and social interaction, community divisions are found around other issues, such as the kind of fantasy permitted. For example, in ElseMOO, characters with non-human descriptions were prohibited, but these were common on LambdaMOO (Cherny 1999: 61). Linguistic practices also vary within the community, and strong sanctions may be imposed for modes of expression marked as “outside” of whatever local group is concerned (Cherny 1999: 93–95); on ElseMOO these include the abbreviated “r” and “u” variants of “are” and “you” that are common elsewhere in chat. While MUDs and MOOs no longer command the popularity that they once did, most online games (as well as virtual worlds for social and educational purposes) now support some form of chat as a standard feature, and the nature of that chat, its relationship to programming, and its various practices draw heavily from chat in MUDs and MOOs. Use of chat in online games such as World of Warcraft, for instance, is a core gaming competence and an integral part of the gaming experience. 2.2.

AOL chat

In the mid-1980s, online services for video gaming and personal computing began to offer chat services to their customers.4 One such company was Control Video Corporation, which later evolved into America OnLine (AOL), for which chat remains a mainstay. As in MUDs and MOOs, AOL chat was part of a system of services originally offered to video game aficionados. Consequently, AOL chat can be considered to have been designed for recreational, rather than serious, uses. In the 1990s, many members of the general public were exposed to chat via AOL, whose chat service was expanded to audiences beyond its original focus on video gaming. AOL’s implementation of chat came with very tight top-down controls. Chat rooms were created (and removed) by AOL, and a system of paid and volunteer moderators was employed to regulate chat interaction. Almost all chat contexts have explicit or implicit policies on what constitutes acceptable speech (netiquette); where AOL chat differs from normal practice elsewhere is that the policies are set at a company-wide level, without direct user involvement. Enforcement of AOL policies is sometimes controversial, as when an English-only policy was enforced on chat rooms discussing International Football (FIFA) in 1996.5 At the time, AOL claimed they lacked moderators for the chat rooms fluent enough in Spanish to filter out obscene comments. AOL also promoted “celebrity chat”, in which an entertainment celebrity “hosts” one or more chat sessions at scheduled times; additional moderators are generally employed to filter the chat between ordinary subscribers and the celebrity. These circumstances further highlight the asymmetric social roles in AOL chat and have consequences for turn-taking and interaction management (cf. Beißwenger 2007; Beißwenger and Storrer 2008).

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Figure 1. A screen shot of the IRC client mIRC connecting to the #beginner channel on the Italian server irc2.tin.it (Zelenkauskaite 2004)

2.3.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen released Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as an open source program. Free distribution rapidly raised the visibility of multiparticipant chat: Chat was freed from proprietary pay-per-use online services, and large, unbounded networks of chat users (and associated computers) could be created. IRC thus became a de facto standard against which other chat implementations are compared. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the IRC client mIRC connected to a channel on an IRC server based in Italy. IRC interaction is organized into “channels”, usually according to topic. Channels may be created by any user; the founding user is granted special privileges for that channel by the system (known as “operator privileges” or “ops”), which allows him or her to control participation in the channel by excluding (“kicking”, “banning”, or “muting”) users from the channel. Operators can in turn grant ops to others as proxies. Channels may be created as private or public, as a further control of visibility and participation. IRC servers are often connected into networks. Channels and user identities are shared across servers in a network, and the pool of participants and channels grows with network size to thousands of channels and

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participants. IRC networks thus function as enormous social markets. IRC also permits direct client-to-client connections (DCC) where communications are handled directly by participants’ computers, without involving the network. DCC is used for private chat between two participants or for transfers of binary files such as documents, images, and software. Other features, such as “actions”, resemble the emote feature of MUDs and MOOs but are less sophisticated. Unlike in MUDs and MOOs, user identities in IRC were not originally intended to persist beyond a single user session. When a user connects to a server, s/he is required to select a globally unique nickname (“nick”). However, nothing requires a user to have the same nick in a subsequent session or prevents someone else from using the same nick in a different episode. Users may also change their nicks in mid-session, and users are even permitted to exchange nicks, sometimes leading to playful exploitation of identity (Danet 1998). In general, however, users prefer to maintain only a small number of nicks, in which they tend to become invested, and impersonation often leads to the offender being banned. While spatial metaphors and formal games are not a characteristic of IRC, programmed text and programming skills are common among users, especially since clients are generally “scriptable” (i.e., programmed using a programming language interpreter embedded in the client). Scripts can be unsophisticated, e.g., spitting out random song lyrics or jokes from a file, or highly sophisticated, e.g., responding to specific events or typed text on a channel. The most sophisticated scripts are known as “bots”, short for “robots”. Bots usually serve as a proxy for an operator or a group of operators in their absence, permitting a clique of operators to assert their presence on a channel round-the-clock (Paolillo 2001). This is often done on large channels, where constantly-changing membership may lead to confusion about who deserves to enforce speaking rights. Lack of a negotiated hierarchy of operators can lead to “op wars”, where multiple contesting groups of operators disrupt a channel’s participation and vie for its control. Hackers are frequent participants in op wars, sometimes instigating them as an anti-social form of amusement (Paolillo 2001). The social environment of IRC is thus hierarchically structured, but governed by many layers of ad hoc technical and social arrangements. Channels have operators but exist on servers run by server owners, who have agreements with other server owners, and who may be responsible to local computer administrators. While hierarchical, these relations are informal and highly dynamic, sometimes changing moment-to-moment according to the availability and/or status of participants. Power thus plays a major role in structuring chat interaction, although it may arise in different ways. Among operators on IRC channels, mutual support cliques exercise local power on a channel (Paolillo 2001). In educational settings, the instructor, who is institutionally empowered, functions also as moderator (Herring and Nix 1997; Osman and Herring 2007). Network-wide, other administrators using various forms of delegation may determine the roles that individual people

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play in a chat environment and in what specific ways they are empowered. Sometimes these roles are negotiated within the chat context itself. When private chat takes place on IRC, it occurs most commonly alongside public chat. Each chat room has its own window, and chatters may participate in multiple channels by switching windows. Consequently, IRC users often experience multiple levels of interaction while using chat, making “conversational multitasking” a core pragmatic competence of chat (Dresner and Barak 2006). This feature is commonly carried over into other environments such as online games, where distinct public, team, administrator and private chat channels are often provided (e.g., Herring, Kutz, Paolillo, and Zelenkauskaite 2009). 2.4.

Other forms of chat

Closely related to chat are the instant messaging (IM) family of applications, such as AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Live Messenger, Jabber, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and ICQ (“I seek you”; see Baron, this volume). Clients and supported features vary across these services, but common to them is the use of contact or buddy lists and a lack of formal channel structure. Contact lists tend to indicate the online status of potential participants via changes in the typography or icons alongside each contact, thus replacing an important function of IRC system messages with a less intrusive alternative. Lack of channel structure favors dyadic interaction (although some systems allow multiple participants to be invited on a persession basis). A consequence of this is that IM conversations have a more private nature, as opposed to IRC and MUD/MOO interaction, where others can almost always elect to enter the space in which someone else’s conversation occurs. Multimedia chat is another important variety, especially with video. Video chat originated with CU-SeeMe, which was an open-source application originally developed at Cornell University in 1993 (hence “CU”; Herring 2002). CU-SeeMe functions like IRC in having central servers whose purpose is to facilitate connection between different individuals. The chief difference is the availability of a simultaneous video channel. Often, however, users would substitute a still picture for the video and communicate only via the text chat, due to bandwidth limitations. The principal uses of CU-SeeMe were social and phatic (Yates and Graddol 1996). Today, video has been added to Instant Messaging and Internet telephony applications (such as Apple’s iChat and Skype), where text chat nonetheless remains an important part of the CMC experience. Web chat originated as an attempt to build interactive communication features into web servers. Web chat can be easier for naive users, because it does not require separate client software to run (all chat interaction takes place within a web browser window). Web chat is technically heterogeneous and tends to offer fewer features than IRC. Some services go so far as to connect the web chat interfaces to specific IRC channels on selected networks. As a consequence it is harder to know

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in any given instance of chat use what sort of interface experience a user might have. The visual presentation of the chat, and what sorts of typographic enhancement or multilingual script support are available, can vary from user to user in unknown ways. This presents challenges to the analyst in understanding a user’s chosen mode of expression on a given occasion. 2.5.

Applications of chat

Chat has many different applications; these affect the nature of the language and interaction that are observed when it is used. Although entertainment and “hanging out” are the earliest and most ubiquitous uses of chat, and the norms developed in these uses often color the nature of interaction experienced in other applications, chat is not confined to recreational uses alone. Educational chat is one of the earliest “serious” applications of chat and also one of the most widely-studied (e.g., Herring 1999; Herring, Börner, and Swan 2003; Herring and Nix 1997; Jepson 2005; Kern 2006; Lam 2004; Murray 2000; Osman and Herring 2007). Educational chats employ MUD/MOO environments (Haynes and Holmevik 1998), IRC, online games, and special-purpose applications (Barab et al. 2005; Stoerger, Herring, and Kouper 2007). The environments may be controlled and restricted to the members of the educational context, or in many cases, public, making use of widely-available servers. Business applications of chat center on “virtual teams” (Pauleen and Yoong 2001). When tasks within an organization are assigned to groups whose members are geographically distributed, chat is often an important mode of communication. In corporate environments, issues such as task-orientation, reward structures, and managerial monitoring of communications have a profound bearing on the communication, in addition to issues of intercultural communication and cross-cultural pragmatics (Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1999). Less formally-structured variants of the virtual team also exist. For example, open-source software developer communities often make extensive use of chat for providing instant technical help, for planning and coordinating work, and for promoting esprit de corps among members of the development team; the Freenode.net IRC network specializes in this kind of application. Many of the issues involving hierarchical structure crop up in research on open source and virtual teams, just as they do for recreational chat. Chat is also used as a public face for institutions; online help, customer support and library reference services are three major applications in this vein. Of these, online library reference services have been studied most (Foley 2002; Shachaf 2008; Shachaf, Oltmann, and Horowitz 2008). Institutional chat is sometimes treated as property, access to which is only granted under license (e.g., for data mining). This imposes a variety of pragmatically relevant conditions on the chat environment, alongside an ideological regime of intellectual property ownership. Hence, pragmatic research needs to consider carefully the larger context in which an application of chat resides when seeking explanations for its linguistic characteristics.

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Pragmatic phenomena associated with chat

Chat is subject to tremendous technical and social variation, and the pragmatics of chat interaction vary accordingly. This leads to the question: What determines the pragmatic features of any instance of chat? Are they based on face-to-face conversation, as suggested by Werry (1996), Reid (1991), and Zhang (2005)? Are they based primarily on written modes, as suggested by Zitzen and Stein (2004)? Or do they arise from the social and technical characteristics of the chat mode in some way (Herring 2007)? While pragmatic phenomena vary in chat, certain ones are commonly encountered. In this section, we describe some of these phenomena and attempt to indicate which sorts of technical and social characteristics of the mode bear on them. 3.1.

Interaction management

The mechanics of conducting a conversation in chat are different from those in other synchronous modes of communication such as telephony or face-to-face conversation. Hence, a substantial body of research examines interaction management in chat in relation to greetings, turn-taking, interruption, and other conversational mechanics (e.g., Beißwenger 2007). Werry (1996) observed that there is a common practice on IRC of greeting channel participants. However, Rintel, Mulholland, and Pittam (2001) concluded that the meaning of opening greetings in a public channel can lead to several contrasting outcomes, which can either help to establish new relations or ruin them even before the conversation begins. Turn-taking in chat occurs without the benefit of users knowing what other users are doing at a particular moment, e.g., whether an interlocutor is presently reading or typing. Because reading and typing occur simultaneously and messages are posted immediately as they are sent, an interlocutor may introduce new threads before a previous one is finished. In multiparticipant chat, turn-taking becomes even more complex, since everyone can react at the same time. Herring (1999) observed this in the following exchange (2) from interleaved conversations on #punjab, cited from Paolillo (2011). (2) [1] hi jatt [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

*** Signoff: puja (EOF From client) kally i was only joking around ashna: hello? dave-g it was funny how are u jatt ssa all kally you da woman! ashna: do we know eachother?. I’m ok how are you

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[10] [11] [12] [13]

*** LUCKMAN has left channel #PUNJAB *** LUCKMAN has joined channel #punjab dave-g good stuff:) kally: so hows school life, life in geneal, love life, family life? [14] jatt no we don’t know each other, i fine [15] ashna: where r ya from?

While potentially confusing on the surface, Herring (1999) analyzes this sequence as two relatively independent dyadic exchanges – one with ashna and Jatt, the other with kally and Dave-G – whose turns happen to be interleaved with one another. This situation can be schematized graphically, as in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Schematic representation of turn-taking in an IRC sample (from Herring, 1999)

Markman (2005) also observed that disrupted adjacency (what she calls “false adjacency pairs”, 118) is a common consequence of chat interaction, especially when multiple participants are involved, and several disjoint conversations can be interleaved, sometimes with overlapping participation from common participants. Messages in chat are ordered sequentially, depending on who hit the “send” button in what order; users do not necessarily intend to interrupt one another when messages appear out of sequence. Users also must employ context to determine if a turn was actually completed. Despite such complexities, it appears that users are not actually confused but manage to be engaged in several interactions simultaneously. Herring (1999) explained this contradictory tendency in terms of adaptation to the technological constraints or engagement in playful language exchanges. Dresner and Barak (2006) describe this same tendency as a pragmatic competence for “conversational multi-

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tasking”. Various interface modifications, such as “threaded” displays of chat (Smith, Cadiz, and Burkhalter 2000), have been proposed to facilitate such competence, but they are not widely deployed, and their effect on chat interaction management is unknown. Since chat interaction unfolds in real time and participants vary in number and skill, the pace of chat interactions can also vary greatly. Pacing has consequences for what interactional strategies participants can use and how they can orient to changes in the interaction. 3.2.

International and intercultural contexts

During the rapid diffusion of the Internet in the 1990s, IRC emerged as a way for people from different places in the world to gather and chat. The architecture of IRC rapidly made it the largest chat network, embracing participants from more than 70 countries (Werry 1996), with participants using many different languages and coming from diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds. Chat channels on IRC servers can draw participants either from a specific locale or from an international network of participants; the linguistic backgrounds of participants in local or international chat channels also vary accordingly. Channels residing on local servers are primarily dedicated to local users who share a particular language and/or culture, whereas channels residing on servers or networks hosting a mixed user community make linguistic choice particularly important. Such channels may be monolingual or multilingual, each one setting its own language policy, independent of whatever server or network it resides on. On multilingual channels, users must also manage interaction in multiple languages appropriately. Topics of chat channels are similarly governed by the local or international context of the server: Discussion topics on local chat servers are entirely nested within the choice of server. On international and intercultural chat servers and networks, available chat topics are typically not circumscribed as much by locale (Zelenkauskaite 2004). Another phenomenon common in intercultural and international contexts is codeswitching, i.e., the use of two or more languages side-by-side in communication. Codeswitching has many variant forms, from lexical borrowing to intrasentential mixing of two or more languages (Gumperz 1982). It is traditionally regarded as being limited to face-to-face communication; since its expression is stigmatized among the bilinguals who engage in it, written forms of communication induce metalinguistic reflections that amplify such stigmas and hence mitigate codeswitching (Myers-Scotton 1993; Poplack 1993; Poplack and Meechan 1995). Yet codeswitching of all types has been observed in a broad range of chat communication, including German dialect-standard codeswitching in IRC (Androutsopoulos and Ziegler 2003; Franke 2005; Siebenhaar 2006), Hindi-English and Punjabi-English codeswitching in IRC (Paolillo 2001, 2011), codeswitching among diasporic communities in Germany (Androutsopoulos 2003, 2006; Androutsopoulos and Hinnenkamp 2001), Cantonese-English in ICQ (Carter and Fung 2007;

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Fung and Carter 2007), Mandarin-English chat (Lotherington and Xu 2004; Su 2003), Swedish IRC and web chat (Sveningsson 2001), and Finnish-English chat (Kotilainen 2002; Leppänen and Nikula 2007), among others. Where multiple writing systems are potentially involved, technical issues again arise. When supported, chatting in multiple scripts can resemble the written practices of, e.g., use of English loanwords in Mandarin, as in the following example from Su (2003). (3)

suggestion ‘From what I can recall, no one seemed to respond to Lily’s last suggestion~~~~’

Many chat codeswitching studies apply taxonomic categories, e.g., from Gumperz (1982), both for functions and forms of codeswitching. Codeswitching in chat strongly resembles that in face-to-face communication. Observation of codeswitching has an important diagnostic role in chat, as its rate of occurrence is highly sensitive to contextual variation, whether from the regional topic of a chat, the age composition of its participants (Siebenhaar 2006), or the centrality of participants in a social network (Paolillo 1999, 2001). Such contextual variation in codeswitching is predicted by theories of face-to-face interaction, but it is relatively easier to observe in chat, because of the variety of readily-accessible contextually distinct chat channels on IRC, for example. 3.3.

Orthography

Non-standard orthography was one of the earlier features to be recognized as characteristic of chat language; it has been noted in various language contexts: English (Werry 1996), French (Anis 1999), Spanish (Llisterri 2002), Swedish (Hård af Segerstad 2000), Russian (Lamprecht 2000), Finnish (Kotilainen 2002), and Lithuanian, Croatian, and Italian (Zelenkauskaite 2004; Zelenkauskaite and Herring 2006). Three major types of orthographic variation have been found in IRC chat: deletions or reductions, insertions, and substitutions. Deletion or reduction of characters is often related to economy. Insertions may have an expressive motivation (such as emphasis), as may substitutions. Typographic errors are common in chat. These are distinct from other forms of orthographic modification, in that they are recognized by the users who produce them as errors, not reflecting their communicative intent. Users sometimes selfcorrect by posting a new message, as in the following Lithuanian example (4) from Zelenkauskaite (2004), in which a metathesis is repaired.6 (4) #alus: 712. o jau galvoju kad mano meile be tasako … #alus: 713. atsako [#alus: 712. that my love will be without the ersponse] [#alus: 713. response]

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Reduction is a common strategy that optimizes writing efficiency by eliminating characters from written forms that are not essential to the meaning, or whose identity can be deciphered from the context. Different types of reduction are found, with different linguistic characteristics, depending partly on language and partly on other aspects of the context. The Croatian (5) and Italian (6) examples below, from Zelenkauskaite (2004), illustrate reduction. (5) #woodoo: 157. ajde macic mali budi dobar #woodoo: 157. hajde macic mali budi dobar [#woodoo: 157. come on, little kitty, be good] (6) #warp9 177. si bhe nn importa #warp9 177. si bhe non importa [#warp9 177. yes, well, it does not matter] Abbreviations are also common in chat, partly to conserve keystrokes as in reduction. A number of expressions have emerged that are widespread in, and sometimes specific to, chat. Typical English examples are lol (‘laugh out loud’), ttyl (‘talk to you later’), and brb (‘be right back’). Others arise in specific contexts, such as MUD chat (Cherny 1999) or online game chat (Herring et al. 2009). Phonetic writing is another common form of non-standard orthography in chat. This is illustrated in example (7), from Cyrillic-based Russian IRC (Lamprecht 2000). (7) Kab«zdoh: Klon, a pamoemu t« s lebedinskim gavaril Kab«zdoh: Klon, po moemu t« s lebedinskim govoril

[Kab«zdoh: Klon, according to me, you talked with Lebedinski] Finally, non-alphabetic symbols are often used in a variety of ways, whether as variants of alphabetic symbols (e.g., zero substituting for “o”), as complements to the roman alphabet for languages normally written in another, such as Arabic script (Palfreyman and al Khalil 2003), or as logographs, as in the following Lithuanian (8), Croatian (9), and Italian (10) examples from Zelenkauskaite (2004). (8) #lithuania: 39. cew =]~ ir iki 6-ienio :* #lithuania: 39. ciao =]~ ir iki sˇesˇtadienio :* [#lithuania: 39. ciao, until Saturday :*] (9) #banda: 209. ya0 jesam gl00p #banda: 209. jao jesam glup [#banda: 209. oh I am such a fool] (10) #help: 348. ciao penelope 6 sparita eh #help: 348. ciao penelope sei sparita eh [#help: 348. Hi Penelope, you are gone, hey]

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Substitutions are common across all languages observed. The following example (11) from Italian, as reported by Zelenkauskaite (2004), exhibits another common pattern, namely the repetition of a letter for expressive purposes. (11) #ragepunk:258. KE PALLE PORKO DDIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO … #ragepunk:258. CHE PALLE PORCO DIO [#ragepunk:258. it is so annoying, damn it] All of the orthographic features mentioned above (and others) are variable, and users adopt different attitudes to them, based in part of the usage of the features by specific chat sub-cultures. Users draw inferences about the nature of their interlocutors from these linguistic manifestations (e.g., “child” versus “adult”, “hip” vs. “square”, “insider” vs. “outsider”), and thus their use is pragmatically conditioned as well. Orthographic variants are not always conventional, thus contextual interpretation is necessary. 3.4.

Gender

Gender differences in language are well established in speech (Coates 1993), but because of the idea that CMC causes a leveling in context cues, potentially making social distinctions like gender unimportant (e.g., Danet 1998), the case for gender differences has had to be re-established for CMC (Herring 1992, 1993, 2003). In MOO chat, Cherny (1994) uncovered a range of gender differences in the use of emotes and specific actions. Notably, male participants tended to use fewer affectionate actions than females and expressed them more frequently to inanimate and abstract objects. Males also employed more physically violent imagery. Herring (2003) observed similar gender differences in IRC, with males being more aggressive and participating more actively, whereas women used more smilies and had more instances of laughter. Despite some cases of gender-switching that have been reported in chat environments (e.g., Danet 1998), the assumption in most gender and CMC research is that online gender usually matches the writer’s offline gender, on the grounds that it is difficult to fake subtle linguistic cues characteristic of female or male discourse for any sustained period of time (Herring 2003). Gender differences in chat are not restricted to English-based chat. In a Thai cultural setting, it was found that women participate more actively in public chat and that women more often addressed turns to a specific next speaker and received more responses by both females and males (Panyametheekul and Herring 2003). It was also found that females would ask for and offer more email addresses to maintain further contacts, while men asked more direct questions and employed flirtatious communicative strategies more often. In a study comparing Lithuanian and Croatian chat, gender differences in orthography were found for specific diacritic symbols. There is a phonemic differ-

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ence between s/z/c and sˇ/zˇ/cˇ in both Lithuanian and Croatian; however, the IRC protocol does not provide for the relevant symbols, hence users are forced to adapt. Zelenkauskaite and Herring (2006) found that users adopted a strategy of using either digraphs [sh]/[zh]/[ch] or monographs [s]/[z]/[c]; when analyzed by gender, males used more digraphs than females.

4.

Discussion and conclusions

We have illustrated in the above sections that chat is a highly diverse phenomenon, both in its technical and social contexts, which shape the linguistic manifestations of its expression. We have illustrated some of the more important linguistic manifestations of pragmatic phenomena in chat. Both the contextual aspect of chat and its linguistic manifestations are rich and substantial areas of research, and valid approaches can be formulated that focus primarily on one aspect or the other. At the same time, understanding the pragmatics of chat must go beyond taxonomy. Historical, human-computer interface, and linguistic principles all bear on the nature and use of chat, and the respective roles of these principles need to be explicated in relation to other modes of discourse. A clear understanding of these principles and their relation can also help indicate areas in need of development for future research. An important concept throughout this chapter has been that of chat mode: a conventional clustering of technical and social characteristics, whose status is comparable to that of a genre in other forms of discourse (Glitrow and Stein 2009; Herring 2001, 2002). As chat is multifaceted, there are many such clusters, and distinct chat modes need to be recognized. At the same time, these modes do not vary arbitrarily from one another, and the mode is a strong predictor of the kinds of pragmatic phenomena one may find in any particular instance of chat, as well as their likely linguistic manifestations. Chat modes can be divided into two main types, largely on technical grounds: those which are bounded by a single server, such as MUDs/MOOs, many online games, and web chat, and those which reside on networks, such as IRC, commercial services such as AOL chat, and the instant messaging family of modes. The social consequence of this choice concerns the number of potential participants: Networked servers tend to have a much larger pool of participants than isolated servers. Conversely, isolated servers tend to permit more focalized interaction and the development or reinforcement of local communities and norms. Thus, among Internet-based chat modes, we have an analog of the weak-tie/strong-tie distinction widely recognized in social network analysis (Granovetter 1973), where contacts on isolated servers resemble strong ties, and those on networks resemble weak ties. Other technical variables of a mode might also correlate with this distinction. For example, multimedia modes such as video chat tend to favor connection to spe-

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cific individuals or small groups for specific intervals of time, rather than to large, unbounded and ongoing interactions. The technical reason for this is the extreme demands of sharing multimedia data in real time, which become increasingly severe when participants are added. Text communication has the same complexity problems, but because the amount of data associated with text is small, the system can handle much larger numbers of people before problems of transmission volume are encountered. Hence, media type can also shape opportunities for social interaction. Linguistically, there are many consequences of this distinction. On one hand, a larger pool of potential participants may draw from a broader range of national, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds; hence the opportunities for linguistic and cultural conflict, and the necessity to negotiate norms of interaction, are greater. Weak-tie networks form effective mechanisms for the transmission of linguistic and interactional patterns (Milroy 1992), and so observations of a phenomenon in one part of the network are not likely to be independent of related events occurring in other parts. Focalized communities, on the other hand, such as Cherny’s ElseMOO (1999), are effective structures for the cultivation of distinctive identities, as expressed through characteristic routines and/or modes of expression that do not necessarily spread to other locations on the net. Hence, the situation of a chat mode in the context of a broader network is the first dimension along which chat modes appear to differ significantly. Another distinction with similarly large pragmatic consequences is the degree of choice users can exercise in customizing their chat environment. While customizability in terms of computer programming is relevant and has a variety of effects, the most important pragmatic aspect of this concerns the selection of potential participants by users. Commercial services such as AOL offer the least user control over participation by fixing in advance the number and type of available chat rooms and placing power in the hands of corporately-appointed moderators to enforce policies on appropriate speech. IRC goes largely in the other direction, by allowing any user to create channels and vesting moderation power in the founding user, to be delegated as s/he sees fit. At the other extreme is the IM cluster of modes, where a user is required to select participants from a list of contacts. The IM cluster acquires from this the characteristics of private interaction, which is not invaded easily by arbitrary third parties, an opportunity that exists in the more public IRC and AOL chat modes. These two dimensions of variation in chat modes make predictions about what might be observed in chat contexts that have not yet received extensive study. For example, online games vary in the degree of user versus corporate control, and hence, chat in those environments is predicted to be shaped accordingly. World of Warcraft, a swords-and-sorcery game produced by Blizzard Entertainment, has a game environment with strict corporate control; its game spaces are structured in advance, and it employs its own moderators to enforce acceptable speech policies

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in the same way as AOL. BZFlag, an open source tank-battle game supported by a loose federation of independent developers and fans (Herring et al. 2009), is more like IRC in its delegation of policies and enforcement to individual server owners and administrators. A prediction from this is that the pragmatics of chat in these two games, e.g., in the exercise of power in turn-taking and interaction management, will differ in ways similar to that found between AOL chat and IRC. This is one area in which further study of chat modes would be potentially instructive. Another area for future investigation concerns the ongoing convergence across media types, represented by the incorporation of chat into various technologies such as websites, interactive television programming, online games, multimedia platforms, and telephony applications, among others. Wherever media are changing, text chat, or something very much like it, seems to appear. To what extent are the pragmatic characteristics of chat (as found in dedicated applications such as IRC) carried over into these convergent media? When chat spreads to a convergent media context, where does it get its pragmatic features from? The studies cited in this chapter provide some indicators, along with the dimensions of variation among chat modes described above, but additional research is still needed. Further research remains to be done in other areas of the pragmatics of chat as well. More yet needs to be said about medium effects with respect to chat language. Existing work, both in design of systems and in cognitive psychological studies of their effects, are informative, but additional research is needed into the social effects of the technological medium features, especially beyond local issues of turn-taking and interaction management. Analyses addressing the global organization and coherence of conversations in chat, such as those using Dynamic Topic Analysis (Herring 1999; Herring and Nix 1997; Herring et al. 2009), could do much to illuminate the ways in which chat functions for actual communication. The international and intercultural dimensions of chat also deserve more attention. Today, with the widespread use of IRC and online games, chat is a vehicle of continuous, large-scale intercultural and cross-linguistic contact, and issues of language status, dominance, and conflict have already surfaced in many studies. The understanding of language contact dynamics stands to gain much from close attention to chat and its role in the evolving online world. The nature of the social networks established in chat and their relationship to off-line and other social networks is a major area of potential study that is also related to the foregoing issues. Its importance to linguistic pragmatics is that the social network offers a different way of representing and investigating the social context from the approaches of the past, and so more thorough incorporation of this into research can have an influence not only on understandings of the pragmatics of chat and CMC, but also on understandings of social context in linguistic pragmatics more generally.

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Notes 1. The game program Adventure (or ADVENT) written for PDP-10 by William Crowther at BBN in 1975 is generally recognized as the first in the genre of interactive fiction. The first MUD was written in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw at Essex University, UK. 2. The acronym MOO is recursive, like many other acronyms in the field of computing. 3. MUDs/MOOs are also used for education, and educational MUDs/MOOs are typically recognized as a third type, distinct from social and gaming MUDs/MOOs. 4. Instant messaging and ICQ are both later developments that were not part of this offering. 5. The language regulation was dropped after one week. 6. In the examples that follow, the first line shows the text as it was originally typed; the second line shows the same text with standard spelling; and the third line is a free English translation. In each line, the expressions in focus are in boldface.

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2003 Online-Gemeinschaften und Sprachvariation. Soziolinguistische Perspektiven auf Sprache im Internet. [Online communities and language variation. Sociolinguistic perspectives on language in the Internet.] Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 31(2): 173–197. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2006 Multilingualism, diaspora, and the Internet: Codes and identities on Germanbased diaspora websites. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10: 520–547. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Volker Hinnenkamp 2001 Code-Switching in der bilingualen Chat-Kommunikation: ein explorativer Blick auf #hellas und #turks. In: Michael Beißwenger (ed.), Chat-Kommunikation: Sprache, Interaktion, Sozialität & Identität in synchroner computervermittelter Kommunikation, 367–402. Stuttgart: Ibidem. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Evelyn Ziegler 2003 Sprachvariation und Internet: Regionalismen in einer Chat-Gemeinschaft. In: Jannis Androutsopoulos and Evelyn Ziegler (eds.), Standardfragen: Soziolinguistische Perspektiven auf Sprachgeschichte, Sprachkontakt und Sprachvariation, 251–279. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Anis, Jacques 1999 Chats et usages graphiques. In: Jacques Anis (ed.), Internet, communication et langue française, 74–90. Paris: Hermes. Barab, Sasha, Michael Thomas, Tyler Dodge, Robert Carteaux, and Hakan Tuzun 2005 Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns. Educational Technology Research and Development 53(1): 86–107. Beißwenger, Michael 2007 Sprachhandlungskoordination in der Chat-Kommunikation. Berlin: de Gruyter. Beißwenger, Michael and Angelika Storrer 2008 Corpora of computer-mediated communication. In: Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook, 292–309. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Carter, Ronald and Loretta Fung 2007 New varieties, new creativities: ICQ and English-Cantonese e-discourse. Language and Literature 16: 345–366. Cherny, Lynn 1994 Gender differences in a text-based virtual reality. In: Mary Bucholtz, Anita Liang, Laurel Sutton, and Christine Hines (eds.), Communicating In, Through and Across Cultures: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women and Language Conference, 102–115. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Cherny, Lynn 1999 Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Coates, Jennifer 1993 Women, Men and Language. London: Longman. Crystal, David 2001 Language and the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Danet, Brenda 1998 Text as mask: Gender, play and performance on the Internet. In: Steven G. Jones (ed.), Cybersociety 2.0, 129–158. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Danet, Brenda 2001 Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online. London: Berg. Danet, Brenda, Lucia Ruedenberg-Wright, and Yehudit Rosenbaum-Tamari 1995 “Hmmm … where’s that smoke coming from?” Writing, play and performance on Internet Relay Chat. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue4/danet.html Dresner, Eli and Segev Barak 2006 Conversational multitasking in interactive written discourse as a communication competence. Communication Reports 19: 70–78. Erickson, Thomas 2000 Making sense of computer-mediated communication (CMC): Conversations as genres, CMC systems as genre ecologies. In: Proceedings of the ThirtyThird Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press. http://csdl.computer.org/dl/proceedings/ hicss/2000/0493/03/04933011.pdf Ferrara, Kathleen, Hans Brunner, and Greg Whittemore 1991 Interactive written discourse as an emergent register. Written Communication 8: 8–33. Foley, Marianne 2002 Instant Messaging reference in an academic library: A case study. College and Research Libraries 63: 36–45. Franke, Katharina 2005 Language variation in #berlin. Networx 48. http://www.mediensprache.net/de/ networx/docs/networx-48.asp Fung, Loretta and Ronald Carter 2007 Cantonese e-discourse: A new hybrid variety of English. Multilingua 26: 35–66.

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Giltrow, Janet and Dieter Stein (eds.) 2009 Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Granovetter, Mark 1973 The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360–1380. Gumperz, John J. 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hård af Segerstad, Ylva 2000 Swedish chat rooms. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0008/swedish.php Haynes, Cynthia and Jan Rune Holmevik (eds). 1998 High Wired: On the Design, Use and Theory of Educational MOOs. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Herring, Susan C. 1992 Gender and participation in computer-mediated linguistic discourse. Washington, D.C.: ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, document ED345552. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/participation.1992.pdf Herring, Susan C. 1993 Gender and democracy in computer-mediated communication. Electronic Journal of Communication 3(2). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/003/2/ 00328.HTML Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html Herring, Susan C. 2001 Computer-mediated discourse. In: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 612–634. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Herring, Susan C. 2002 Computer-mediated communication on the Internet. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 36: 109–168. Herring, Susan C. 2003 Gender and power in online communication. In: Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), The Handbook of Language and Gender, 202–228. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Herring, Susan C. 2007 A faceted classification scheme for of computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet 4, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761/index_html/ Herring, Susan C., Katy Börner, and Margaret Swan 2003 When rich media are opaque: Spatial reference in a 3-D virtual world. Unpublished manuscript, Indiana University. Herring, Susan C., Daniel Kutz, John C. Paolillo, and Asta Zelenkauskaite 2009 Fast talking, fast shooting: Text chat in an online first-person game. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press. http://csdl.computer.org/dl/proceedings/hicss/2009/3450/00/03-05-04.pdf

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Herring, Susan C. and Carole G. Nix 1997 Is “serious chat” an oxymoron? Academic vs. social uses of Internet Relay Chat. Paper presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics, Orlando, FL, March 11. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/aaal.1997.pdf Jarvenpaa, Sirkka L. and Dorothy E. Leidner 1999 Communication and trust in global virtual teams. Organization Science 10(6): 791–815. Jepson, Kevin 2005 Conversations – and negotiated interaction – in text and voice chat rooms. Language Learning and Technology 9(3): 79–98. Kern, Richard 2006 Perspectives on technology in learning and teaching languages. TESOL Quarterly 40: 183–210. Kotilainen, Lari 2002 “Moi taas, ai äm päk: Lauseet, tilanteet ja englanti suomenkielisessä chat-keskustelussa” [Hello again, I’m back: Sentences, situations and English in Finnish chat.] In: Ilona Herlin, Jyrki Kalliokoski, Lari Kotilainen, and Tiina Onikki-Rantajääskö (eds.), Äidinkielen Merkitykset [The Meanings of the Mother Tongue], 191–209. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Lam, Wan Shun Eva 2004 Second language socialization in a bilingual chat room: Global and local considerations. Language Learning and Technology 8(3): 44–65. Lamprecht, Rolf-Rainer 2000 Kommunikationspraxen im Internet und ihre textuellen Realisierungen. In: Wolf-Dieter Krause (ed.), Textsorten im Russischen, 144–171. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Leppänen, Sirpa and Tarja Nikula 2007 Diverse uses of English in Finnish society: Discourse-pragmatic insights into media, educational and business contexts. Multilingua 26(4): 333–380. Llisterri, Joaquim 2002 Marcas fonéticas de la oralidad en la lengua de los chats: Elisiones y epéntesis consonánticas. Revista de investigatión Lingüística 2(5): 61–100. Lotherington, Heather and Yejun Xu 2004 How to chat in English and Chinese: Emerging digital language conventions. ReCALL 16: 308–329. Markman, Kris M. 2005 To send or not to send: Turn construction in computer-mediated chat. Texas Linguistic Forum 48: 115–124. Milroy, James 1992 Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Murray, Denise 1988 The context of oral and written language: A framework for mode and medium switching. Language in Society 17: 351–373. Murray, Denise 2000 Protean communication: The language of computer-mediated communication. TESOL Quarterly 34: 397–421. Myers-Scotton, Carol 1993 Social Motivations for Codeswitching. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Osman, Gihan and Susan C. Herring 2007 Interaction, facilitation, and deep learning in cross-cultural chat: A case study. The Internet and Higher Education 10: 125–141. Palfreyman, David and Muhamed al Khalil 2003 “A funky language for teenzz to use”: Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/palfreyman.html Panyametheekul, Siriporn and Susan C. Herring 2003 Gender and turn allocation in a Thai chat room. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/panya_herring.html Paolillo, John C. 1999 The virtual speech community: Social network and language variation on IRC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/ vol4/issue4/paolillo.html Paolillo, John C. 2001 Language variation in the virtual speech community: A social network approach to Internet Relay Chat. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(2): 180–213. Paolillo, John C. 2011 “Conversational” codeswitching on Usenet and Internet Relay Chat. Language@Internet 8, article 3. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2011/Paolillo Pauleen, David J. and Pak Yoong 2001 Facilitating virtual team relationships via Internet and conventional communication channels. Internet Research 11(3): 190–202. Poplack, Shana 1993 Variation theory and language contact: Concept, methods and data. In: Dennis Preston (ed.), American Dialect Research, 251–286. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Poplack, Shana and Marjory Meechan 1995 Patterns of language mixture: Nominal structure in Wolof-French and FongbeFrench bilingual discourse. In: Leslie Milroy and Pieter Muysken (eds.), One Speaker, Two Languages, 199–232. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Reid, Elizabeth 1991 Electropolis: Communication and community on Internet relay Chat. Senior honours thesis, University of Melbourne, Australia. Rintel, E. Sean and Jeffery Pittam 1997 Strangers in a strange land: Interaction management on Internet Relay Chat. Human Communication Research 23: 507–534. Rintel, E. Sean, Joan Mulholland, and Jeffery Pittam 2001 First things first: Internet Relay Chat Openings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 6(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue3/rintel.html Schonfeldt, Juliane and Andrea Golato 2003 Repair in chats: A conversation analytic approach. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36(3): 241–284. Shachaf, Pnina 2008 Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study. Information and Management 45(2): 131–142.

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Shachaf, Pnina, Shannon M. Oltmann, and Sarah Horowitz 2008 Service equality in virtual reference. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(4): 535–550. Siebenhaar, Beat 2006 Code choice and code-switching in Swiss-German Internet Relay Chat rooms. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 481–506. Smith, Marc A., JJ Cadiz, and Byron Burkhalter 2000 Conversation trees and threaded chats. In: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 97–105. New York, NY: ACM. Stoerger, Sharon, Susan C. Herring, and Inna Kouper 2007 “Great job, Quester!” Assessing language skills on Quest Atlantis. Texas Linguistics Forum 50. http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/proceedings/2006/ Stoerger.pdf Su, Hsi-Yao 2003 The multilingual and multi-orthographic Taiwan-based Internet: Creative uses of writing systems on college-affiliated BBSs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/su.html Sveningsson, Malin 2001 Creating a Sense of Community: Experiences from a Swedish Web chat. [Ph.D. dissertation.] Linköping: Linköping Studies in Art and Science. Werry, Christopher C. 1996 Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat. In Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and CrossCultural Perspectives, 47–63. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Yates, Simeon J. and David Graddol 1996 “I read this chat is heavy:” The discursive construction of identity in CMC. Paper presented at the 5th International Pragmatics Conference, Mexico City, July. Zelenkauskaite, Asta 2004 Lietuvisˇkuu˛, italisˇku˛ ir kroatisˇku˛ internetiniu˛ pokalbiu˛ rasˇyba. [Lithuanian, Italian, and Croatian written chat on the Internet.] Unpublished M.A. thesis, Vilnius University. Zelenkauskaite, Asta and Susan C. Herring 2006 Gender encoding of typographical elements in Lithuanian and Croatian IRC. In: Fay Sudweeks and Charles Ess (eds.), Proceedings of Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Culture 2006 (CATaC’06), 474–489. Murdoch, Australia: Murdoch University Press. Zhang, Yongfang 2005 Pragmatic analysis of Internet Relay Chat. China Science and Technology Information 15: 229–230, 232. Zitzen, Michaela and Dieter Stein 2004 Chat conversation: A case of transmedial stability? Linguistics 42(5): 983–1021.

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6.

Instant messaging Naomi S. Baron

1.

Introduction

The phrase “instant messaging” (IM) typically refers to a form of computermediated communication (CMC) created on a computer, involving two parties, and in real time (synchronously). By contrast, other forms of electronically-mediated communication (e.g., email, text messaging) were designed for asynchronous exchange, meaning senders cannot assume an immediate response. 1.1.

Historical roots of IM

IM, as we know it today, emerged in two stages. First, synchronous one-to-one messaging systems running on mainframe or minicomputers began to appear by the1980s on a number of American university campuses and research sites, with the development of UNIX applications such as “talk”, “ytalk”, and “ntalk” and the Zephyr notification system created through Project Athena at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.1 The term “instant messaging” was not yet in use. Initially, messages could only be sent between people on the same computer system, and communication was only between two people. Over time, multi-person messaging became available, as did communication with individuals on other computer networks. Unlike modern IM clients, early versions such as UNIX “talk” transmitted one keystroke at a time (visible to the recipient), rather than sending the completed message all at once. Using split screens, the programs placed the sender’s output in one screen and the recipient’s in another (Herring 2007). In the second stage, in the late 1990s, one-to-one messaging become widespread, thanks largely to Mirabilis Ltd’s ICQ (“I Seek You”)2 and to America Online (especially AIM, i.e., AOL Instant Messenger). ICQ, launched in 1996, was purchased by AOL in 1998. ICQ gained popularity in Europe and Asia, while AIM dominated much of the United States. Over the next decade, other players in the IM market included Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. Widespread adoption of IM in North America was fanned by the ubiquity of personal computers in homes and offices, increased access to broadband, and, until recently, minimal use of text messaging on mobile phones. With Microsoft’s release of Windows XP, Microsoft’s IM client (now known as “Windows Messenger” or “Windows Live Messenger”) supplanted ICQ in parts of the world.3

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Evolution of IM functions and platforms

Since the late 1990s, modern PC-based IM clients such as AIM and Windows Messenger have continued to add new features. For examples, multi-person chats are now commonly available, as are options for voice communication (using Voice-over-Internet protocols [VoIP]) and video. Users can now be logged on to IM but “lurk”, rendering them invisible to members of their buddy list. IM has also been incorporated into other computer platforms, especially commercial web sites, offering clients opportunities for live “chat” with customer representatives. Another type of evolution has been in the conditions under which IM is used, which sometimes compromise the notion of “instant” (i.e., synchronous) communication. Young people commonly conduct several IM conversations simultaneously or do IM while engaged in another task, such as talking on the telephone or searching the web (see section 3.3). Consequently, interlocutors do not always respond to messages immediately, rendering the medium more like asynchronous email or text messaging. Other online and mobile technologies have been encroaching on the communication space IM dominated (at least in the United States) up through the mid-2000s. Increased connection speeds have made some email nearly “instant”. VoIP programs such as Skype now include “chat” (i.e., IM) functions, rendering separate IM clients such as AIM unnecessary. Similarly, as Facebook functions multiplied, early communication tools such as Facebook messages (essentially, email) were augmented by status updates (in 2006) and then synchronous chat (in 2008).4 Equally-importantly for the status of IM in the U.S. has been the rapid growth of text messaging on mobile phones during the second half of the 2000s. Between 2005 and 2008, the average number of text messages sent monthly soared from 7.25 billion to 75 billion.5 During the same period, in Europe, where text messaging had been firmly entrenched for over than a decade, IM grew.6 1.3.

Overview of the chapter

This chapter continues (section 2) by outlining the parameters of IM as a communication medium, considering features that users can manipulate. Section 3 presents an overview of IM research. Section 4 looks at the construction of IM away messages and IM conversations. Central themes include conversational composition, lexical issues, utterance breaks, and gender issues. Section 5 explores user choice between IM and other mediated communication technologies, while section 6 considers the future of IM.

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2.

Defining the medium

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Operational features of IM clients

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Most IM clients offer suites of features that users can manipulate, beyond creating written “conversations”. For example, users can customize graphic presentation, including choosing colors, font style and size, and sometime a visual “theme” for their messages (e.g., soccer, a popular band). Users are also invited to represent themselves in a variety of ways. One is to create a personal profile containing such items as contact information, birth date and hometown, and favorite quotations, books, or movies. A second is to design a visual self-representation through photographs or avatars. Third, users can create away messages, a feature originally designed to indicate temporary absence from the computer (see section 4.1). IM facilitates interaction through brief written exchanges. IM clients signal one’s availability to communicate once a person logs on to the system. While some businesses using IM for employee communication announce this availability to everyone in the organization, personal IM systems invite users to create buddy lists defining a circle of friends with whom to share information about one’s availability and (optionally) whereabouts. Originally, users could only send messages when they and their desired interlocutor were both online, although other options have since been introduced. While buddies have access to one’s away messages, users may temporarily block individuals on their buddy list, making it appear that the user is offline (and therefore away messages are not viewable). 2.2.

Pragmatic issues in IM

If, following Levinson (1983: 9), we define pragmatics as “the study of those relationships between language and context that are … encoded in the structure of a language”, then a pragmatic analysis of IM leads us to examine not just the linguistic make-up of messages but the meaning they have for actual senders and recipients. With a few exceptions (e.g., Nastri, Peña, and Hancock 2006), IM research has focused on the interpersonal dynamics or the linguistic nuts-and-bolts of IM, rather than viewing data through the lens of pragmatics. Nonetheless, linguistic pragmatics offers useful tools for conceptualizing – and for understanding – context that lends meaning to IM as mediated communication. Concepts that prove particularly relevant include: – – – –

Speech act theory Grice’s conversational maxims (including issues of deception) Notions of implicature Aspects of conversational analysis, including turn-taking, interruptions, conversational repair, conversational closings, and politeness

In the course of this chapter, pragmatic issues relevant to IM will be noted.

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Overview of IM research

Many studies have focused on IM as a medium for social interaction. In this section, research is reviewed involving use of IM between peers (especially young people) and as a tool in the workplace. I also consider the social implications of using IM while multitasking. Discussion of how IM away messages and conversations are constructed appears in section 4. As IM tools (and alternative communication media) evolve, it can be anticipated that future studies may generate different empirical results. However, variables identified in existing research (e.g., age, gender, linguistic creativity, speech acts performed, strategies for controlling conversational flow) are likely to remain important. 3.1.

Tool for communication among adolescents and young adults

Within the U.S., young people have been heavy users of IM. American teenage usage patterns have been tracked by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Lenhart, Madden, and Hitlin 2005; Lenhart, Rainie, and Lewis 2001; Shiu and Lenhart 2004). Other American-based research on adolescents and young adults includes Boneva et al. (2006), Bryant, Sanders-Jackson, and Smallwood (2006), Grinter and Paylen (2002), and Schiano et al. (2002). In Canada, Quan-Haase has examined IM usage by university students, including analysis of how they employ IM to manage interpersonal communication (2007a), comparisons with other forms of mediated communication (2007b), and a general review of the IM literature (2009). In Hong Kong, Leung (2001) analyzed motivations of university students for using ICQ (e.g., relaxation, social inclusion, escape), while Cheuk and Chan (2007) studied ICQ usage patterns among high school students. IM technology can facilitate communication in educational settings and between people lacking voice options. With online distance education expanding, IM enables students who are geographically separated to collaborate on projects (e.g., Eisenstadt, Komzak, and Dzbor 2003). Additionally, IM can function in teacherstudent advising (de Siqueira and Herring 2009). IM is also a valuable communication platform for the hearing-impaired, replacing more cumbersome TTY or telecommunication relay services (Bowe 2002).7 3.2.

Tool in the workplace

Considerable research has been done on use of IM in the workplace, beginning with early studies by Issacs et al. (2002) and Nardi, Whittaker, and Bradner (2000). A dominant theme has been how IM can facilitate collaborative work. Representative studies include Cho, Trier, and Kim (2005), Fussell et al. (2004), and QuanHaase, Cothrel, and Wellman (2005). A related theme has been the role of IM in

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providing a “presence indicator”, signaling the intended interlocutor’s availability (e.g., Debbabi and Rahman 2004). Yet other research has explored how to negotiate conversational turn-taking in CMC (e.g., Shankar, VanKleek, Vicente, and Smith 2000) and differences between IM use for work and for social relationships (e.g., Avrahami and Hudson 2006). A derivative research genre focuses on crosscultural issues in workplace IM communication (e.g., Kayan, Fussell, and Setlock 2006; Massey, Hung, Montoya-Weiss, and Ramesh 2001; Setlock, Fussell, and Neuwirth 2004; Stewart, Setlock, and Fussell 2004). Finally, a growing body of research explores the effects of IM interruptions on work productivity. The findings are mixed: Garrett and Danziger (2007) suggest that workers they studied learned to integrate IM communication with the tasks at hand, while Iqbal and Horvitz (2007) report that Microsoft employees in their study averaged 10–15 minutes following an IM or email alert before returning to the original task. In pragmatics terms, these interruptions are in the “conversation” between the employee and his or her work, due to initiation of a more traditional conversation between the employee and a human interlocutor. 3.3.

IM and multitasking

IM users commonly engage in multiple activities at the same time. Multitasking behavior may involve other social interaction (e.g., conducting multiple simultaneous IM conversations) or individually-based pursuits (e.g., eating, doing web searches).8 Researchers (Baym, Zhang, and Lin 2004; Lenhart et al. 2005; Shiu and Lenhart 2004) have gathered self-reports on general levels of multitasking activities while using CMC. Unfortunately, post hoc self-reports are often inaccurate. To obtain more accurate data, my students and I used an online questionnaire to track multitasking of American undergraduates in fall 2004 and spring 2005.9 We knew subjects were participating in at least one IM conversation just before accessing the questionnaire, since we distributed the questionnaire’s URL through IM. Results revealed a high level of multitasking. In our first study, 98 % of the 158 subjects (half male, half female) engaged in at least one other computer-based or offline behavior while IMing. Table 1 indicates the percent of students engaged in each additional type of activity. On average, subjects were simultaneously doing three computer-based activities and two offline activities (i.e., besides the IM containing the study’s URL). Subjects averaged 2.7 simultaneous IM conversations, ranging from 1 to 12. Subsequent informal discussion with some of the subjects revealed both synchronous and asynchronous use of IM. Students generally responded immediately to an IM message (i.e., synchronically) when there was “good gossip” or when the conversation was serious. Only one student (out of 20) found it rude to hold simultaneous IM conversations. When asked whether they ever held a single IM con-

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Table 1.

Study 1: Multitasking while using IM

Computer-Based Activities Web-based activities: Computer-based media player: Word processing:

70 % 48 % 39 %

Offline Activities Face-to-face conversation: Eating or drinking: Watching television: Talking on the telephone:

41 % 37 % 29 % 22 %

versation without engaging in other online or offline activities, students overwhelmingly responded “no”. Such behavior, said one student, would be “too weird”, because in her eyes, IM conversations are conducted as background activity to other endeavors. Using a revised online questionnaire administered to 51 subjects, we probed why students multitask while doing IM. Most respondents mentioned time pressures: Multitasking enabled them to accomplish several activities at once. Students commented that IM is not, by nature, a stand-alone endeavor. Twenty percent of students in the second study multitasked because they were bored. Boredom sometimes resulted from waiting for a conversational partner to respond (either because the interlocutor was slow to reply or because in modern IM systems, entire messages must be sent before recipients see them, rather than appearing as each character is typed). Other students spoke of “get[ing] bored with just one activity” or “having too short an attention span to only do one thing at a time”. The second study probed which multitasking behaviors students felt were suitable. Eighty-six percent (i.e., of the 51 subjects) either specifically mentioned IM or email – both forms of interpersonal communication – or indicated that any type of multitasking behavior is acceptable. Nearly 60 % of respondents singled out face-to-face or telephone conversations as inappropriate for multitasking. Students offered various explanations. The most prevalent was that such behavior was simply wrong, because, for example, “the person on the other phone line usually feels left out or unattended to”. Others disapproved of the behavior only if the conversation was particularly serious or important. Despite these sentiments, of the 158 students in our initial study, 41 % reported engaging in at least one computer activity while talking face-to-face, and 22 % were simultaneously on the computer and on the phone. Seen in pragmatics terms, multitasking by doing IM while speaking with another person (face-to-face or on the phone) violates the simple politeness principle of paying attention to one’s interlocutor. Whatever the reality of multitaskers’

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claims about successfully accomplishing several tasks simultaneously, their interlocutors may be disturbed. In the words of one student, “people [on the phone with you] get pissy about hearing a keyboard clicking”.

4.

Construction of IM away messages and IM conversations

Social interaction through IM is accomplished via written language. Therefore, it is necessary to examine how these written messages are constructed. The research summarized in this section includes discussion of the functions of away messages, analysis of specific linguistic features of IM conversations, and consideration of gender issues. 4.1.

Away messages

Away messages were designed for users logged on to their IM clients (but not physically at their machines) to alert interlocutors not to expect immediate replies to messages. In practice, away messages serve richer functions than simply noting one’s absence. From the perspective of pragmatics, these messages may perform a variety of speech acts, often entailing meaning that is not expressed overtly. Nastri et al. (2006) used speech act theory to categorize a corpus of universitystudent away messages. The authors found that 68 % of messages were assertives (e.g., At the library), while smaller numbers were expressives (e.g., What a lousy day), commissives (e.g., I’ll meet you at 7), or directives (e.g., Call me). Several years earlier (fall 2002), my students and I undertook a more general study of away messages. We collected 190 messages from 38 people (half male, half female) that had been posted by students’ friends from their AIM buddy lists. Informal interviews were subsequently conducted with some of the subjects.10 Message length varied considerably across individuals, ranging from one word to more than 50, averaging 13 words for both males and females. Compared with IM transmissions, away messages are fairly long – partly because away messages are posted all of a piece, while IMs are commonly chunked and sent seriatim (see section 4.2). However, the more interesting aspect of the answer lies in the role away messages play in students’ social lives. Often there is a gap between the overt meaning of an away message and the intended tone or ulterior motive. Consider the message In the bowels of hell … or what some would call the library. The overt message indicates that the person posting is unavailable. However, by conversational implicature, the message renders a strong value judgment. We analyzed messages according to the overt text, and then considered implied communication functions. Overt texts were divided between messages conveying

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information or initiating a conversation, and those providing entertainment. Some messages overlapped categories (especially where humor was involved). Our coding scheme did not incorporate conventional terms from speech act theory (e.g., expressives, commissives), although our scheme spans similar conceptual territory. Informational/conversational messages were subdivided into three clusters:11 – “I’m away” – initiate discussion or social encounter – convey personal information about oneself, one’s opinions, one’s sense of humor Using these clusters, Figure 1 illustrates away messages whose overt function was to convey information or initiate conversation. In the “I’m Away” messages, both the categories Lurking (Maybe I’m doing work) and Intentional misrepresentation (dinner with Mark) involve deception, violating Grice’s conversational maxim of quality – to tell the truth. There is, however, a fine line between deception and privacy, and between deception and idiosyncrasy. As for privacy, some of the students interviewed felt that specifying their precise location was an invasion of privacy. (Others felt obligated to be specific so friends could locate them.) One interviewee only posted away messages when in her dorm room, working at her computer. (Her messages included the likes of Eating the souls of my fellow man and *sigh*.) For her, away messages expressed personal information (sometimes humorously) about her current situation, perhaps to generate conversation with people viewing her messages. Conversely, people sometimes craft messages to camouflage their state of mind. One subject posted quotations when she did not feel like talking or, in her words, “giving away too much information”. The same individual reported using self-deprecation (I could easily be replaced with a dancing chimp) when it [had] been a long day and she didn’t want to explain why. In addition to the informational/conversational postings, other messages focused on entertainment. For example, work rhymes with beserk and jerk. i lurk in the murk and do my work, ya big jerk. ok, I gotta go do some work now. Use of quotations from well-known people was also common, along with stanzas from songs or URLs for interesting websites. Why post away messages primarily to entertain? The answer is grounded both in the technology and in the social goals and expectations of American college students. Experienced users of email are familiar with signature files, enabling senders automatically to post at the end of their emails not only professional contact information but also pithy sayings or quotations. While IMs have no signature files, “entertainment” away messages serve comparable functions.

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“I’m Away” Away Messages Overt Text

Example

Comments

I’m really away

out

overt message matches communicative intent

Itinerary

voter registration, peace corps meeting, class, choir, dinner, dorm council

enumerated sequence of activities to inform friends how one is spending one’s day

Lurking/filtering

Maybe I’m doing work … maybe I’m not … the question of the night.

monitoring incoming IM traffic so one can decide which messages to respond to and which to ignore

Intentional misrepresentation

dinner with Mark and dancing all night (when actually alone in dorm room watching TV)

construct a self-image (here, of a successful social life)

Away Messages that Initiate Discussion or Social Encounter Overt Text

Example

Comments

Reach me through a different medium

since I am never around try TEXT MESSAGING me! Send it to [phone number]. I wanna feel the love!

attempting to stay in the social loop

Let’s chat online

Please distract me, I’m not accomplishing anything

soliciting social contact

Away Messages that Convey Personal Information Overt Text

Example

Comments

Current activity

Reading for once … the joy of being an English major is sooo overwhelming right now … (the sarcasm is very much intended)

commentary about feeling overburdened

Sense of humor

I could easily be replaced with a dancing chimp … and at times I believe people would prefer the chimp (but so would I)

use of humorous style to soften description of how one is feeling

Figure 1. Away messages that convey information or initiate conversation

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Many subjects perceived entertainment to be an essential component of away messages. One subject said that since she enjoyed friends’ away messages that made her laugh, she tried to make her own words funny. Others felt they had to justify themselves when their away messages were not funny or creative, typically pleading lack of time or energy to craft amusing postings. Seen in terms of pragmatics, entertainment messages reflect users’ sense of social obligation to make their away messages worth reading. 4.2.

IM conversations

We turn now from IM away messages to IM conversations. Popular discussion of IM conversations has typically focused on lexical issues (IM “lingo”) such as abbreviations, acronyms, emoticons,12 and odd spellings (see Thurlow 2006; Bieswanger, this volume). As the ultimate building blocks of conversation, lexical issues are important to study, especially through quantitative corpus analysis. However, equally relevant are the conversations themselves, including such pragmatics issues as conversational repair and conversational closings. Jacobs (2009) reports on a two-year ethnographic study she conducted of IM usage by an adolescent girl. By videotaping both on-screen IM behavior and other activity in the physical environment, Jacobs illustrated how young people incorporate IM conversations within their larger social worlds (see also Hu, Wood, Smith, and Westbrook 2004). Focusing on lexical issues, Tagliamonte and Denis (2008), building on protocols I had earlier developed (see below), collected over a million words of IM conversations from Canadian teenagers. Comparing the IM data with speech from some of the same subjects, the authors found that while IM manifests some distinctive traits, it shows considerable stylistic variation, and it remains rooted in the model of offline language. In spring 2003, my students and I undertook a small-scale study of the structural properties of American college student IM conversations.13 Student experimenters initiated IM conversations with peers on their AIM buddy lists. After anonymizing user screen names, the student experimenters forwarded the IM conversation files to a project web site. We collected 23 IM conversations, containing 2,185 distinct transmissions composed of 11,718 words. Nine were conversations between females, 10 between males, and 5 involved male-female pairs. Our IM analysis explored conversational composition, lexical issues, utterance breaks, and gender issues. Figure 2 summarizes our coding system. Names here and in subsequent examples from the corpus have been anonymized.

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Transmission Unit: any IM that is transmitted e.g., Max: hey man Utterance: a sentence or sentence fragment in IM e.g., Susan: Somebody shoot me! [sentence] e.g., Zach: if the walls could talk [sentence fragment] Sequence: one or more IM transmissions sent seriatim by the same person e.g., Max: hey man Max: whassup Closing:14 a series of transmissions at the end of an IM conversation, beginning with one party initiating closure and ending with termination of the IM connection Utterance Chunking: the process of breaking a single IM utterance (“sentence”) into multiple transmissions (“chunks”) e.g., Joan: that must feel nice Joan: to be in love Joan: in the spring Utterance Break Pair: two sequential transmissions that are grammatically part of the same utterance and result from utterance chunking e.g., Allyson: Kathleen is back in town Allyson: for a month or so Figure 2. Coding system for structural analysis of IM conversations

4.2.1.

Conversational composition

The average IM transmission was 5.4 words long, with transmissions ranging between 1 and 44 words. In a contrastive analysis of spoken and written language, Chafe and Danielewicz (1987: 96) found that informal spoken “conversational intonation units” (chunks of spoken language typically demarcated by rising or falling intonation, or by a pause) averaged 6.2 words. For written prose, the “punctuation unit” (strings of writing set off by punctuation marks) for traditional letters averaged 8.4 words. By these measures, IM more closely resembled informal speech. One reason IM transmissions were generally short is that many IMs were written seriatim. Nearly half the sample consisted of sequences of two or more transmissions. While some sequential transmissions constituted distinct utterances, e.g., transmission 1: transmission 2:

i’m sorry [utterance 1] if it makes you feel any better, i’m being held captive by two of Julie’s papers [utterance 2]

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others were pieces of larger sentences, as in transmission 1: transmission 2:

in the past people have found stuff under the cushions [together, a single utterance]

Eliminating the one-word transmissions (almost never found in sequences of two or more transmissions sent by the same person seriatim), one-sixth of the remaining transmissions were part of an utterance break pair. The IM conversations averaged 93 transmissions and 24 minutes long. Conversational length varied widely, from quick three- or four-transmission volleys to sessions of more than 200 transmissions lasting over an hour. We also examined conversational closings. As in spoken discourse, saying goodbye on IM is sometimes a protracted process (in number of exchanges and time on the clock). For example: Gale: Sally: Sally: Gale: Gale: Sally: Sally: Gale: Sally:

hey, I gotta run Okay. I’ll ttyl? [talk to you later] gotta do errands. yep! Okay. :) talk to you soon Alrighty.

From the first indication that one partner intended to sign off up until actual closure, subjects averaged 7 transmissions and 40 seconds. 4.2.2.

Lexical issues

We analyzed abbreviations, acronyms, contractions, and emoticons, along with spelling mistakes and self-corrections. We only tallied IM abbreviations and acronyms distinctive to online (or mobile) language (e.g., excluding hrs for hours or US for United States). Abbreviations were sparse: 31 out of 11,718 words. These included 16 instances of k for OK, 7 of cya for see you, and 5 of bc (or b/c) for because. Only 90 acronyms occurred, the majority of which (76) were lol for laughing out loud. Contractions are another form of lexical shortening (e.g., I’m instead of I am). Among young adults, contractions are prolific in informal speech, probably appearing more than 90 % of the time they are possible.15 However, in the IM data, contractions were only used in 65 % of the possible 763 cases. Emoticons were also infrequent. Of the 49 instances, 31 were smiley faces and 5 a frowny. Just three subjects accounted for 33 of the emoticons.

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Spelling was surprisingly good. Only 171 words were misspelled or lacked necessary punctuation – averaging one error every 12.8 transmissions. More than one-third of the errors involved omitting an apostrophe in a contraction (such as thats) or a possessive (Sams).16 Another third were common spelling mistakes – adding or omitting letters (e.g., assue for assume), or using the wrong letter (e.g., coliege for college). Some of these mistakes probably reflect typing errors, as do the 21 % of misspellings involving metathesis (e.g., somethign for something). In 9 % of the cases, writers noticed the problem and fixed it (or tried to) in the next transmission. That is, these writers repaired conversational infelicities, perhaps out of habit, as a face-saving move or to increase intelligibility. 4.2.3.

Utterance breaks

The utterance break analysis used the nine conversations between females (FF) and the nine between males (MM).17 The 189 break pairs were coded for the grammatical relationship between the first and second transmissions. For example, in the break pair sequence transmission 1: transmission 2:

Kathleen is back in town for a month or so

the second transmission (for a month or so) is an adverbial prepositional phrase, modifying the sentence in the first transmission. Table 2 summarizes the results of the grammatical coding. Table 2.

Grammatical coding of second member of utterance break pairs

Grammatical Type

FF (N=84)

MM (N=105)

Total (N=189)

Conjunctions and sentences or phrases introduced by conjunctions

47.6 % (40)

68.6 % (72)

59.3 % (112)

Independent clauses

22.6 % (19)

9.5 % (10)

15.3 % (29)

7.1 % (6)

8.6 % (9)

7.9 % (15)

11.9 % (10)

5.7 % (6)

8.5 % (16)

Noun phrases

9.5 % (8)

5.7 % (6)

7.4 % (14)

Verb phrases

1.2 % (1)

1.9 % (2)

1.6 % (3)

Adjectives and adjectival phrases Adverbs and adjectival phrases

Conjunctions were the primary device for chunking utterances into multiple transmissions. Out of 189 break pairs, 112 began the second transmission with a conjunction. Of these, 89 used conjunctions to introduce sentences (e.g., coordinating conjunction: and she never talks about him; subordinating conjunction: if I paid my own airfare). The remaining 23 were conjunctions introducing a noun phrase (or circleville) or verb phrase (and had to pay back the bank). More than

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four-fifths of all conjunctions appearing in the beginning of the second member of an utterance break pair were coordinating conjunctions. Fifteen percent of the 189 break pairs contained an independent clause in the second transmission. Grammatically, independent clauses in the corpus were also sentences (e.g., that’s all I’m saying) or sentence fragments (e.g., monitor democratic processes). Conjunctions introducing sentences, plus the independent clause category, account for 62 % of all utterance break pairs. The remaining cases of second transmissions in break pairs were largely adjectives (completely harmless), adverbs (on Saturday), or nouns (radio station). Among verb phrases, there was one lone example in which the utterance break was between the subject and the verb-phrase predicate: transmission unit 1: transmission unit 2:

and then Pat McGee Band perform like 7

The next section considers the implications of these findings for assessing the extent to which IM is a spoken or written modality. 4.2.4.

Gender, speech, and writing in IM conversations

Gender makes a difference in various aspects of IM use. Female-female conversations averaged 122 transmissions per conversation, lasting an average of 31 minutes. Male-male conversations averaged 85 transmissions, lasting 19 minutes. Females took longer to say goodbye, averaging 9.8 turns and 41 seconds, while males averaged 4.3 turns and 16 seconds. Gender was irrelevant for all lexical categories except contractions and emoticons. While males used contracted forms 77 % of the time contractions were possible, females did so in only 57 % of possible cases. By contrast, females were the prime users of emoticons. Gender also differentiated use of multi-transmission sequences. Males were almost twice as likely as females to chunk sentences into sequential transmissions (males: 23 % of all their IM transmissions; females: 13 %). Males were also more likely than females (69 % versus 48 %) to begin the second transmission in a break pair with a conjunction. (Females were more likely than males – 23 % versus 10 % – to chain together related sentences.) Many of these gender differences bear on the question of whether IM approximates spoken or written discourse. Researchers (e.g., Baron 1998; Crystal 2001; Quan-Haase 2009) have considered the extent to which CMC (including email, IM, and text messaging) is structurally more like speech or writing. While popular discussion assumes a spoken model (to wit: the phrase “IM conversation”), formal linguistic analysis reveals a mixed profile. Considering our IM corpus as a whole, the medium seems more similar to speech than writing.18 IM and speech have comparable average turn lengths; both

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use many one-word utterances; and both can have protracted conversational closings. As for lexicon, while informal speech uses more contractions than IM, there are more contractions in IM than in formal writing (where, traditionally, there are none). Similarly, while not numerous, IM emoticons essentially substitute for (spoken) prosody. A comparison of the utterance break data with Chafe’s description of utterance breaks in speech (1980) reveals that the two are largely parallel.19 However, when gender considerations are introduced, the profile changes. Granted, several aspects of female IM usage are congruent with a “spoken” character, including more protracted conversational closings and more use of emoticons than males. Yet in other important dimensions of IM, females seem to be adopting a more written model. Females used fewer contractions than males. Males were more likely to chunk sentences into multiple IM transmissions and to begin the second member of an utterance break pair with a conjunction, while females tended to begin the second member with an independent clause. The conjunction pattern is more common in speech, whereas the independent clause pattern is more characteristic of writing (Chafe and Danielewicz 1987). Overall, male IM conversations have much in common with face-to-face speech, while female IMs more closely approximate conventional writing patterns. Obviously, these generalizations are tempered by individual variation, along with message function. Moreover, despite the more written quality of female IMs, the messages remain largely informal. Why does IM assume some dimensions of more formal, written language? One explanation is what John Dewey (1922) called habit strength. By the time they reach college, undergraduates have been typing on computers for years – often for school work, where acronyms, abbreviations, and contractions are generally unwelcome. These school-appropriate writing habits may be carrying over into IM, which is produced on the same keyboard as school compositions – and sometimes at the same time. According to “The Nation’s Report Card” (National Center for Educational Statistics 2002), in the K-12 years, girls produce better writing than boys (measured by assessment of narrative, information, and persuasive writing tasks). It is therefore not surprising that female IM conversations include fewer contractions, fewer sentences chunked into multiple transmissions, and fewer sentence breaks involving a conjunction. These findings are consonant with sociolinguistic research reporting that women’s language generally adheres more closely to linguistic norms than does men’s (James 1996; Labov 1991). Is IM speech or writing? It is some of both, but not as much speech as popularly assumed. What is more, gender matters. Gender also matters with respect to other IM issues, such as content, word choice for initiating or closing IM conversations, and tone. Lee (2003) found that male college students spoke more in their IMs about technology-related topics, while female conversations involved more emotional subjects; that males tended to avoid opening greetings or goodbyes, while females used both; and that males

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addressed one another with derogatory names and used harsh teasing, while females displayed a more sympathetic tone and used more emoticons. These findings confirm gender distinctions observed in other forms of CMC (e.g., Herring 2003).

5.

Choosing between IM and other communication options

IM is only one tool available for mediated communication. On computers, alternatives include email and social networking sites such as Facebook. An additional possibility is sending text messages on mobile phones. Selection of medium may reflect such factors as whether users wish to communicate synchronously or asynchronously, and whether users actually have a choice. (Some businesses, for example, have shifted office communication from email to IM.) In this section, research on choosing between IM and Facebook (5.1) and between IM and texting (5.2) is summarized. 5.1.

IM versus Facebook

5.1.1.

Brief introduction to Facebook

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, then an undergraduate at Harvard University. Building on the success of first-generation social networking sites such as Friendster, TheFaceBook (as it was originally called) was essentially an electronic version of the printed freshman “facebooks” common on American campuses, which included such information as name, photo, date of birth, hometown, and perhaps college dormitory address, potential major, and hobbies. Zuckerberg designed the program for use at Harvard, but soon it spread to other American campuses, then to high schools, and eventually to anyone, anywhere desiring an account.20 The homepage of Facebook (as of February 2010) asserts that “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life”. By early 2010, there were more than 350 million active users of the site worldwide, about 70 % of whom were outside the U.S. During its brief history, Facebook has added ever-more functions to assist users in making those connections, from a chat function and status reports (mentioned above) to posting of photo albums – with more than 2.5 billion photographs being uploaded each month as of early 2010.21 Initially, Facebook had rather sparse tools for one-to-one communication. A message function (essentially an email) enabled one to contact others using Facebook, but recipients had to be logged on to their Facebook accounts to know they had received a message. (Later, recipients received a traditional email, alerting them to log on to Facebook.) In a study of all Facebook usage between February

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2004 and March 2006, Golder, Wilkinson, and Huberman (2006: 3) found that on average, users sent less than one message per week. This was the Facebook environment in which my students and I explored how American university students juggled IM versus Facebook usage. 5.1.2.

Choosing between IM and Facebook

In spring 2006, we administered a paper-based questionnaire to 60 university undergraduates (half male, half female).22 At that time, Facebook and IM had several overlapping functions: profiles; away messages (IM) or the wall (Facebook) for posting information available to groups of people; and a one-to-one messaging system. We first compared time spent on IM and Facebook. Respondents averaged 2.2 hours a day on IM, compared with .7 hours on Facebook. Another comparison concerned profiles: whether users looked first at someone’s IM or Facebook profile, and how often users changed their own profiles. Four-fifths of the students turned first to Facebook profiles to garner information, and two-thirds updated their Facebook profile more frequently. Despite the swift rise of Facebook, IM remained an important communication tool in 2005–2006. Interview data collected in fall 200523 suggested that Facebook had largely become the network on which one presents oneself to others, while IM retained its role as the basic form of online communication between individuals. One interviewee commented that she and her friends “tended to send a Facebook message when they wanted to communicate something private, but not immediate” (akin to email, in that both were asynchronous). In the words of another student, “an IM conversation with someone you’d rather not speak with, or whom you do not know, is seen as more of an invasion of privacy than a message via the more relaxed [i.e., asynchronous] Facebook system”. The Facebook wall provided an alternative to an IM or a Facebook message. Several interviewees admitted using the wall “when they wish to avoid talking to the person in question”. An example was a Facebook birthday message: She posted a happy birthday message on the wall of a casual friend rather than call or send an instant message because she did not want to start a conversation … The wall is often used as a means of social avoidance; users try to keep up social ties without having to actually maintain them.

Commenting more generally on IM versus Facebook, another student explained, Facebook … allows the person to maintain a presence in an online community from a distance. Being someone’s friend or joining a group carries no obligation or responsibility … [IM] takes on a more personal role, similar to that of a phone number or physical address … [IM] is a direct line to the user and their state of mind[.]

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By early 2010, the relationship between IM and Facebook had shifted. Anecdotal evidence from informal observation suggests that at least on American campuses, traditional IM clients such as AIM have been largely eclipsed by Facebook or the chat function of Skype (see section 6). 5.2.

IM versus texting

The popular press commonly conflates language used in IM and text messaging (e.g., Thurlow 2006). However, the two media differ in important respects. IM conversations are traditionally constructed on full computer keyboards, are synchronous, and involve stationary interlocutors. Text messages have traditionally been constructed on small phone keypads, are asynchronous, and are potentially composed while on the move. It is reasonable to expect that these parameters will affect both messages and perhaps choice between platforms. Until recently, text messaging on mobile phones was a relative novelty in the U.S., compared with many other countries.24 In a study of teens and technology, Lenhart et al. (2005) reported that in communicating with friends, 24 % chose IM, while 51 % preferred landline phones, 12 % opted for voice calls on mobile phones, 5 % selected email, and only 3 % used text messaging. However, the U.S. profile then shifted: By 2008, Americans were doing more texting on mobile phones than talking (Steinhauer and Holson 2008). In other parts of the world, relative usage of IM versus texting varies, reflecting such factors as relative cost and computer access. Structurally, messages constructed via IM (on computers) and via texting (on mobile phones) show both similarities and differences. Ling and Baron (2007) compared 191 IM messages from the data set described in section 4.2 with 191 messages from another American university population, gathered in fall 2005. Among the similarities were very low use of emoticons and acronyms, and comparable use of periods and question marks. However, the text messages were longer, reflecting both cost factors (since texts are charged by the transmission) and users’ tendencies to chunk IM utterances into sequences of short transmissions. IMs had three times as many apostrophes in contractions, likely an artifact of input complexity on mobile phones. And text messages had more abbreviations, although the number was still small (only 3 % of total words in the texting corpus). Given this background, what is known about user choice between IM and texting? 5.2.1.

Choosing between IM and texting

In 2007–2008, as part of a cross-cultural study of mobile phone practices by 2001 university students, I compared use of IM on computers versus texting on mobile phones in Sweden, the U.S., Italy, Japan, and Korea.25 Table 3 reports the years of experience subjects had with each platform.

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Mean years of experience with IM and text messaging

Sweden (N=171) U.S. (N=523) Italy (N=616) Japan (N=529) Korea (N=162)

Doing IM on Computer

Doing Texting on Mobile Phone

5.9 7.4 2.7 3.7 6.9

6.8 3.5 7.0 5.5 6.4

However, not everyone in the study used IM or texting. Thirty percent of Italians and 47 % of Japanese did no IM, and 12 % of Americans did no texting. These data were largely consonant with results from another survey question: Did people spend more time communicating through IM on a computer or through texting on a mobile phone? Table 4.

More time doing IM on computer or texting on mobile phone

Sweden (N=171) U.S. (N=523) Italy (N=616) Japan (N=529) Korea (N=162)

More IM

More Texting

55.0 % (94) 42.1 % (220) 28.1 % (173) 6.2 % (33) 8.6 % (14)

45.0 % (77) 57.9 % (303) 71.9 % (443) 93.8 % (496) 91.4 % (148)

As Table 4 shows, Swedes spent slightly more time on IM, and Americans spent, slightly more on texting. Since in both Italy and Japan, many subjects did not use IM, it is not surprising to find the preponderance of both groups using more texting. In the case of Koreans, although they had been using IM nearly as long as Americans, their main form of one-to-one communication had become mobile phones. The same survey revealed that Koreans used both voice functions and texting on their mobiles more than subjects from the other four countries (Baron 2009a). Gender was a relevant variable in Sweden, the U.S., Italy, and Korea, where more females favored texting over IM. One explanation is that females are often more aware than males of how to manipulate communication media (Baron 2009b). Texting (unlike synchronous IM) enables users to select when to send and receive messages. Another component of the cross-cultural study lends support to this notion of control. When asked how important it was to send a text message to a friend rather than make a voice call because “I want to make my message short, and talking takes too long”, more females than males in each country responded that this was a “very important” or “somewhat important” reason. As members of subsequent focus groups explained, with texting, people can convey their own message without having to listen to other people’s problems.

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IM in the future

Since its emergence two decades ago, IM has undergone continuing evolution. The proliferation of personal networked computers in the 1990s made the medium available to millions of users. New features emerged, allowing individuals to customize their self-presentation as well as take advantage of affordances familiar from email (e.g., messaging people not logged on to the system) and chat rooms (e.g., conducting multi-person conversations). The biggest challenges to IM came with the availability of multi-featured social networking sites (such as Facebook), the popularity of VoIP Systems (such as Skype) that include typed messaging, and the profusion (most recently in the U.S.) of inexpensive text messaging on mobile phones. From the perspective of young users, price is often no longer a consideration: IM, Facebook, and Skype are “free” (once one has an Internet connection), and texting plans increasingly offer unlimited messaging, typically after paying a small monthly fee. In the case of text messaging on mobile phones, portability is a clear advantage over carrying a computer. IM, Facebook, and Skype can all be done on mobiles, although input tends to be cumbersome. However, input is simplified somewhat by T9 programs and by full QWERTY keypads, which are especially popular in the U.S. and may be helping fuel the explosion in American texting. Social networking and VoIP communication, at least in the U.S., are still predominantly done on computers. But such sites as Facebook have the advantage (over traditional IM) of offering multiple additional functions (from photo albums to event coordination). Applications such as Skype enable users to conduct an audio (or video) session and simultaneously engage in written chat and/or transmit files. Whatever name it travels under, IM as a typed synchronous communication tool linking two (or more) interlocutors will almost certainly persist. Less clear is whether the distinctive characteristics described in section 4 will survive as well. As overall use of the Internet continues to grow, and as input devices become increasingly simpler, Dewey’s (1992) notion of habit strength could lead users of both genders to a single writing style for all compositions produced on computers. Moreover, now that young people have enjoyed more than a decade of linguistic creativity in their online (and mobile) communication, they might move on to novelty in other pursuits, leaving the majority of IM “lingo” to fade. With regard to pragmatics issues, there are larger questions: How will we manage personal interruptions (when an IM arrives), and how will we learn to coordinate turn-taking in multiparty conversations (be they exchanges between friends or classroom discussions in online education)? We will need to better understand differences between online and face-to-face issues regarding politeness, deception, conversational repairs, and conversational closings. We will also need to study whether meanings are necessarily less clear in mediated communication than in traditional face-to-face exchange or traditional writing. The latter concern moti-

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vated the creation of emoticons in 1982, although it is unclear whether these symbols are themselves semantically unambiguous – or necessary (Baron 2009c). Since the mid 2000s, IM has increasingly evolved into a function incorporated into – or replaced by – other mediated communication tools. However, the questions of language, context, and interpretation that IM initially generated are no less relevant today to students of CMC.

Notes 1. See http://web.mit.edu/zephyr/doc/usenix/zslides.PS. 2. ICQ, like its predecessors, originally had a split-screen and keystroke-by-keystroke transmission option, allowing what Herring (2007) calls two-way message transmission. 3. In much of Europe, “chat” refers to what Americans call “instant messaging”. 4. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=12811122130. See section 5.1 for discussion of Facebook messaging versus AIM. 5. http://www.cellsigns.com/industry.shtml (accessed July 2, 2012). 6. http://www.multilingual-search.com/forrester-research-inc-data-on-mobile-instantmessaging-im-in-europ e/25/01/2008 (accessed July 2, 2012). 7. Text messaging is also productively used by hearing-impaired populations (Bakken 2005). 8. See Baron 2008a (Chapter 3) for broader discussion of multitasking issues. 9. Tim Clem and Brian Rabinowitz assisted in this project. 10. For details on the away message study, see Baron, Squires, Tench, and Thompson (2005). 11. There were also two messages conveying information intended for specific interlocutors, although the messages were viewable by everyone on the sender’s buddy list (e.g., “Back in D.C. missing Houston very much … Kate, Erin, and Phil [names anonymized], thank you for an amazing weekend”). At the time the data were collected, AIM users could not send messages to people not logged on to the system. The only way to have a message waiting for them upon their return was through a broadcast away message. 12. Emoticons typically function as commentaries on the preceding utterance. However, since abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons are commonly viewed as hallmarks of IM communication, all are included in this chapter’s discussion of lexical issues. 13. See Baron 2004 for details of the study. While the corpus was small, results are consonant with findings from Tagliamonte and Denis’s larger corpus. 14. This is an operational definition of the term, adopted for purposes of the present analysis. 15. This statistic is from a class project done in 2004 at my university analyzing traits of students’ informal speech. 16. There is no evidence whether omission of apostrophes was an unconscious or conscious act. 17. For details on the analysis, see Baron (2010). 18. For discussion of distinctions between spoken and written language, see Baron (2000), Biber (1988), Chafe and Danielewicz (1987), Chafe and Tannen (1987), and Crystal (2001). 19. See Baron (2010) for more detailed analysis.

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20. For discussions of the development of Facebook, see Cassidy (2006) and Petersen (2010). For an early analysis of the social impact of Facebook in college settings, see Vanden Boogart (2006). 21. Statistics in this paragraph are from http://newsroom.fb.com/ (accessed July 2, 2012). 22. For more information on the Facebook study, see Baron 2008a (Chapter 5). Clare Park assisted in gathering data. 23. Interviews were conducted by Tamara Brown, Dan Hart, Kathy Rizzo, and Kat Waller. 24. For example, in January 2005, Americans sent 7.25 billion text messages. People in the UK sent approximately 2.7 billion texts in the same month. However, since the UK had only one-fifth the population of the U.S. (roughly 60 million versus 296 million), the UK sent nearly twice as many messages per capita. Three years later, the situation had changed dramatically: In mid-2008, the UK sent roughly 6 billion texts per month, while the U.S. sent 75 billion. Adjusting for population, by mid-2008 the U.S. was sending more than twice as many texts as the UK (UK source: http://www.text.it/mediacentre; U.S. source: http://www.cellsigns.com/industry.shtml (accessed July 2, 2012). 25. For discussion of the larger survey, see Baron (2008b, 2009a).

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Leopoldina Fortunati, Tomaz Turk, and Eugene Loos (eds.), The Good, the Bad, and the Challenging: The User and the Future of Information and Communication Technologies, vol. 1, 273–282. COST Action 298 Participation in the Broadband Society. Baron, Naomi S. 2009b Control freaks: How online and mobile communication is reshaping social contact. Keynote address, Language in New Media: Technologies and Ideologies Conference, Seattle, WA, September 6. Baron, Naomi S. 2009c The myth of impoverished signal: Dispelling the spoken language fallacy for emoticons in online communication. In: Jane Vincent and Leopoldina Fortunati (eds.), Electronic Emotion: The Mediation of Emotion via Information and Communication Technologies, 107–135. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang. Baron, Naomi S. 2010 Discourse structures in instant messaging: The case of utterance breaks. Language@Internet 7, article 3. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2651/index_html/ Baron, Naomi S., Lauren Squires, Sara Tench, and Marshall Thompson 2005 Tethered or mobile? Use of away messages in instant messaging by American college students. In: Rich Ling and Per E. Pedersen (eds.), Mobile Communications: Re-Negotiation of the Social Sphere, 293–311. London: Springer. Baym, Nancy, Yan Bing Zhang, and Mei-Chen Lin 2004 Social interactions across media: Interpersonal communication on the internet, face-to-face, and the telephone. New Media & Society 6: 299–318. Biber, Douglas 1988 Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bowe, Frank 2002 Deaf and hard of hearing Americans’ instant messaging and e-mail use: A national survey. American Annals of the Deaf 147(4): 6–10. Boneva, Bonka, Amy Quinn, Robert Kraut, Sara Kiesler, and Irina Shklovski 2006 Teenage communication in the instant messaging era. In: Robert Kraut, Malcolm Brynin, and Sara Kiesler (eds.), Computers, Phones, and the Internet, 201–218. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bryant, J. Alison, Ashley Sanders-Jackson, and Amber Smallwood 2006 IMing, text messaging, and adolescent social networks. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication 11(2), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/bryant.html Cassidy, John 2006 Me media. New Yorker, May 15, 50–59. Chafe, Wallace L. 1980 The deployment of consciousness in the production of a narrative. In: Wallace L. Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, 9–50. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Chafe, Wallace L. and Jane Danielewicz 1987 Properties of spoken and written language. In: Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels (eds.), Comprehending Oral and Written Language, 83–113. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

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Herring, Susan C. 2007 A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet 4, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761 Hu, Yifeng, Jacqueline Fowler Wood, Vivian Smith, and Nalova Westbrook 2004 Friendship through IM: Examining the relationship between instant messaging and intimacy. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue1/hu.html Isaacs, Ellen, Alan Walendowski, Steve Whittaker, Diane Schiano, and Candace Kamm 2002 The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace. In: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11–20. New York: ACM Press. Iqbal, Shamsi, and Eric Horvitz 2007 Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: Field study, analysis, and directions. In: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 677–686. New York: ACM Press. Jacobs, Gloria 2009 Adolescents and Instant Messaging: Literacy, Language, and Identity Development in the 21st Century. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. James, Deborah 1996 Women, men, and prestige speech forms: A critical review. In: Victoria L. Bergvall, Janet M. Bing, and Alice F. Freed (eds.), Rethinking Language and Gender Research, 95–125. London: Longman. Kayan, Shipra, Susan Fussell, and Leslie Setlock 2006 Cultural differences in the use of instant messaging in Asia and North America. In: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 525–528. New York: ACM Press. Labov, William 1991 The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2: 205–254. Lee, Christine 2003 How does instant messaging affect interaction between the genders? The Mercury Project of Instant Messaging Studies, Stanford University. http://www.stanford.edu/class/pwr3–25/group2/pdfs/IM_Genders.pdf Lenhart, Amanda, Mary Madden, and Paul Hitlin 2005 Teens and technology: Youth are leading the transition to a fully wired and mobile nation. Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 27. Lenhart, Amanda, Lee Rainie, and Oliver Lewis 2001 Teenage life online: The rise of the instant-message generation and the internet’s impact on friendships and family relationships. Pew Internet & American Life Project, June 20. Leung, Louis 2001 College student motives for chatting on ICQ. New Media & Society 3: 483–500. Levinson, Stephen 1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ling, Rich and Naomi S. Baron 2007 Text messaging and IM: A linguistic comparison of American college data. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 26(3): 291–298.

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Shiu, Eulynn and Amanda Lenhart 2004 How Americans use instant messaging. Pew Internet & American Life Project, September 1. Steinhauer, Jennifer and Laura M. Holson 2008 As text messages fly, danger lurks. New York Times, A1, September 20. Stewart, Craig, Leslie Setlock, and Susan Fussell 2004 Conversational argument in decision making: Chinese and U.S. participants in face-to-face and instant messaging interactions. Discourse Processes 44(2): 113–139. Tagliamonte, Sali and Derek Denis 2008 Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language. American Speech 83(1): 3–34. Thurlow, Crispin 2006 From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(3), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue3/thurlow.html Vanden Boogart, Matthew 2006 Discovering the social impacts of Facebook on a college campus. Master’s thesis, Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, College of Education, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas.

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7.

Text messaging Crispin Thurlow and Michele Poff

1.

Introduction

On the day we first started putting this chapter together, then-soon-to-be-Presidentof-the-United-States Barack Obama announced his choice of vice-presidential running mate by sending a text message to journalists and Democratic Party senators and supporters. In one not-so-restrained New York Times journalist’s characterization of the event: “Mr. Obama’s use of the newfound medium is the widest use of texting by a presidential candidate in history”. The following morning, again in the U.S., a National Public Radio journalist talked about “the most highly anticipated text message in human history”. This already newsworthy event was given an added mediatized spin thanks to texting. While we are not convinced of the historic proportions of the Obama campaign’s text message, it was certainly a communicative event loaded with pragmatic – and metapragmatic – force. Why choose to use texting to deliver this public message? (After all, supporters could just as easily have been notified via the ancient technology of email.) What did the choice of text message mean to voters? Why should it warrant such media interest? Why make so much fuss about a text message that bore little resemblance to the millions of text messages sent every day by ordinary people around the world? In this chapter, we consider these matters by stepping back from the hyperbolic commentary on text messaging by journalists and the entertaining observations of popular writers. To this end, we start with a comprehensive review of the scholarly, research-driven literature on text messaging; this work highlights the range of applications to which texting has been put, as well as the ways in which sociolinguists, discourse analysts, and other communication scholars have been attending to language in text messaging. Shifting next to a more specifically pragmatic and metapragmatic focus, we present some of our own early research as a way to illustrate general phenomena covered in the wider scholarly literature and to ground text messaging as a pragmatic phenomenon. The chapter closes with brief thoughts about gaps in the academic literature and possible directions for future research on the language of text messaging. Before proceeding further, however, we offer the following account of text messaging as a digital technology.

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The mechanics of texting

The terms “text messaging” and “texting” refer to the brief typed messages sent using the SMS (‘short message service’) of mobile/cell phones, PDAs (‘personal digital assistants’), smartphones, or web browsers. Although messages nowadays often include images, videos, and music (hence the newer term MMS ‘multimedia message service’), the basic text-based messaging service continues to be enormously popular. Texting was initially developed and released commercially in the early to mid-1990s and has since seen a huge rise in popularity around the world, following the rapid spread of mobile telephony in general. (In 2009, the United Nations reported that more than 60 % of the world’s population – about 4.1 billion people – had access to a mobile phone.1) Most often used for person-to-person communication, text messages are also increasingly being used to interact with automated systems (e.g., buying products, participating in television contests, recruiting voters). One interesting “convergence” phenomenon is the use of short messaging services with interactive television, which confuses the boundary between interpersonal and broadcast messaging (Zelenkauskaite and Herring 2008). As is usually the case, the technology is being transformed continually. In situating text messaging with reference to computer-mediated communication (CMC) more generally, it is important to recognize the interplay between what a technology itself allows (or affords) and what the communicator herself/ himself brings to the technology. Most obviously, in the case of text messaging, the equipment is small and, eponymously, mobile; it therefore affords most texters an unobtrusive and relatively inexpensive means of communication. At the same time, text messaging is also technically and practically restricted, allowing only a certain number of characters per message. (Set by a worldwide industry standard, the limit is almost always 160 characters per message.2) Moreover, like text-based CMC, it is primarily QWERTY-driven – which is to say, reliant on the standard typewriter keyboard (Anis 2007). Whether or not any mechanical feature of any technology presents as a communicative constraint or opportunity, however, depends on the user and on the context of use.

3.

Locating the linguistic: An overview of the literature

For a technology that only really went “live” in the mid-1990s, it took scholars a while to attend to texting. Since the early 2000s, however, research from a range of disciplines and a number of countries has been growing. While much of this work falls outside the immediate interests of language scholars, it does reveal the increasing importance and application of texting in both scholarly and public contexts. This research also demonstrates how much scholarly writing focuses on the transactional and often commercial uses of texting rather than the relational func-

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tion which, as we will suggest, is at the heart of most everyday texting. Texting research spans a wide range of disciplines and topics. From medicine, studies include the use of texting for patient reminders (e.g., Downer, Meara, Da Costa, and Sethuraman 2006; Leong et al. 2006) and for aftercare treatment (e.g., Robinson et al. 2006; Weitzel et al. 2007). In academia, studies include texting as library support (Herman 2007; Hill, Hill, and Sherman 2007), as a research methodology (Bosnjak et al. 2008; Cheung 2008; Steeh, Buskirk, and Callegaro 2007), as a pedagogical tool (Dürscheid 2002a; Naismith 2007), as a recruitment strategy (Maher 2007), and as a means for reducing school truancy (Allison 2004). Research in environmental development has examined how texting assists Bangladeshi villagers to locate clean water sources (Opar 2006). Texting research extends to business and commercial uses (e.g., Bamba and Barnes 2007; Hsu, Wang, and Wen 2006; Mahatanankoon 2007), political campaigning (Prete 2007), and media broadcasting (Enli 2007). Closer to human communication research, psychologists have looked at compulsive texting (Rutland, Sheets, and Young 2007) and so-called cyberbullying (e.g., Raskauskas and Stoltz 2007; Smith et al. 2008). What is apparent from this research is how often the purely informational uses of texting are privileged. Much other research does address the role of texting as a social-communicative resource in people’s daily lives. Consider these findings, for example: Thirty-two percent of adult texters in Malaysia cannot use their mobile phones without texting (Tanakinjal, Amin, Lajuni, and Bolongkikit 2007); texting is a status symbol with Hong Kong college students, with texters being predominantly male and having a high household income (Leung 2007); young adults with lower social skills in Hong Kong (Leung 2007) and Japan (Ishii 2006) prefer texting to voice communication; Filipino mothers in the U.S. with children overseas use texting to maintain real-time relationships with their children (Uy-Tioco 2007); and subtle gender relations are negotiated via texting in Taiwan (Lin and Tong 2007). Lists like this illustrate nicely the ways in which texting is typically embedded in people’s daily lives. In terms of language and communication in particular, scholarly interest has been somewhat slower still to establish itself, and texting continues to be a relatively under-examined area of research (compared, for example, with other modes of CMC). This too has been changing, however, and a growing body of properly sociolinguistic and discourse analytic research attends to texting in English and other national languages. Our brief overview of the literature here, for example, covers work done in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, South Africa, Nigeria, New Zealand, Kuwait, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as the UK and the U.S. Pragmatically-oriented studies meanwhile have begun to address, among other things, turn-taking, code-switching, openings and closings, and general communicative intent. They have also considered, explicitly or not, the pragmatic implications of message length, textual complexity, grammar and punctuation, orthography, and

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the use of emoticons. In every case, studies typically situate pragmalinguistic phenomena with a view to broad cultural and interactional variations, which has important implications for any gross generalizations about the uniform nature of texting – a point we return to below. 3.1.

Cross-cultural contexts

Cross-cultural research on texting typically focuses on “linguacultural” (Agar 1994) and gender differences. A small handful of studies consider age differences. Perhaps not surprisingly, young people and older people have been found to use texting in different ways (Kim, Kim, Park, and Rice 2007). Teenagers and young adults are typically the most avid texters in a range of cross-cultural settings (Kasesniemi 2003; Ling 2005; Spagnolli and Gamberini 2007), which is not to say that texting is exclusive to, or has relevance only for, young people. In reviewing the literature briefly, we find very little research that focuses on adult texters; the vast majority attends to children and young people. As with popular media coverage, therefore, the broader demographics of texters is largely overlooked. In terms of gender differences in texting, research has been done in a number of countries. In Norway, for example, female teenagers and young adults text most frequently, with more than 40 % of young women texting daily (Ling 2005). Compared with young Norwegian men, these young women also send a greater number of longer and more syntactically complex messages, 52 % of which contain complex sentence structures compared with 15 % of boys’ messages. The women also use capitalization and punctuation more prescriptively, are more adroit at innovating new forms, prefer to coordinate events in the immediate future (as opposed to the middle future, as do boys), and are more likely to use texting for managing emotionally “loaded” communication (Ling 2005). These broad differences between girls/women and boys/men are commonly reported; see also Höflich and Gebhardt (2005) and Schmidt and Androutsopoulos (2004) in Germany; Herring and Zelenkauslaite (2009) in Italy; and Deumert and Masinyana (2008) in South Africa. In Finland, meanwhile, Kasesniemi (2003) also found that teenage girls are heavy texters, often placing greater emphasis on providing emotional exchanges, contemplating reasons behind interpersonal incidents, and discussing how incidents have affected them. Finnish boys, however, typically place greater emphasis on speed; their messages tend to be brief, informative, practical, often single-word or question-answer texts in a single sentence, and are about the facts of events. That gender differences emerge in young people’s preferred communication styles is hardly surprising (Thurlow 2001); these findings do, however, reiterate the variability that exists between texters and the messages they send. Other cross-cultural research has shown variable patterns across social/demographic groups within countries. For example, texters in Germany (Dürscheid 2002b), Italy (Spagnolli and Gamberini 2007), France (Rivière and Licoppe 2005),

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Korea (Kim et al. 2007), and young people in Japan (Ishii 2006) communicate predominantly with family or those in their innermost social circles. A study of older Japanese texters, meanwhile, found texting used more with those in extended social and even professional circles, in order to preserve respect for the receiver by not risking interrupting their affairs (Rivière and Licoppe 2005). In a study of Kuwaiti texters, Haggan (2007) notes the transcription of Arabic texts into English and a tendency towards formality and eloquence, which, she argues, may arise from the value of the texts more generally. Spagnolli and Gamberini (2007) meanwhile comment on the way that some Italians send lengthy, elaborate refusals to invitations, which, the authors argue, reflects particular local norms. Of course, in all these cases, it is not clear how generalizable the findings are to the rest of the country. Related to this point, we were unable to find anyone pulling together a large multinational comparative study that might offer a more systematic perspective on these types of linguacultural differences, although some steps have been taken in this direction (e.g., Dürscheid and Stark 2011; Nickerson, Isaac, and Mak 2008; also see below: Bieswanger 2007; Plester, Litteton, et al. 2009; Spilioti 2009, 2011). 3.2.

Interactional contexts

The use of texting in building and maintaining relationships has been a key aspect of research, which goes a long way towards confirming the essentially social function of the technology. For example, texting can assist in establishing new relationships (Ling, Julsrud, and Yttri 2008; see also Thompson and Cupples’ 2008 study of young New Zealanders) or, as in Japan, in maintaining and reinforcing existing ones (Ishii 2006). Young Japanese people also rated their relationships as more intimate when texting was an aspect of the relationship (Igarashi, Takai, and Yoshida 2005). Scholars have also remarked on the ritualistic role of texting in defining social boundaries through shared linguistic codes (e.g., Androutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002; Ling et al. 2008; Spilioti 2009) and have demonstrated how speech styles constitute different types of social relationships, with style shifting providing a contextual cue for relationship maintenance and conflict management (Schmidt and Androutsopoulos 2004). The role of texting in maintaining an “absent presence” in Japanese relationships is highlighted by Ito and Okabe (2005) as a key interactional function of texting – what they call ambient virtual co-presence. French texters, too, have been found to use texting for maintaining an absent presence among close friends (Rivière and Licoppe 2005). This research demonstrates the deeply embedded nature of texting in people’s lives and its key role in relational escalation and maintenance. Privacy considerations in texting have also been explored; for example, Weilenmann and Larsson (2002) found that texting may be a collective, public practice, with young Swedes sometimes reading and composing aloud with co-present friends. French texters, however, have been found to appreciate the ability to en-

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gage in private communications in public places, as texting permits senders to freely express emotion absent inhibitions and modesties (Anis 2007; Rivière and Licoppe 2005). The privacy afforded by texting also enables young people to communicate more freely (e.g., without adults’ surveillance), which shores up young people’s communities (Thompson and Cupples 2008). Conversely, in China, the traditional social order as governed by the State is perceived to be under threat, where texting facilitates a more or less Habermasian “public sphere” (Latham 2007). Whether approved of or not, texting is clearly aiding sociality in interesting and, to some extent, novel ways. Another area of research that speaks to the interactional contexts of texting – and that has received considerable scholarly attention – is the thematic content or functional orientation of people’s text messages. Chiluwa (2008), for example, classified Nigerian texters’ messages into three categories: economic (business and commerce), social (religion, politics, education, and other social concerns), and personal (greetings, feelings, prayers, etc.), and found that 60 % of text messages fell into this last category. Other researchers have similarly found the overall purpose of texting to be primarily affective, phatic, and socio-coordinative (Androutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002; Kasesniemi 2003; Ling 2005; Rivière and Licoppe 2005). The socio-coordinative function might entail, for example, the sending of “gifts” (akin to greeting cards) or a good-night message (Harper 2002; Laursen 2005; Ling 2005), managing a romantic relationship (Harper 2002), or the exchange of jokes and other word-play games (Rivière and Licoppe 2005). Content is also sometimes created together with co-present friends (Harper 2002; Weilenmann and Larsson 2002), and because texting is most often used to fill gaps in the day when texters are without direct, face-to-face interpersonal contact, it invariably takes on a chatty tone (Ito and Okabe 2005). This body of research further illuminates the range of different social functions texting fulfills in people’s lives. 3.3.

Pragmalinguistic contexts

A favourite topic of interest in writing about texting, both lay and scholarly, has been its lexical and stylistic features. Thankfully, an increasing amount of empirical research has begun to provide more measured, discursively situated perspectives on popular stereotypes about the features most popularly attributed to texting, including use of abbreviations (e.g., txt), letter-number homophones (e.g., gr8), and non-standard spelling (e.g., luv) – some of the most popularly cited examples of texting. A brief review of the texting literature such as the one in this chapter immediately reveals how the “linguistics” of texting is again marked by a number of crosscultural similarities and differences. For example, research on Swedish texters finds that they alter their spelling from the standard by spelling phonetically, splitting compounds, omitting vowels, using conventional and unconventional abbrevi-

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ations, writing in either all caps or all lower case, and exchanging longer words for shorter ones (Hård af Segerstad 2002). In Norway, meanwhile, teenagers do not use as many spelling alterations as do Swedish texters, with only 6 % of participants in one study using abbreviations, acronyms or emoticons, and girls largely responsible for abbreviations and innovative spellings (Ling 2005). German texters commonly use reduction techniques (Androutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002), while French texters use phonetic reductions, syllabograms, rebus writing (e.g., as with the English b4 for ‘before’), logograms which are symbols, acronyms, and unilateral abbreviations (Anis 2007), and represent spoken forms in writing (Rivière and Licoppe 2005). In the U.S., unambiguous abbreviations (e.g., u for ‘you’; r for ‘are’), vowel deletions, and lexical shortenings (e.g., Sun for ‘Sunday’) are common (Ling and Baron 2007). Nigerian English texters employ spelling manipulations, abbreviations, and phonetic spellings (Chiluwa 2008), and British texters are also linguistically creative (Tagg 2010). In one of only two African studies on texting that we are aware of, South Africa provides an interesting case where texters are found to use abbreviations, paralinguistic restitutions, and nonstandard spellings when texting in English, but not at all when texting in isiXhosa (Deumert and Masinyana 2008). Capitalization, punctuation, and blank spaces are often omitted in Swedish text messages (Hård af Segerstad 2002); apostrophes and sentence-final punctuation are omitted about two-thirds of the time in the U.S. (Ling and Baron 2007). Emoticons, e.g., smiley faces, are rare but are used in the U.S. (Ling and Baron 2007) and in Sweden (Hård af Segerstad 2002). Once again, what is striking about this international research is how much variation it shows. In addition to examining the lexical and orthographic features of texting, research has also attended to a range of syntactic and textual features (i.e., looking at the composition, organization, and coherence of messages). In this regard, message length has received considerable attention; for example, Hård af Segerstad (2002, 2005a, b) found that, at 14.77 words per message, Swedish text messages are typically longer than German messages, at 13 words per message (Döring 2002a, b). It is possible that cross-language comparisons are complicated by variable morphemic structures (see Plester et al. 2009). Ling and Baron (2007), meanwhile, found that text messages in the U.S. averaged only 7.7 words each, making them closer in length to those in Norway, which average 6.95 words per message for girls and even fewer for boys, 5.54 words per message (Ling 2005). In an extensive comparison of English and German syntax in texts, Bieswanger (2007) found that English texts contain on average 91 characters per message, while German texts contain 95. The pragmatic significance of message length will become apparent when we turn to our own case study in a moment. Research on syntactic features has also investigated message complexity, i.e., messages containing multiple clauses. According to this measure, Norwegian teenage girls’ messages contain far greater complexity (52 %) than their male counterparts (15 %) (Ling 2005). Similar results were found in Finland, where boys prefer

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to send one-sentence text messages, while girls prefer longer and more complex messages (Kasesniemi 2003). These findings are consistent with Ling and Baron’s (2007) finding that 60 % of their female U.S. university students’ text messages contained more than one sentence. Along these lines, the omission of auxiliary verbs, personal pronouns, and function words is common in Germany (Dürscheid 2002a) and Sweden (Hård af Segerstad 2002), where omission of the subject pronoun is also the most common syntactic reduction (Hård af Segerstad 2002). In the UK, analyses of article use and texting language usage more generally are foci of Tagg’s (2007a, b) work. A common thread across these studies is the syntactic variation in both gendered and other cross-cultural contexts. In more specifically pragmatic research, studies show that, for example, openings and closings are frequently dropped by Italian (Spagnolli and Gamberini 2007), Japanese (Ito and Okabe 2005), and German (Dürscheid 2002a, b) text messagers. Dürscheid views this as a function of the conversational frame of texting, as texting is often used as a conversation channel – and indeed adheres more to conversational norms – rather than as a form of communication that adheres to prescriptions for writing (see also Anis 2007, Ito and Okabe 2005). Kasesniemi (2003) too has remarked on the increasingly dialogical nature of texting among young Finns. Other research suggests that turn-taking conventions may be even stricter in texting than in speech, although this varies by cultural context and topic content (or communicative intent), and adheres to some highly standardized exchange patterns (Androutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002; Spagnolli and Gamberini 2007). Texters in Italy (Spagnolli and Gamberini 2007) and Japan expect reciprocity, and Japanese texters are highly sensitive to the amount of time that passes between turns, sending a text message prompt for recipients who take too long to reply (Ito and Okabe 2005). Working with Danish data, Laursen (2005) found expectations of reciprocity and immediacy, while Harper (2002) argued that in the U.S., text messages did not necessitate a reply and certainly not immediately. Some research on code switching has also been done in multilingual settings, predominantly, although not exclusively, investigating the use of English in combination with another national language. In Kuwait, Haggan (2007) found that texters use a mixture of Arabic and English in their text messages, while Finnish teenagers mix Finnish with a medley of foreign language words and expressions, drawing suitable expressions from any language known by the writer (Kasesniemi 2003), and South African texters blend English with isiXhosa by writing English nouns with isiXhosa prefixes (Deumert and Masinyana 2008). In contrast, Nigerian texters completely avoid any “Nigerianness” in their succinct messages, preferring standard (British) English and, even in their personal texts, avoiding Nigerian English and other indigenous languages (Chiluwa 2008). In her study, Spilioti (2009) provides an account of graphemic representations in Greek texters’ alphabet choices and code-switches. While these and other studies certainly attest to some important cultural variability, it is telling that so much research still covers

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English and other dominant/national European languages and, to some extent, languages like Japanese and Arabic, to the detriment of the rest of the languages of the world. This imbalance mirrors patterns of global wealth distribution, as well as the symbolic marketplace of academia. 3.4.

Metalinguistic contexts

Despite the growing body of scholarly research on texting, public and policy-level discourse about texting continues to fixate on its deleterious impact on literacy and standard language use – especially that of young people (Thurlow 2006, 2007). No review of the literature on texting would be complete without briefly considering this broader metalinguistic framework. In this regard, research has addressed two closely related types of public commentary: first, the general influence of texting on standard languages and on popular notions of “good communication”; second, concerns about the specific influence of text messaging style on conventional literacy. Invariably, these metalinguistic – or language ideological – debates prioritize the belief that text messaging style has a negative impact. These issues have been addressed by researchers writing/working in various languages (e.g., in German: Androutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002; Dürscheid 2002a, b; in French: Anis 2007; in Nigerian English: Chiluwa 2008). While a few scholars claim that texting has a negative influence on standard writing, spelling, and grammar (e.g., Siraj and Ullah 2007), most empirical studies focused on this issue maintain that texting does not pose a threat to standard language teaching and learning. These scholars usually argue that, although there may be some diffusion of texting style into “formal” writing (e.g., school work), texters almost always recognize that language use is context specific (Chiluwa 2008; Dürscheid 2002a), although they do not necessarily view CMC as “writing” (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, and Macgill 2008). Other scholars challenge the idea that the influence of texting on standard language practices is necessarily negative. Androutsopoulos and Schmidt (2002: 95), for example, note the following features of texting and their implications: “orthographic negligence reflects the reduction of cognitive resources allocated to spelling; transgression of orthography implies deliberate discrepancies; and neography is an alternative orthography”. Other research (Shortis 2007) suggests that the linguistic creativity of texting poses little threat to standard spelling. Some of the most explicit (and conclusive) research on the issue of standard literacies comes from Plester and her colleagues, who find a positive relation between texting and literacy (Plester et al. 2009; Plester, Wood, and Bell 2008; Plester, Wood, and Joshi 2009). (One instant messaging study also suggests that new media language does not interfere with standard literacy: Tagliamonte and Denis 2008). Plester’s research confirms, not surprisingly, that young people (like older texters, no doubt) are inherently aware of key pragmatic considerations such as context, relationship, and communicative intent (see also Lenhart et al. 2008; Tagg 2009).

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The pragmatics of texting: A case study

One early example of empirical research published on texting was our own study (Thurlow 2003).3 Based on a corpus of actual text messages, this study presented a direct challenge to the kinds of largely unfounded claims being made in the media at the time; it also offered a more properly discourse analytic perspective on texting (for an overview of discourse analysis and its relation to pragmatics, see Jaworski and N. Coupland 2006). A number of the studies reviewed above – especially those with a specifically (socio)linguistic focus – have used this original study as a stimulus for extending scholarly understanding of the “language” of texting. We review the study here in order to demonstrate – and reiterate – the quintessentially pragmatic nature of texting. 4.1.

Linguistic form and language play

While much is made in the media and elsewhere about the technologically imposed need for brevity in texting, texters seldom seem to use all the space available. The average word length of text messages in our own study was approximately 14 and the average character length of messages was only 65, although with quite a lot of variation (SD = 45). (Recall that the standardized limit on text messages is 160 characters.) Others have reported similar results. The length and abbreviated linguistic forms of texts would seem to be more a function of the need for speed, ease of typing and, perhaps, other symbolic and pragmatic concerns, such as gender identity performance or a preference for more dialogic exchanges (see also Döring 2002a; Hård af Segerstad 2005a; Herring and Zelenkauskaite 2009; Kasesniemi 2003; Ling 2005; Ling and Baron 2007; Zelenkauskaite and Herring 2008). In this sense, texting immediately takes on the character of interactive written discourse, as in other new media genres like instant messaging. Texters are able from the outset to infuse an ostensibly asynchronous technology with a certain degree of synchronicity – or dialogicality. The technology is thereby co-opted and exploited to serve people’s underlying needs for intimacy and sociability. Elsewhere, we have called this the “communication imperative” (Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic 2004), a fundamental human drive which usually prevails over the mechanical limitations of technologies. There are other technological constraints in texting that are similarly leveraged by users for interpersonal gain; this is especially evident in the linguistic and typographic form of text messages. Just as message length may easily be accounted for in pragmatic terms, so too may most of the supposedly distinctive, novel, and/or unorthodox linguistic forms, such as shortenings (i.e., missing end letters), contractions (i.e., missing middle letters), g-clippings and other clippings that drop the final letter, acronyms and initialisms, letter/number homophones, “misspellings” and typos, non-conventional spellings, and accent stylizations.

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What was most noticeable about the non-standard items in our own study was how so few of them were especially new or especially incomprehensible. (The media and other commentators often like to play up the “hieroglyphic” unintelligibility of young people’s texting – see Thurlow 2007). In practice, very few of the text messages we looked at were semantically unrecoverable, even in isolation from their original, discursive context and even to outsiders such as ourselves. Much of what texters type in their messages would not be out of place on a scribbled note left on the fridge door, the dining-room table, or next to the telephone – sites where the same brevity-speed imperative would apply. In this sense, both academic and lay claims for the impenetrability and exclusivity of texting language appear greatly exaggerated and belie the discursive significance of situated language use. Like the fridge-door note-maker, texters surely recognize the obvious need also for intelligibility – in Gricean terms, for adherence to the maxims of quantity and manner (Grice 1975; cf. also Lenhart et al. 2008; Plester et al. 2009; Tagg 2007b). One of the best examples of this, in terms of abbreviation, is the use of consonant clusters (e.g., THX), which rely on the premise (and metapragmatic awareness) that consonants in English (as with many other languages) usually convey more semantic detail/value than vowels. Many of the non-conventional spellings found in texting are widespread and pre-date the mobile phone, in any case (Crystal 2008; Shortis 2007). Examples include the use of z as in girlz and the k in skool, as well as phonological approximations such as the Americanized forms gonna, bin, and coz and g-clippings like jumpin, havin. Our own corpus did require one important caveat regarding the issue of nonstandard orthography. The text messages we looked at revealed only about three abbreviations per message, which meant that this supposedly defining feature of texting style accounted for less than 20 % of the overall message content analyzed (see also Bieswanger 2007). This initial finding certainly appears to run counter to popular ideas about the unintelligible, highly abbreviated “code” of texting. In the same vein, relatively few typographic (as opposed to alphabetic) symbols were found throughout the entire corpus, almost all of which were simply kisses or exclamation marks, usually in multiple sets (e.g., xxxxxx and !!!!!). Emoticons (e.g., J), too, were noticeable by their absence. Moreover, in spite of their notoriety in media reports and despite the title of Crystal’s (2008) book about texting, relatively few examples of letter-number homophones (e.g., Gr8) were found. Like many of the paralinguistic and prosodic cues found in older CMC technologies such as IRC (see Werry 1996), a more frequent type of language play was “accent stylizations” and “phonological approximations”, such as the regiolectal spelling novern for ‘northern’ (for parallels in languages other than English, see Ling 2005; Hård af Segerstad 2005b). In addition, we found a range of onomatopoeic, exclamatory spellings (e.g., haha!, arrrgh!, WOOHOO!, rahh, ahhh) and a handful of other typographic-cum-linguistic devices for adding prosodic impact (e.g., quick quick, wakey wakey and yawn) and, therefore, communicative immediacy. Indeed, as re-

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searchers like Shortis (e.g., 2007) have shown, the non-standard orthography of texting almost always expresses the generally creative, playful, and friendly tone intended by texters (see also Hård af Segerstad 2005a). Herein lies the crux of texting. 4.2.

Communicative intent: Maximizing sociality

Relationship building and social intercourse are both central to, and strongly facilitated by, technologies for communication, even though popular opinion still feeds on the once-popular scholarly idea that CMC is inherently asocial and/or antisocial (see Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic 2004 for more on this). Perhaps even more so than the landline telephone, the mobile phone and texting are clearly “technologies of sociability” (Fischer 1988). For anything other than analytical convenience, it is practically impossible to separate relational intent neatly from transactional intent – or, to put it another way, to separate “doing sociability” from information exchange (Jaworski 2000: 113). However, the text messages we collected were overwhelmingly and, for the most part, quite apparently relational in their orientation, ranging from sending friendly salutations, to making social arrangements, to substantial friendship maintenance. Explicitly transactional messaging accounted for only 15 % of all the messages analyzed. Even these ostensible information exchanges (e.g., hyper-coordinated, practical arrangements) invariably served more social concerns, such as finding a friend during a night out or courteously letting someone know that the texter was running late. The predominantly solidary, often phatic function of texting was expressed also in the persistent use of humour and the “gifting” of chain messages (e.g., stock sentiments or saucy jokes). In this sense, it is clear that much texting epitomizes small talk – which is not to say that it is peripheral or unimportant. On the contrary; as J. Coupland (2000) reminds us, small talk is, interactionally speaking, big talk regardless of its brevity, informality, or apparent topical superficiality. For example, as Androutsopoulos (2000) has demonstrated in the case of fanzines, non-standard orthography can be a powerful but also playful means for texters (and young texters, especially) to affirm their social identities by deviating from conventional forms; in doing so, they differentiate themselves (from adults, for example) and align themselves with each other. To this, we would add the opportunity to personalize and informalize their messages. Accordingly, most of what happens in/with everyday texting can and should be explained in the context of texters’ self-evident drive to connect with one another and to maximize sociality (see also Androutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002; Igarashi, Takai, and Yoshida 2005; Ito and Okabe 2005; Kasesniemi 2003; Ling 2005; Rivière and Licoppe 2005; Schmidt and Androutsopoulos 2004; Spilioti 2009). In these terms, texting presents itself in the broadest terms as a social technology par excellence.

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One technologically afforded pragmatic phenomenon in our 2003 data was the openly sexual tone of many messages. Texting facilitates an interesting mix of intimacy and social distance, not unlike various other genres of CMC (e.g., instant messaging and, to some extent, email); this also complicates traditional boundaries between private and public (cf. H. Lee 2005; Zelenkauskaite and Herring 2008). The technical rapidity and ephemerality (it is seldom stored or recorded) of texting seem to lend them a relative anonymity, even though the sender and receiver are invariably known to each other and/or revealed to each other through caller/number display. This kind of “recognized anonymity” might explain the relative licentiousness or “flame” tendencies of some texters (for more on anonymity, see Joinson 2001; Thurlow, Lengel, Tomic 2004).4 The face-saving capacity of this type of anonymity likewise accounts for texters who send messages to say something they would ordinarily avoid having to say face-to-face, such as breaking up with a romantic partner or, in the case of our own study, discussing an unexpected pregnancy. Related to this sense of recognized anonymity, and as another example of how text messagers capitalize on technological affordances, our corpus revealed instances where the sender and receiver were apparently within viewing distance of each other. Texting facilitates this kind of co-present exchange, allowing texters to interact covertly in an immediate and potentially very intimate form of communication – what some have referred to as the “culture of concealed use” (Ling and Yttri 2002:164). Texting evidently enhances communication in ways that allow for multiple or even parallel communicative exchanges (including face-toface interaction), offering an attractive combination of mobility, discretion, intimacy, and play. This combination of immediacy and intimacy drives the underlying need for sociality and, for the most part, explains the linguistic form, or style, of texting. 4.3.

The “maxims” of text message style

Assumptions – especially in the media – about the ubiquity, consistency, and homogeneity of texting style are, in practice, always confronted with a great deal of linguacultural, social, and personal variation. This is apparent from the variable findings of the studies we reviewed above, which show noticeable national, gender, and, to some extent, age differences (see, in particular, Bieswanger 2007; Deumert and Masinyana 2008; Dürscheid 2002a; Herring and Zelenkauskaite 2009; Kim et al. 2007; Ling, Julsrud, and Yttri 2005; Spilioti 2009). The fact is that no two texters necessarily text in the same way, although friends and peer groups no doubt establish their own local stylistic norms. Nor, of course, does the same texter necessarily make the same stylistic choices for all messages (cf. Androutsopoulos and Schmidt 2002; Spagnolli and Gamberini 2007). This is not to imply, however, that texting is without its stylistic curiosities and normativities; indeed, the “lan-

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guage of text messaging” is simultaneously remarkable and unremarkable in its relative unconventionality. Based on our own corpus of real text messages and some of the research findings reviewed above, it is possible to think of the typographic/orthographic practices of texting being underpinned by three key pragmatic “maxims” (cf. Grice 1975), all serving a general “principle” of sociality.5 The maxims, which account for almost all of the language play we see in texting, are: (1) brevity and speed (2) paralinguistic restitution, and (3) phonological approximation. The first of these, the two-fold maxim of brevity and speed, is manifested most commonly in (a) the abbreviation of lexical items (including letter-number homophones) and (b) the relatively minimal use of capitalization and standard, grammatical punctuation (e.g., commas and spaces between words). Importantly, and as we have already suggested, the need for both brevity and speed appears to be motivated less by technological constraints than by pragmatic demands such as ease of turn-taking (i.e., back-and-forth exchanges) and overall fluidity of social interaction. (From the research reviewed above – e.g., Ito and Okabe 2005; Laursen 2005 – it appears that there is some variation in texters’ expectations of reciprocity and response time.) In terms of the second and third maxims, paralinguistic restitution understandably seeks to redress the apparent loss of socioemotional or prosodic features such as stress and intonation, while phonological approximation (e.g., accent stylization) adds to paralinguistic restitution and engenders the kind of playful, informal register appropriate to the relational orientation of texting. On occasion, the second and third maxims appear to override the brevity-speed maxim (see also Spilioti 2009), but in most cases all principles are served simultaneously and equally. Thus, capitalization (e.g., FUCK) and multiple punctuation (what???!!!) may be more desirable for texters for the sake of paralinguistic restitution. Lexical items such as ello (‘hello’), goin (‘going’), and bin (‘been’), meanwhile, serve both the need for abbreviation and phonological approximation. Even though many “linguistic puritans” (Thurlow 2006) nowadays like to exaggerate the “death” of punctuation, the use of question marks (? ) and full-stops (.) can be surprisingly persistent – especially given the additional effort and time it takes to punctuate (cf. Spilioti 2009 again). In fact, with the loss of typographic contrastivity (e.g., italics, bolding, underlining), the use of capitalization and punctuation can become more useful, with ostensibly grammatical marks being coopted for other less standardized effects (e.g., LATE, wow!!!! or No wait …). Another example of paralinguistic restitution in graphical form is the famous emoticon – a direct borrowing from older digital genres such as IRC, and a feature that appears to be similarly unpopular and, therefore, relatively infrequent, in spite of

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its exaggerated depiction in the media. (In a follow-up to our study, Ling and Baron 2007 found a similar result; see also Hård af Segerstad 2002.) The notion of standardness in written language is itself a sociocultural convention and always an abstraction from spoken language (see Cameron 1995; and on texting in particular, Shortis 2007). In this sense, like the fridge-door note and the phonetic transcriptions of expert linguists, many of the typographic practices of texting offer more “correct”, more “authentic” representations of speech to begin with. As Jaffe (2000: 498) puts it: The use of non-standard orthography is a powerful expressive resource. … [which] can graphically capture some of the immediacy, the ‘authenticity’ and ‘flavor’ of the spoken word in all its diversity. … [and] has the potential to challenge linguistic hierarchies.

In their messages, texters “write it as if saying it” to establish a more informal register, which in turn helps to do the kind of small talk and solidary bonding they desire for maximizing sociality. The language texters use is, therefore, invariably appropriate to the context of interaction (see Lenhart et al. 2008; Plester et al. 2009; Tagg 2007a). Sometimes there is also evidence of texters’ reflexive (often playful) use of language and their inherent metapragmatic awareness (Verschueren 2004), as in the following example with its stylized performance of drunkenness and its tongue-in-cheek misanthropy: hey babe.T.Drunk.Hate all luv.Have all men.Fuck them.how r u?We’re ou utery drunk.im changing. Now.Ruth.xxx. Hate every1

This same metapragmatic awareness may also account for texters’ (admittedly variable) use of such apparently clichéd forms as letter-number homophones and emoticons, which can be used with ironic effect and/or self-consciously to enact or playfully perform “text messaging”. In other words, in a Hallidayan sense (Halliday 1969/1997), texting always fulfills both an interpersonal and textual function, as people send messages not only for relational bonding and social coordination, but also to be seen to be texting. Texting (and mobile phones) carries cultural capital in and of itself – as a lifestyle accessory and a ludic resource. Irrespective of message content, the act of texting has cachet (to follow the cliché, the medium is also a message) and necessarily communicates something about the sender/user. And part of buying into the cachet of texting means drawing on – or rejecting altogether – symbolic resources such as ringtones, keypad covers, and popularized linguistic markers like initialisms, clippings, and letter-number homophones. It is precisely this kind of metapragmatic awareness and (life-)stylistic variation that is typically overlooked in the print media’s own metapragmatic commentary – or rather complaint – about texting (see Shortis 2007; Thurlow 2006, 2007).

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4.4.

Texting as a distinctive genre?

In her well-known article on the language of email, Baron (1998) grappled with the idea that email might herald a new linguistic genre; her conclusion was ultimately that email language instead represented a creolizing blend of written and spoken discourse. Like email, and indeed most new media discourse, text messages have much the same hybrid quality about them – both in terms of the speech-writing blend and in terms of their mixing of old and new linguistic varieties. As Rössler and Höflich (2002) put it, texting is “email on the move”. In its transience and immediacy, however, texting is as much like instant messaging as it is like email – and, for that matter, speech. In keeping with Herring’s (2001) proposals, therefore, we are more inclined to view texting in its own terms; whatever formal similarities it may bear to other CMC genres or modes, the linguistic and communicative practices of text messages emerge from a particular combination of technological affordances, contextual variables, and interactional priorities. The kinds of orthographic (or typographic) choices that texters make in their messages are motivated primarily by pragmatic and communicative concerns. Once again, this is not to say that text messages are without character or distinction. Consider the following example: Safe Hi babe!Angie + Lucy had words last nite-stood there arguing 4 ages,loads of people outside cobarna.Bit obvious they … werent gonna fight tho cos they were there 4 so long!I was a bit pissed (woh!) Good nite tho!Spk 2u lata xxBeckyxx

Removed from its original technical context (i.e., transferring it from the small screen of the mobile phone), the extract above is somehow clearly a text message. How is this? Does this not imply a particular “language of texting”? Yes and no. While much research focuses on the linguistic (and orthographic) form of texting (see our review above), the defining feature of text messages is ultimately their sociable function. Text messages are thus communicative events (i.e., genres) only superficially recognizable from their look; their real significance (in both semantic and social terms) lies primarily in their discursive content and communicative intent. So, for example, while a text message may well appear informational or content-focused, it will more often than not be serving a relational purpose. This solidarity function is a more useful genre-defining feature of texting than, say, its length or the use of abbreviations, letter-number homophones, etc. The golden rule of pragmatics is, of course, that form and function are mutually dependent. If the distinctive (albeit not necessarily unique) nature of texting is to be pinpointed in any way, it must hinge on a combination of the following broadly defined but typical discursive features:

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(a) the comparatively short length of text messages, (b) the relative concentration of non-standard typographic markers, and (c) their predominantly small-talk content and solidary orientation. Key qualifications here are “combination”, “comparatively”, “relative”, and “predominantly”; none of these generic and stylistic features is sufficient individually to characterize texting. Compared with a formal letter or an academic essay, they are most likely shorter (constrained in part by the mechanical affordance of a 160 character limit), contain more language play, and are more chatty. This obvious distinction starts to fall away, however, when compared with greeting card messages, fridge-door notes, and so on. Increasingly, with the convergence of new (and old) media, the technological boundaries and generic distinctiveness of instant messaging, texting, and emailing are becoming blurred. Notable examples of this are to be found in microblogging (e.g., Twitter and status updates on Facebook – see C. Lee 2011), as well as the multi-functionality of smart-phones (e.g., BlackBerry) and, to some extent, Apple’s iPhone. These changes serve to remind us that, like language in general, the language of text messaging is constantly changing. No sooner have scholars had the chance to pinpoint (and publish about) the character of new media language than the media change again (see Thurlow and Mroczek 2011). What remains unchanged, however, is people’s determination and capacity to rework technologies (both mechanical and linguistic) for maximizing sociality – in other words, for communication.

5.

Conclusion: New directions

We started this chapter by referring to the decision by U.S. President Barack Obama and his campaign organizers to announce his vice-presidential running mate via text messaging. According to an Associated Press report at the time, his campaign aides wanted to attract additional supporters by soliciting their cell phone numbers and email addresses. Undoubtedly, the choice was a strategic and practical one. However, whether intended or not, the medium was also a powerful message in itself. This was a presidential candidate promising to be a man of change and of participatory democracy. Like any successful presidential candidate of recent times, Obama had to impress upon the country that he was also a man of the people. “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours”. Attainable or not, true or not, what better way to implicate his vice-presidential announcement with a message of novelty, interactivity, and, especially, sociability than to text it. As an act of synthetic personalization (Fairclough 1989), a text message like this offers only the appearance of sociability, however, and is far removed from the embedded, interpersonal exchanges that normally characterize texting.

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Umberto Eco (2002) notes that we are living in an age where the diminutive, the brief, and the simple are highly prized in communication. Clearly, texting (and tweeting) embodies this zeitgeist. And like many earlier communication technologies, it evokes and/or materializes a range of projected fears and hopes. Indeed, the history of the development of so-called new communication technologies has been marked by periods of excessive hype and hysteria about the kinds of cultural, social, and psychological impacts each new technology is likely to have. This is not to deny that few people – professional, academic, or lay – could have predicted the extraordinary rise in popularity of the cell phone and its sister technology texting. Not surprisingly, public discourse about texting (e.g., in the media) encodes any number of metapragmatic comments about the nature of both texting and language, which are interesting in themselves. If, as Mey (2001: 5) suggests, the field of pragmatics “is interested in the process of using language and its producers, not just its end-product, language”, then the kind of everyday, metapragmatic commentary about texting is decidedly a-pragmatic since, for the most part, it fixates on the structures, forms, and grammars of language – or the perceived lack thereof. For example, both media discourse and other popular commentary prioritize and exaggerate the look of text messaging language – its supposedly distinctive lexical and typographic style. Notwithstanding this, everyday talk about texting does offer important insights into people’s beliefs (and concerns) about language (and technology) which, as Pennycook (2004) notes, perfomatively establishes the meanings of language itself. It is for this reason that the study of texting warrants continued research interest, especially from discourse analysts and other language and communication scholars. Briefly, this research would do well to focus on situated (or ethnographic) analyses (i.e., the real, everyday contexts of texting; cf. Thurlow 2009; Thurlow and Mroczek 2011): to address the use of texting across the lifespan; to pay even more attention to non-European linguacultures; to explore different practices of transcultural style- and code-switching;6 to link with other “short messaging” technologies such as microblogging (e.g., Twitter), which are sustained by text- and instant-messaging as well as by emailing; and, in the same vein, to undertake properly multimodal discourse analysis (e.g., use of “pxting” in New Zealand, ring tones, wallpaper). As the technologies of texting are constantly changing, so too are the practices and meanings of texting; any research on texting needs to be constantly updated. As we have argued before (Thurlow and Bell 2009; cf. also Buckingham 2007: 3), it is also important that scholars lead the way in resisting a superficial fascination with technology – and, in the case of texting, with fleeting linguistic curiosities – in favour of a deeper engagement with the cultural contexts and communicative practices that give both technology and language their real meaning.

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Acknowledgements We are grateful to Susan Herring, Tuija Virtanen, and an anonymous reviewer for their careful and constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. Any errors or oversights are of our own doing.

Notes 1. Source: International Technology Union’s ICT Development Index. Retrieved 10 April 2010 from http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press_releases/2009/07.html 2. For an interesting account of the reason behind the 160-character limit on text messages, see the Los Angeles Times article (2009, May 03) Why Text Messages are Limited to 160 Characters. Retrieved 07 April 2010 from http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/ 2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html 3. To save space, we do not repeat background information about the size and nature of our corpus other than to say that it comprised 541 text messages sent or received by a random sample of British university students. With the exception of a few instances of Welsh, all the messages were in English. 4. “Flames” and “flaming” are terms sometimes used to describe openly hostile or derogatory messaging in CMC (see Thurlow, Lengel, and Tomic 2004). 5. In their recent study, Deumert and Masinyana (2008) found that these maxims were violated by isiXhosa texters who, it seems, prefer to text without any forms of paralinguistic restitution and/or phonological approximation. By the same token, in her analysis of Greek texting, Spilioti (2009) found that texters were not always beholden to brevity, sometimes preferring to use more time-consuming foreign-language borrowings for the sake of expressivity (i.e., paralinguistic restitution). 6. In his chapter “How do other languages do it?”, Crystal (2008) makes some attempt to address the practices of texting in languages other than English. His lists of “text abbreviations in other languages” do little, however, to move understanding beyond the stereotypical exaggeration of linguistic forms preferred by journalists. Better examples of first-hand empirical studies are, for example, Bieswanger (2008), Hård af Segerstad (2005a), Herring and Zelenkauskaite (2009), Ling (2005), and Spilioti (2009).

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8.

Mobile phone communication Rich Ling and Naomi S. Baron

1.

Introduction

Mobile phones are the world’s most widespread electronic communication technology. However, unlike landlines, mobiles are multimodal, allowing users to talk, engage in written communication, and access online information. In addition, the mobile phone is often a multi-functional device. One can use it to listen to recorded music, take and send photographs, and keep track of appointments and contact numbers, along with employing an array of other features, including a radio, games, a calculator, and sometimes a global positioning system (GPS). There are phones that can tell people when their house alarm has gone off, remind Muslims when to pray (Bell 2005), and enable passengers to pay bus fares. These devices render people continually available to friends, family, and the world at large (Ling 2008a; Ling and Stald 2010). They help us gather important information or just chat, arrange a dinner menu with a spouse, or ask children when they will be coming home. Mobile phones let us coordinate activities, provide a safety link, connect people to their jobs, and even serve as high-tech fashion accessories. The technology adds a new set of pragmatic considerations to how people communicate. While the issues differ somewhat across cultures, users everywhere must: –

– –

– –

–

understand differences between the ways in which landlines and mobile phones work (for instance, mobiles must be turned on to operate; after inputting a phone number, the user must push “send” for the call to transmit; batteries on mobile phones must be charged for phones to function) learn how to input and retrieve text messages (if they wish to use this modality) learn the myriad of additional functions available on many mobile phones (for example, setting the alarm clock, creating an address book, taking and sending photographs, downloading information from the Internet – again, if they wish to use these tools) manage the costs (such as keeping track of charges for talking, texting, or using the Internet; devising strategies to minimize charges) set personal usage style and usage boundaries (for instance, choosing to use abbreviations in text messaging or to write words out in full; deciding if there are conditions for declining to use the mobile phone – such as at a family dinner or in a class lecture) negotiate new relationships within families and across generations (for example, adolescents using mobile phones to manage direct parental control)

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This chapter surveys mobile communication, seen in a global perspective. Section 2 begins with an introduction to mobile phone usage. Section 3 explores how these phones present new communication solutions in daily life. Section 4 examines some of the pragmatic issues shaping mobile phone use. Section 5 looks at text messaging, considering theoretical issues and summarizing empirical studies conducted by the authors in Norway and the United States. Section 6 offers concluding remarks.

2.

Describing the mobile phone

This section addresses some basic technological considerations, the diffusion of the mobile phone, the impact of texting, and the role of personal addressability. These elements help set the stage for subsequent discussion. 2.1.

Technological considerations

Various practical conditions need to be satisfied before a mobile phone can play an active role in communication. There must be a signal; the battery needs to be charged; and the user must have access to a subscription. Sometimes, access to a signal or even to facilities for charging a battery is difficult, especially in developing countries (Chipchase 2008; Singhal, Svenkerud and Flydal 2002; TDG 2002). 2.2.

Diffusion of the mobile phone

The adoption rate of mobile phones is high. As of 2009, there were more than 68 subscriptions for every 100 people in the world (ITU 2009). Indeed, mobile phones are one of the fastest-spreading technologies. They are easy to use and relatively inexpensive to own and operate. Per capita, there are far more mobile phones used around the world than people with computer-based Internet access or landline telephone subscriptions.1 However, mobile phones have had different adoption rates and varied effects on people in the developed and the developing world. By 2006, there were 90 subscriptions per 100 people in the developed world (Ling and Donner 2009). In the developed world, mobiles have generally provided communication access when away from a landline system. Growth in the developing world has been even more dramatic. In 1994, there was roughly one mobile subscription for about every 500 people. Within a decade, this proportion rose to one mobile phone subscription for every five people in the developing world (ITU 2009). In the developing world, mobile phones have often meant access to telecommunications for the first time. In 1982, more than half of the world’s population had less than one (landline) phone per 100 people (Maitland 1984). By 2007, in South Asia, over 90 % of the population had used a mobile

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phone in the previous three months (Zainudeen et al. 2007). This transition has brought about more access to information and services, greater ability to coordinate everyday activities, and even increased prospects for participating in social unrest (Paragas 2003; Rafael 2003). 2.3.

From talking to text messaging

Mobile phones were initially designed as an extension of landline telephones. Text messaging was introduced as an afterthought, in some ways (Hillebrand, Trosby, Holley, and Harris 2010; Trosby 2004). In 1982, a European consortium known as GSM (originally meaning Groupe Spécial Mobile, but now known as the Global System for Mobile Communication) was constituted to create a single mobile telephone system to function across Europe. By 1992, eight European countries began using the GSM network, and most of Europe had signed on by 1995. The network was designed for transmitting voice calls. However, a small amount of leftover bandwidth was made available for creating text messages on the small phone keypad. This feature, known as Short Message Service (or SMS – now commonly called text messages or texting) was initially offered for free in 1993. Over time, GSM began charging for text messages, but at a lower price than for voice calls (Baron 2008). Texting has grown to be a major form of interaction on mobile phones. In the United States (U.S.), by mid-2008, the monthly average number of text messages per user exceeded the average number of voice calls (Nielsenwire 2008). However, mobile voice interaction remains a major function of mobile communication. Considering all types of use for a normal Norwegian, about half of the events generated on a mobile phone are calls, approximately 43 % are text messages, and the remainder are Internet sessions (Ling and Sundsøy, in press). 2.4.

Personal addressability

It is perhaps obvious that landlines connect callers to places (the location of the landline phone) and that mobile phones link callers to specific people, wherever they may be. Such functionality, however, makes all the difference. This new linkage redefines phone communication from “person-in-a-place” to “person-withoutreference to locale”. In fact, if individuals are not at a particular location, they can inform potential interlocutors how to reach them – as happens in Ghana, where people sometimes write their mobile phone number outside the door of their residence, in lieu of a street address, so visitors can reach them if they are not home (Sey 2007). The mobile phone has become an essential part of the “kit” that is carried about in everyday life (Traugott, Joos, Ling, and Quan 2008). By progressively becoming smaller, less expensive, and more portable, the mobile phone has become more personalized. This transformation has, in turn, made individuals on

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the move more available for telephonic interaction. Because of these issues, mobile phones are increasingly seen as personal devices. They are repositories of individual lists of friends – and their telephone numbers. Phones store endearing text messages from significant others and provide a general communication log. To look at the call register or at the “address book” on other people’s telephones is to pry into their private lives.

3.

New communication solutions in daily life

Mobile communication devices affect people’s daily lives. This section explores three everyday domains: micro-coordination of activities, security and safety, and integration with the closest sphere of friends and family. 3.1.

Micro-coordination

Mobiles are used to orchestrate interactions in nuanced ways. For example, people use them to coordinate when and where to meet for a beer after work, to keep tabs on the comings and going of their children, and to manage activities with colleagues working on common projects (Ling and Yttri 2002). Norwegian teenagers in a 2003 focus group describe this process.2 Inger:

If you have a mobile phone, you can change plans along the way. You don’t need to agree on a meeting. You don’t have to agree to meet either, you can just call whenever actually. Interviewer: But how do you do agreements then? Inger: I don’t know, you agree when and where you are going to meet and if there is some change, then you can say that you will meet another place, for example, if it is easier. Arne: I usually make agreements by just calling, “What are you doing tonight? Ok, then I will just call you.” Interviewer: Is it like that that you call and ask if you will do something? Arne: Yeah, like, for example, today when I am here, then I can just make an agreement with my friends that I will call when I am done. That is ok instead of planning what you are going to do. Such micro-coordination is possible because with mobile phones, users are personally addressable and can be reached even when there is no access to a computer or landline phone. Coordination may take place iteratively, as individuals shift plans regarding when and where to meet.3 When using landlines, interpersonal coordination is more rigid. The parties must agree to meet at a specific time and place. Once they set out for the rendezvous, they cannot conveniently adjust the arrangements. By contrast, mobile phones make this process more dynamic.

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195

Security and safety

A second important social consequence of mobile phones is the sense of security and safety they provide. As a latent safety channel, mobile phones are used by students (Lenhart, Ling, Campbell, and Purcell 2010), the elderly (Ling and Yttri 2002), people in automobiles (hopefully not when they are driving) or engaging in outdoor activities (Ling, Julsrud, and Krogh, 1998), and individuals caught up in extraordinary events such as those of September 11, 2001 (Dutton 2003; Katz and Rice 2002). When people from a variety of cultures are asked what words first come to mind when they think of mobile phones, safety issues are commonly mentioned.4 For many, especially the elderly, personal safety and security is the prime reason for buying a mobile phone (Ling 1999). In the words of one elderly Norwegian man: Before I retired I thought that [when I retire] I can take a walk exactly when I want to, especially in the mountains … but … my wife says that she doesn’t dare let me go up there: “You can be lying there someplace and freeze to death” … [S]everal people I know … have taken a mobile phone [up to the mountains] … If I go cross-country skiing and I am lying there, then I can call Norwegian Air Ambulance … for help.5

Adventurers finding themselves in dire straits are increasingly turning to the mobile phone to call for assistance (Ling 2004). Some rescue actions involve improbably long chains of communication, as in the case of the people in London who received a call from friends stranded on an inoperative boat off the coast of Indonesia. The Londoners phoned local British authorities, who in turn alerted emergency personnel in Indonesia – who then carried out the rescue. Mobile phones are also a convenient medium for broadcasting messages regarding tsunamis or conveying emergency instructions after events such as the April 2007 shootings on the Virginia Tech campus in the U.S. (Yuan, Dade, and Prada 2007). At the same time, individuals sometimes resort to mobile phones to seek help when they might have sorted out the situation on their own. News reports suggest that people are increasingly calling emergency services when they have temporarily lost their way or suffer from small injuries that previously they would have handled themselves (BBC 2006). 3.3.

Social integration through connected presence

Another social consequence of mobile phones is the possibility of creating what Christian Licoppe (2004) calls “connected presence”. On the one hand, mobile phones disturb copresent interaction (Monk, Carroll, Parker, and Blythe 2004). Their ringing can draw attention away from a conversation taking place here and now (Ling 1998). On the other hand, the fact that one is perpetually accessible has led to a new mode of interaction among friends. According to Licoppe, in the era of landline telephony, close friends commonly had long telephone conversations, done in one sitting. Such landline conversations may have started with a particular

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instrumental purpose (for instance, arranging a meeting date) but then meandered off to talk about family, sports, vacation plans, or the like. With the coming of mobile phones, people are keeping in touch through a series of shorter but more frequent interactions. These short communiqués might be voice conversations or text messages. Such communications might explore a theme of common interest, constitute a sequence of micro-coordinations, or simply be phatic interactions. With mobile phones, communication among individuals is less a specific event than an ongoing process, interleaved with other daily activities. Much as one has a continuing thread of interaction with office colleagues that is taken up, dropped, and resumed in the course of the day, the mobile phone facilitates comparable interaction with physically remote individuals.

4.

Pragmatic issues shaping mobile phone use

In section 1, it was suggested that mobile phones add a new set of pragmatic considerations in how people communicate. In this section, some of the factors at play are illustrated by looking at cost issues, the emancipation of adolescents through mobile phones, and the pragmatics of everyday use. 4.1.

Cost issues

The cost of operating a mobile phone, along with the type of subscription one has, can affect usage patterns. The two basic models of subscriptions are “pre-paid” and “post-paid”. Pre-paid subscriptions initially dominated most of the developed world outside the U.S. The pre-paid system allows users to “load” an account with money and then use this credit to make calls, send text messages, transmit photographs, access the Internet, and so on. Post-paid subscriptions are similar to arrangements for most landline telephones. Users receive a bill at regular intervals from the telecommunications carrier, generally including a base fee plus charges for service exceeding the plan’s limits (for example, making more than a set number of calls a month or placing international calls). The effects of cost and billing practices on communication are seen in the adoption of texting among teenagers in the U.S. (Lenhart et al. 2010). In the U.S., people pay to both send and receive calls. This is not generally the case in the rest of the world. In addition, American subscribers need a special subscription for texting. Without such a texting plan, they must pay a premium price to send and to receive text messages. Initially, the price per message was low (five to 10 cents). Starting in 2009, the price for sending and receiving non-subscription texts was increased to 20 or 30 cents per text. However, operators had already begun offering unlimited texting subscriptions for a set fee per month. Thus, if teenager A got an unlimited subscription, he or she could send a profusion of texts at no additional

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cost per text. Yet for all of A’s friends, receiving so many texts was suddenly an expensive problem. This situation motivated A’s friends to also get unlimited texting subscriptions. In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in texting among U.S. teens – and in unlimited texting plans. Between 2006 and 2009, the percent of teens who texted their friends on a daily basis went from 27 % to 54 % (Lenhart et al. 2010). Hence, payment and subscription structures affect the flow and the form of communication. In the developing world, widespread use of pre-paid subscriptions is pushing increased adoption of mobile phones (Kalba 2008). Employing the system of SIM cards,6 users can shift cards from one phone to another. Alternatively, a single individual might have several different subscriptions (i.e., SIM cards) and use only a single handset. One subscription might have less expensive voice minutes and another, less expensive texting. Alternatively, it might be cheapest to use one subscription early in the morning, another during the day, and a third in the evening, as the rates change. In countries such as Ghana, people might have one subscription for use in larger cities and another that has better coverage when away from core population areas (Chipchase 2008). People in the developed world also contrive cost-saving strategies through use of multiple SIM cards. In Italy, for example, it is common for university students to have two handsets (each carrying a different SIM card) so they can take advantage of differential pricing for voice calls and texting from alternative carriers.7 Both nationally and globally, cost-savings strategies make it difficult to determine the number of mobile phone users accurately, since single users do not necessarily have a single subscription.8 Those in the developing world who are too poor to own a phone handset – but own a SIM card – are exceptions to the model of individual reachability described earlier as distinguishing mobile phones from landlines. There are, for examples, places in southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where people who own only a SIM card will borrow the handset of a neighbor and insert their own SIM card to place a call (Ling and Donner 2009). While this system is somewhat awkward, poorer populations now have a viable way to check on prices for their crops, arrange money transfers from children or relatives living in the cities, or maintain social contact with family members working far away from home (Law and Peng 2006; Paragas 2008). Individuals without their own handset or their own SIM card sometimes “rent” mobile access. This communal function is illustrated by the telephone kiosks operated in Bangladesh by Grameen “telephone ladies” (Singhal, Svenkerud, and Flydal 2002). Grameen Telephone has lent money to women in rural villages to purchase simple handsets and solar recharging systems, thereby providing telephone service to local villagers. Another cost-management strategy involves “beeping” (also known as “flashing” or “missed calls”). The system takes advantage of the caller ID function on

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mobile phones. Beeping is an inexpensive technique for micro-coordination: The user calls a potential interlocutor but hangs up before the person answers. Since the caller’s phone number is displayed on the recipient’s device, the recipient knows who called. If, for example, two individuals have a pre-existing arrangement such as “Beep me when you are ready to be picked up”, the message is conveyed with no cost to either party (Donner 2007). In countries such as Ghana or Bangladesh, missed calls can account for as much as 80 % of all calls initiated in the mobile phone system (Geirbo, Helmersen, and Engø-Monsen 2007). In Bangladesh, beeping is sometimes used to construct expressive messages (such as a long series of beeps between lovers to inexpensively convey affection). Beeping can also serve as a form of social control. Geirbo et al. (2007) note that some Bangladeshi parents ask their children to send a beep to indicate they have arrived safely at an activity. Similarly, husbands sometimes request beeps at fixed time-points from wives to signal the household is running smoothly, and girlfriends and boyfriends use beeps to make sure the phone line of their significant other is free, thus convincing themselves there is no competing paramour (Lasén 2011). 4.2.

Emancipation of adolescents through mobile phones

Mobile phones were originally conceived of as a communication tool for business and industry. Very quickly, however, adolescents became a leading cohort using the technology. Many elements associated with mobile communication are seen – sometimes in exaggerated form – among adolescents. The ability to contact one another individually, to coordinate interactions, to reduce costs through creative strategies, and to define mobile phones as fashion items are all obvious among teens. Teenagers are also often masters at managing personal availability. Many teens have a well-developed notion of when to accept and to make voice calls, and when to use the mobile phone as a type of background communication, interlacing mobile communication with face-to-face activities in a nearly seamless way (Ling and Donner 2009). They also understand how to use a mobile phone to give the impression of being in contact with another person – when indeed they are not – by pretending to be talking when there is no actual connection. This posture is used – most often by women – when walking alone after dark to warn potential predators that they are “in contact” with someone who could summon help (Baron and Ling 2007). However, males and females alike pretend to be talking to avoid having a stranger (or even an acquaintance) approach them for conversation. Such avoidance is particularly common in the U.S. (Baron and Campbell, 2012). Mobile phones give teenagers a communication channel that they control. This control facilitates adolescents’ transition from being largely defined within the confines of their family home to being freestanding individuals. By having their

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own mobile phones, teenagers can avoid conducting personal social interactions with friends in the quasi-public space surrounding the family landline phone. Instead, they can determine when and where the calls (and text messages) are initiated and received. Such personal freedom not only fosters communication with individuals but also, for many teenagers, facilitates opportunities for strengthening peer group relationships (Ling and Haddon 2008). At the same time, when adolescents travel outside of the home (as when meeting friends in the evening), parents gain some peace of mind, knowing that their progeny can call home to report their whereabouts or in case of emergency. Another area in which mobile phones allow young people some latitude concerns linguistic usage conventions. In the 1990s, very soon after teenagers began using text messaging on mobile phones, they started playing with lexicon, syntax, and punctuation (Thurlow and Poff, this volume). Creation – and sharing – of mobile-based lingo became a badge of group membership, much the way that verbal slang, clothing, and hair style have traditionally served as markers of social closeness for this age cohort (Baron 2008; Ling 2008a). Moreover, such creative usage signaled a level of security with their language: Adolescents knew the rules but were able to bend them, while retaining the ability to communicate (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, and Macgill 2008). 4.3.

Pragmatics of everyday use

Three broader issues affecting the pragmatics of everyday use are fashion, cultural expectations regarding availability, and choice of mode of communication. First consider fashion. Mobile phone handsets range from inexpensive second-hand models to posh “fashion” telephones, encrusted with gems and costing as much as an expensive automobile. An inexpensive “little smart” device might only offer limited voice-based access within a short geographic range (Castells, FernándezArdèvol, Qiu, and Sey 2007), while a high-end 3G9 phone might provide voice, texting, Internet access, video telephony, email, IM, and social networking. Choice of device (coupled with service plan) has implications for the types of communication that can take place. Second, there is the question of social obligation (along with personal choice) regarding whether one is always available to respond to voice calls or text messages. In Hong Kong, for instance, there is a strong expectation that mobile phone users (which, in Hong Kong, includes almost everyone) will answer their phones when they ring and respond quickly to text messages. By contrast, in the U.S., many users regularly screen calls through caller ID, deciding which calls to take and which to ignore (Baron 2008). Others only turn their phones on to make outgoing calls, essentially rendering the phone a one-way device. Even in societies such as Sweden or Japan that are typically perceived as “always on”, university students report that they almost always have the ringer on their phone turned off,

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Table 1.

Students for whom using voice functions on mobile phones is “always” or “usually” acceptable

Venue

Sweden

Japan

N=171

N=529

sitting with people you know in an informal café

42.7 %

13.8 %

paying at the cash register at a convenience store

57.3 %

31.6 %

walking in public

97.7 %

73.7 %

riding a local bus, tram, or subway

89.5 %

4.0 %

and that they sometimes turn their phones off entirely when they do not want to be disturbed (for instance, while studying or while watching television at home).10 Yet despite individual and cultural differences, there is a growing expectation in many countries that people be available to receive mobile phone calls and text messages. In the words of James Katz, “You’re a problem for other people if you don’t have a mobile phone” (Weiner 2007). A third pragmatic dimension of everyday mobile phone use involves modality of communication: Does the mobile phone user choose to make a voice call or send a text message? Sometimes the basis for decision-making is cultural, and sometimes it is individual. In Japan, for example, it is considered rude to be disruptive of public space. As a result, people tend to modulate their voices when in public – and, at least until recently, to constrain public mobile phone conversations. By comparison, in Sweden, while mobile phone users are also relatively quiet in public space, they are less hesitant than the Japanese to speak on their phones in public. Table 1 contrasts Swedish and Japanese findings from a survey conducted in 2007–2008 (Baron and Hård af Segerstad 2010) in which university students aged 18–24 were asked about public situations in which they felt it was “always” or “usually” acceptable to talk on their mobile phone. Data analyzed earlier by Misa Matsuda suggest how much Japanese conventions have been liberalized in recent years.11 In her 2001 data, only 49 % of 187 subjects between the ages of 18 and 24 (although not necessarily university students) approved of mobile phone voice communication while on the street, compared with Baron and Hård af Segerstad’s recent finding of 74 %.12 The Japanese sociologist Hidetoshi Kato (2009) suggests that contemporary Japan is experiencing fundamental – and troubling – social change: “We seem to be moving toward non-edited, non-censored, non-self-restricted society”. Beyond cultural conditioning factors, users make individual decisions regarding when to talk and when to text. Sometimes the choice is obvious: The person you want to reach is in a meeting, so you text in order not to disturb him or her. Alternatively, if one’s interlocutor does not use text messaging, the person initiating the communication calls.

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As part of her cross-cultural study of mobile phone use, Baron compared reasons that Swedish, American, Italian, and Japanese university-aged students gave for choosing to send a text message rather than to make a call.13 Among the variables explored were: convenience for the message-initiator, convenience for the recipient, desire to keep the message short, and cost. In Sweden, the U.S., and Italy, personal convenience was judged a “very important” factor in deciding to send a text message rather than make a voice call. Convenience of the interlocutor was also deemed “very important”, though slightly less so. In Japan, convenience – of either the subject or the interlocutor – was seen as somewhat less important. Another element in this mix is the age of the person receiving the text. According to research done by Ling, Norwegians are less willing to send texts to elderly people than they are to teens. There is the sense that if you want to communicate with an elderly person, voice is generally the best choice (Ling 2008b). Keeping a message short was seen as a “very important” reason for Swedes, Americans, and Italians to text rather than to have a phone conversation. (With a phone call, one risks needing to spend time engaging in social pleasantries or having the interlocutor launch into a new topic.) By contrast, Japanese were only onethird as likely as their counterparts in other countries to choose texting over talking to keep the message brief. Cost considerations proved to be an important deciding factor in choice of modality. While there are some exceptions (depending upon the type of subscription plan one has), texting is generally less expensive than talking in Sweden, Italy, and Japan. In the U.S., the reverse has been true, since most American subscription plans include a large number of voice minutes but charge additionally for text messaging, although this picture is changing with the advent of unlimited texting subscriptions. In the study, Italians were the most cost-conscious, followed by Japanese and then Swedes. That is, Italians were most likely to judge cost to be a very important reason to choose texting over talking.14

5.

The linguistic nature of text messages

With the introduction of texting on mobile phones in the early 1990s, users acquired a new modality for mobile discourse. While adults have adopted texting to varying degrees, it is among teenagers and young adults that the distinctive culture of text messaging lives (Goggin and Crawford 2011; Ling, Bertil, and Sundsøy 2010). To wit: In a 2003 study of teenage mobile communication in Norway, 18-year-old girls sent a mean of more than 20 text messages per day, while their 45-year-old mothers sent only 5.15 Texting has proven especially important to the younger age demographic both because it is inexpensive and because it provides a discreet platform for social interaction with peers (Castells et al. 2007; Haddon 2004; Ito and Okabe 2006). In this section a number of these issues are exam-

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ined. In addition, the section summarizes findings from empirical studies of text messaging in Norway and in the U.S. 5.1.

Synchronicity, texting “conversations”, and discretion

Like email, texting is technically an asynchronous form of mediated communication and thus generally less intrusive than synchronous mediated interaction such as voice conversation (on mobile phones) or instant messaging. Often text messages are “one off” communiqués, intended to provide another person some stand-alone piece of information. However, users also sometimes construct rapidfire sequences of messages, essentially rendering the medium almost synchronous. These sequences take on some of the dynamics of a conversation. Such text-based “conversations” might, for example, include written interjections (such as “hmm” or “umm”) that mimic oral conventions for establishing turn-taking or holding the floor. In a 2005 survey of Norwegians, 41 % of respondents indicated that they “sometimes” or “very often” engaged in series of chained text messages.16 There were no gender differences in the reported length of these interactions, but age was a statistically significant factor. Subjects aged 13–18 reported a mean of five total turns (i.e., including messages from both parties) in the “conversation”, while those over age 25 reported a mean of only three turns in a typical texting interaction. Another characteristic of texting is that it is discreet in comparison with voice calls. This means that text messaging can be done in the background while the user is engaged in other activities. People can, for instance, read a text message from their children while attending a meeting without disrupting the meeting. Similarly, students sometimes arrange their social lives while ostensibly paying attention to a class lecture (Ling 2008a). Focus groups with university students in the U.S. and Italy indicate that students engaging in this behavior generally believe that professors are unaware that such texting is being done,17 although subsequent informal discussions with American and Italian faculty members indicate otherwise. 5.2.

Production of text on mobile phones

It has been estimated that in 2009 more than 4.5 trillion text messages were sent worldwide (Marlatt 2010). Such a profusion of text production on mobile phones is surprising in light of the relative complexity involved in producing text messages on standard mobile phones. These challenges are particularly pronounced when phone keypads use alphabets that do not correspond to the letters used for encoding the speaker’s native language18 or when the native language is written with a nonalphabetic script.19 Contemporary standard mobiles, excluding those with either a physical or screen-based QWERTY keyboard, offer two primary input options: multi-tap

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(the most common) and predictive texting. The multi-tap system utilizes the 12 keys on the mobile phone keypad for inputting each alphanumeric character (or punctuation mark) in the text. On many mobile phones there is also a predictive texting function that automatically anticipates later letters in a word, based upon the initial letters entered through the multi-tap system. Mobile phone keypads – like the landline dial plates on whose design they were based – display clusters of three or four letters of the alphabet next to (or below) each of the numbers “2” through “9”. With the transition from manual to mechanized telephone exchanges, letters were added to the (landline) telephone dial purely to create a mnemonic device to help users in remembering phone numbers (Ling 2007). Customers were assigned telephone numbers such as “GR 4–2525”, where the “GR” (for “Greenbelt”) was dialed using the numbers “4” and “7”. The alphanumeric design made the transition to landline touchtone phones in the 1970s, despite the fact that telephone numbers (at least in the U.S.) had already eliminated letters in favor of strictly digits. Only with the introduction of mobile phones were the residual letters once again put into active service, this time for entering text. Use of the mobile phone keypad for text entry necessitates mastering a new – and for some cumbersome – writing technique. These keypads are far less efficient than full computer keyboards, where each letter appears on a separate key. For example, to write “hello” with the multi-tap system, the mobile phone user presses the “4” key twice to get an “h”, the “3” key twice to get an “e”, the “5” key three times to get an “l”, repeats the last sequence to get the second “l”, and finally presses the “6” key three times to get the “o”. This process often results in jettisoning some traditional formalities. In a 2005 analysis of text messages, only about 3.5 % of all the text messages had a salutation (Ling 2005). According to Silfverberg, MacKenzie, and Korhonen (2000), a proficient and trained texter using the multi-tap system can attain speeds of 25–27 words per minute.20 By contrast, using predictive texting, proficient texters can attain 46 words per minute.21 However, in studies of everyday users creating text messages using both the multi-tap and the predictive texting systems, input speeds were between 5 and 10 words per minute (Curran, Woods, and Riordan 2006; Hård af Segerstad 2003). Since text messages tend to be rather short (usually fewer than 10 words), the inefficiency of producing the text is somewhat mitigated (Ling 2005). 5.3.

Norwegian text-messaging study

What do users talk about in their text messages? If data from Norway are any indication, the broad answer is, “anything and everything”. Messages may be personal (for example, private exchanges between spouses), professional (such as between two employees collaborating on a project), or of a broadcast nature (for instance, traffic alerts from the municipal government – now common in the U.S.).

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Table 2.

Content distribution of text messages in a 2002 Norwegian study

Content Area

Percent of Total Messages

Examples23

Coordination

32.6 %

When are you coming to get me? (male, aged 17)

Questions and answers

24.0 %

When is practice (male, aged 26)

Grooming or phatic expressions

18.3 %

I love you sweetie. =) (female, aged 14)

Commands and requests

5.0 %

remember to take dads bike home (female aged 48) Call me (female, aged 49)

Location issues

3.5 %

Where are you? What is happening this evening? (male, aged 17)

Other

16.6 %

Happy birthday. (female, aged 26)

There is not one prototypical content domain, any more than there is one prototypical writing style. Nonetheless, to get a flavor of the variety of messages that users compose, it is instructive to consider the contents of a representative body of text messages. Our example here comes from Norwegian data gathered in 2002 (Ling 2005).22 Table 2 summarizes the content distribution (and, in some instances, sentential form) for all 882 messages produced in the study. One-third of all text messages in the sample involved coordination. These data confirm the importance of the coordination function of mobile phones discussed in section 3.1. The next most frequent category, questions and answers (one-quarter of all messages), illustrates the use of texting for short bits of information that can appropriately be exchanged asynchronously. So-called “grooming” or phatic messages were the third mostfrequent content area (18.3 %). With these messages, the actual semantic content may be less important than the social connection established between two people by sending a text message. While the total number of commands and requests (5.0 %) was not high, requests to “Call me” constituted 1.5 % of all 882 messages. “Call me” requests demonstrate how users exploit multiple functions on their mobile phones: texting to get someone’s attention (without interrupting a person at an inopportune moment), but then having the interlocutor follow up with a voice call, which generally permits freer give-and-take between interlocutors. The Norwegian data were also analyzed for demographic distribution, message length, and punctuation. Women generally wrote longer and often more complex text messages than men. The mean length of messages generated by males was

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5.5 words, compared with 7.0 for women. On the whole, females’ messages involved a larger variety of themes than texts composed by males. Moreover, women were more likely to use capitalization and punctuation correctly,24 and women used the letter-like conventions of openings and closings more often than males. At the same time, women were more likely to use abbreviations than were their male counterparts.25 As a group, younger users (teenagers and young adults) were the heaviest users of abbreviations, although the overall frequency of such shortened forms was relatively low. 5.4.

American text-messaging study

Our second empirical study of text messaging was done in the United States, using data collected in 2005 from female undergraduate students at a large midwestern university (Ling and Baron 2007). A convenience sample was gathered from 22 subjects, all female, each of whom kept a 24-hour diary of all text messages she had sent. The resulting sample was 191 text messages, composed of 1473 words. The focus of this study was structural: message length, sentential composition, and use of lexical shortenings of various sorts (contractions, abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons).26 Table 3 summarizes the findings. Table 3.

Key findings from an American text-messaging study

Length mean words per message mean characters per message one-word messages multi-sentence messages mean sentences per message

7.7 words 35.0 characters 3.7 % of messages 60.0 % of messages 1.8 per message

Emoticons and lexical shortenings contractions

84.7 % of potential contractions

apostrophes

31.9 % of actual contractions

abbreviations

3.2 % of words in corpus

acronyms

Surrounds talk that is faster r u gam? yup

>gwm 38 5’8 80kg stocky fit tanned smooth cut thick vers1 >married?

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Rodney H. Jones

20:03:16 20:03:20 20:03:23 20:03:27 20:03:30 20:03:33 20:03:37 20:03:40 20:03:43 20:03:47 20:03:50 20:03:53 20:03:57

yes >nice >yr stats top/btm? >vers more top >u

31/5’10/149 (move window) vers >mmm nice more btm >do u work out

As can be seen, participants take short, rapid turns with pauses between turns usually no longer than six seconds. Longer pauses do occur, notably after participants are asked for their “stats” (self description involving age, weight and height, and sometimes other relevant information about physical appearance), primarily because these responses tend to take a bit longer to type, especially if they are elaborated upon (as in: “gwm 38 5’8 stocky fit tanned smooth cut thick vers”1). Most turns consist of one to four words. The string of descriptors: “gwm 38 5’8 stocky fit tanned smooth cut thick vers” is unusually long, not only creating a slight interruption in the rhythm of the conversation but also creating implicature, communicating particular involvement, cooperation, and interest. As the interaction progresses, however, this rhythmic pattern begins to break down. At 20:30:23, a slight disfluency occurs when both parties ask a question of each other at the same time. Such an occurrence in itself is not particularly problematic – users are used to them, and the initiator of the chat immediately compensates by changing his discourse position (from questioner to answerer) and answering muscular bi’s question before muscular bi finally answers his. What is notable, though, is that while the first response comes within six seconds of the question, the response from muscular bi comes more than fifteen seconds after the question. Finally, muscular bi does not respond to the question “do u work out” (example 2). After waiting around 20 seconds, his interlocutor makes another attempt to elicit a response by asking a different question, “any pic?”, after which he waits another 33 seconds or so before issuing a more explicit prompt, “hello”, and then after approximately 30 more seconds finally gives up.

Rhythm and timing in chat room interaction

(2) 20:04:00 20:04:04 20:04:07 20:04:10 20:04:14 20:04:17 20:04:20 20:04:24 20:04:27 20:04:31 20:04:34 20:04:37 20:04:41 20:04:44 20:04:47 20:04:51 20:04:54 20:04:58 20:05:01 20:05:04 20:05:08 20:05:11 20:05:14 20:05:18 20:05:21 20:05:24 20:05:28 20:05:31

497

>any pic?

>hello

(close window)

One might ask why muscular bi does not terminate the conversation himself if he is not interested. One can never be sure, however, if such pauses indicate a lack of interest or are due to other extraneous circumstances (the user may be answering a phone call or attending to chats with other – perhaps more desirable – partners). At the same time, this strategy of showing lack of interest is a particularly prevalent means of rejection. The preference for this means of termination, rather than the less popular “sorry”, “gotta go”, or “not my type”, comes from the fundamental difficulty involved in “ending” characteristic of all communication (Schegloff and Sacks 1973), magnified by the even more “face threatening” nature of termination of this particular kind of interaction. In the entire corpus of chats collected, 86% are terminated without any closing ritual.

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At the same time, very short pauses can communicate intense interest. Just as in face-to-face conversation, people have different “conversational styles” (Tannen 1984a), and one aspect of style has to do with how much (and how) one shows involvement. Showing involvement in computer chat, as in face-to-face conversation, often includes talking a lot and taking shorter pauses between turns. Tannen (1984a) calls this “high involvement style”, and, aside from shorter pauses, it also includes features such as more frequent questions and, in face-to-face conversation, paralinguistic, proxemic, and gestural characteristics. As I have already mentioned, most conversations in this chat room seem to be characterized by “high involvement”, when they are progressing successfully, that is; interactions not showing such involvement usually do not last. There are instances, however, in which this involvement is even more pronounced. The main feature of this “hyper-involvement” style is when a user issues a rapid series of consecutive turns without waiting for a reply, as in example 3. (3) 09:20:26 09:20:30 09:20:34 09:20:38 09:20:42 09:20:46 09:20:50 09:20:55 09:20:59 09:21:03 09:21:07

09:21:11 09:21:15 09:21:19 09:21:23 09:21:27 09:21:31 09:21:36 09:21:40 09:21:44 09:21:48 09:21:52

nice stats i like i am lean fit here >ic looking for? >any I look for regular gay sex buddy ok to u? but >sure >but what we can swim together >haha and have sex ok to u? hei >why not wanna try swim at night in beach with me? >i wanna to go this afternoon sure where shall we go?

Rhythm and timing in chat room interaction

09:21:56 09:22:00

499

pool? where u live?

In this example, LeanFit’s contributions come at the rate of one every 5.7 seconds, and most intervals are three seconds or less. In the space of the one minute 26 seconds of this excerpt, LeanFit takes 15 turns, while his interlocutor takes six. This strategy not only gives the user a way to highlight his attention towards his interlocutor, but also a way of keeping the interlocutor’s attention by continually “refreshing” his presence on his interlocutor’s screen. One’s use of such a rhythmic strategy, as in face-to-face conversation, can affect others’ perception of one’s character; users who have different conversational styles might interpret such strategies as “friendly”, or as “pushy” or “desperate” (Tannen 1984a). This use of rapid, consecutive turns also has the function of maintaining presence by avoiding the longer pauses that might ensue when longer stretches of information need to be given, such as “stats”. In example 4, for instance, hot fun divides his “stats” into five turns. (4) 20:26:11 20:26:15 20:26:18 20:26:25 20:26:28 20:26:31 20:26:35

> ur stats 21 180 cm 150lbs 30 w 41 c

This rhythmic incremental release of information, however, can also serve another function, that of introducing “suspense” into the process of seduction. Here, rhythm plays a crucial role in the game of revealing and withholding information to maximize involvement from one’s interlocutor (van Leewuen 2005). Hot fun’s incremental release of his statistics becomes a kind of “textual striptease” (Barthes 1975) that heightens desire by heightening anticipation of the next, partial revelation. A similar strategy is used by Naked Sleeper when he describes what he likes to do in bed (example 5). (5) 20:38:37 20:38:42 20:38:47 20:38:52 20:38:57 20:39:02

>what do u like to do in sex?

kissing oral fucking

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Conversational management

I do not mean to suggest that long pauses always show lack of interest or result in interactions being terminated. It depends very much on where these pauses occur in the conversation. Conversations are not mono rhythmic – they develop through many changes in rhythm and, as in face-to-face conversations, these changes of rhythm and shifts in tempo are often meaningful. In fact, the average time between turns in my data is 30–39 seconds, which does not seem consistent with the rapid turn-taking in the examples above. This is because these interactions tend to follow a pattern of “bursts” and “breaks”, in which chunks of rapid interaction are interspersed with sometimes quite lengthy breaks. Within these “bursts” of interaction the average time between turns is 3–9 seconds. This segmentation of the conversation is by no means random. These bursts and breaks take place in the context of an interactional format which progresses through a fairly predictable set of stages made up primarily of question/answer adjacency pairs (the exchange of information about physical appearance, sharing of other information such as location and availability, the exchange of pictures, or the making of arrangements to meet). Each stage tends to take place in one burst, with breaks tending to occur between stages. The initial burst usually involves the exchange of information about physical appearance, the second stage usually involves further sharing of information (such as location and availability), the third involves the exchange of pictures, and the next involves arrangements to meet and often the exchange of telephone numbers. Breaks often serve to mark the transition to a new topic or new stage in the interaction. When they occur in between two halves of an adjacency pair or an offer of information and a reaction to it, they can create implicature that is interpreted sometimes as deliberation, sometimes as lack of interest, and sometimes as rudeness. Example 6 illustrates a typical pattern. In the first burst participants share information about what they are seeking and physical appearance. (6) 20:20:23 20:20:27 20:20:30 20:20:33 20:20:37 20:20:40 20:20:43 20:20:47 20:20:50 20:20:53

hihi > hi u lk for? >friends or fun >u? anything > great stats?

Rhythm and timing in chat room interaction

20:20:57 20:21:00 20:21:03 20:21:07 20:21:10 20:21:13 20:21:17 20:21:20 20:21:24

501

> 36/6’/160 nice stats u gwm > yup > ur stats? 21/5/11/130 > nice

Then after a break of about 20 seconds they talk about where they live (example 7). This exchange is followed by another break, also around 20 seconds long. (7) 20:21:27 20:21:34 20:21:37 20:21:40 20:21:44 20:21:47 20:21:50 20:21:54 20:21:57 20:22:00 20:22:04 20:22:07 20:22:11 20:22:14 20:22:17 20:22:21 20:22:24 20:22:27

live alone > yes where > Tai Po ic quite close

After this the exchange of pictures is negotiated. The final break occurs after users exchange picture links, to give participants a chance to visit the respective sites and evaluate the pictures (example 8). (8) 20:23:31 20:22:34 20:22:37 20:22:41 20:22:44 20:22:47

pic > for trade email or link > link >urs? my link is piclink.com/xxxxx/

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20:22:51 20:22:54 20:22:57 20:23:01 20:23:04 20:23:07 20:23:11 20:23:14 20:23:18 20:23:21

> picturetrail.com/YYYYY

nice pic > thanks

This patterning gives users a way to manage and signal the accomplishment of these different stages of the interaction. It also helps them to manage multiple interactions strategically, the breaks giving users time to engage with other interlocutors, as well as to prioritize different interactions based on the stages they have reached and the likelihood of them progressing to subsequent stages.

4.

Polychronicity and conversational synchrony

As noted before, one thing that characterizes this activity is a high degree of polychronicity. Users often engage in conversations with multiple interlocutors in order to maximize their chances of success. These multiple, simultaneous interactions do not proceed at the same pace. Some are slower, and some are faster. Each thread of conversation follows its own rhythm, “yet [they] are perfectly coordinated with each other as they weave in and out without ever colliding” (van Leeuwen 2005: 194). Several factors serve to facilitate these multiple concurrent interactions. First, the alternation between bursts and breaks makes it easier for users to toggle from one interaction to another. Second, interlocutors tend to synchronize their rhythm with the person they are talking to. Such “conversational synchrony” has been widely noted in face-to-face conversation (Hall 1959; Kendon 1974; Scollon 1982). Erickson (1980) has shown, for example, that in ordinary talk people speak to each other in a regular meter of regular beats and time their entrances and exits to the rhythm of these beats. As Capra (1982: 300, 302) notes, “Human communication […] takes place to a significant extent through the synchronization and interlocking of individual rhythms[, … and] opposition, antipathy, and disharmony will arise when the rhythms of two individuals are out of synchrony”. This also seems to be the case in computer-mediated interaction; de Siqueira and Herring (2009), for example, in their study of dyadic IM (Instant Messaging) conversations, found that some users attempt to achieve conversational synchrony by adjusting the rhythm and timing of their contributions to fit the temporal styles of their interlocutors.

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Example 9 shows a user engaging in four different conversations at once (one conversation per column), each conversation proceeding at a different rhythm. In this short segment, for example, the conversation with Lean Fit proceeds more quickly than that with Sporty Stylish, which proceeds more quickly than those with Gymfit built btm and tanguy. Each conversation, however, seems to have its own fairly consistent pace. (9) 09:26:20 09:26:24 09:26:28

09:26:32 09:26:36 09:26:41 09:26:45

09:26:49 09:26:53 09:26:57 09:27:01 09:27:05 09:27:10 09:27:14 09:27:18 09:27:22 09:27:26

LeanFit >with family >clerial >u icic

SportStylish

Gymfit built btm tanguy alone?

>what time u go today

have icq number?

bank >no clerk here >ic hei u fit >yes, but not open too? what col of now your speedo?

maybe 1100 >medium icic >arrive?? >mind?

around >where u live u do me no exercises? 2 >no now >no money

>ic hung hom. u?

It is also important to remember that these interactions are not just coterminous but also competitive, and not all participants are equally successful in maintaining the attention of their interlocutor. The relative pace of the interactions, therefore, can be an indication of how successfully they are progressing and can also tell us something about which party is more in control of the interaction.

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In example 10, the user begins an engagement with an interlocutor called chrisboi. While he is waiting for chrisboi to respond, he answers the invitation of AC Reloaded, returns to chrisboi with a reaction to his information, and then answers AC reloaded’s question before initiating another sequence with chrisboi. (10) 20:19:06 20:19:09 20:19:13 20:19:16 20:19:19 20:19:23 20:19:26

>8” here

hello cool 6.5 here maybe

20:19:29 20:19:33 20:19:36 20:19:39 20:19:43 20:19:46 20:19:50 20:19:53 20:19:56 20:20:00 20:20:03 20:20:06

>yo care for a chat? >sure >r u gam? how’s going man?

>lol >sounds nice yeah I am >horny n u >r u top or btm so am I am vers top u?

As chrisboi begins to be more forthcoming in his responses, the user pays more attention to that conversation and less attention to AC reloaded (example 11). (11) 20:20:10 20:20:13 20:20:16 20:20:20 20:20:23 20:20:27 20:20:30 20:20:33 20:20:37 20:20:40

>nice i am vers ur stats btw?

>gwm 28 6’ 78kg 44c 32w 8 cut thick vers care to intro? >mmm

Rhythm and timing in chat room interaction

20:20:43 20:20:47 20:20:50 20:20:53

cool … >gwm 28 6’ 78kg 44c 32w 8 cut sounds hot thick vers >do u work out where are u wow from?

20:20:57 20:21:00 20:21:03 20:21:07 20:21:10 20:21:13 20:21:17 20:21:20 20:21:24

20:21:27 20:21:34 20:21:37 20:21:40 20:21:44

505

8” that’s a very nice size >Melbourne >u

not really … so am not mascular or anything … but what u see in the pics is what u get from Tokyo >ok nice

Later, as the interaction with chrisboy heats up even more, AC reloaded gets only a minimal response (“tks” means thanks), before being completely ignored. At the end AC reloaded says, “Anyway I think you must be pretty occupied at the moment, sorry for the intrusion” and terminates the interaction (example 12). (12) 20:21:47 20:21:50 20:21:54 20:21:57 20:22:00 20:22:04 20:22:07 20:22:11 20:22:14 20:22:17 20:22:21

>well I dont see al that I will get >lol >tks lol no prob >do ulive here or r u visiting

i live here >same

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20:22:24 20:22:27 20:22:31 20:22:34 20:22:37 20:22:41 20:22:44

have lived here over 2 years now >k >I just moved in 3 months ago

>wot u into?

anyway I think u must be pretty occupied at the moment, sorry for the intrusion

An important difference between these two conversations is not just timing, but the interactional roles the participants are playing. With chrisboi, the user is the one who initiates most of the sequences, asking questions and taking rapid consecutive turns to show interest. In the other conversation, AC reloaded initiates the sequences, which are answered mostly with minimal responses.

5.

Timing, social identity, and power

As can be seen from the examples above, timing and rhythm are not just a matter of conversational synchrony, but also a matter of interactional roles and social power. The way timing is managed affects and is affected by the degree of “desirability” the user is able to project through the relative “market value” of different personal and physical attributes within this community and how “desirable” he perceives his interlocutor to be. Some people, as a consequence of their perceived market value, are less willing to wait, while others who are not so desirable are forced to wait longer for responses. In fact, it is sometimes by taking longer pauses that users signal their desirability and power. In example 13, after try has given his “stats”, the user replies with his own “stats”, breaking them up into three consecutive turns, not, as in the above examples, to create suspense and desirability, but rather, because the last bit of information, the user’s weight, marks him as having less “market value” than his interlocutor. (13) 20:20:06 20:20:10 20:20:13 20:20:16 20:20:20 20:20:23 20:20:27

I am aged 23, 130 lbs, 5;11“ how about u? > I am 23 also >178 cm >190 lbs

Rhythm and timing in chat room interaction

20:20:30 20:20:33 20:20:37 20:20:40 20:20:43 20:20:47 20:20:50 20:20:53 20:20:57 20:21:00 20:21:03

507

ic

After revealing this potentially discrediting information, he waits around 25 seconds before try finally replies with “ic”, an ambiguous response, which sometimes signals a coming rejection. The user replies to this with the question, “do I scare you?” (example 14). (14) 20:21:07 20:21:10 20:21:13

> do I scare you? (Three minutes and nine seconds elapse.)

He then waits more than three minutes for try finally to respond again (example 15). (15) 20:24:04 20:24:08 20:24:11 20:24:14 20:24:18 20:24:21

honestly, yes but I hope you don’t mind > it’s ok > at least you are willing to tell me I think you should join a weight loss program

The way this particular user described in a subsequent interview his expectations about timing contrasts sharply with the participants quoted above, who considered 10 to 15 seconds between turns reasonable. He explained: I think I am a patient guy, I am always willing to wait. There is no time limit for me to wait. I have tried before, there is guy in the chat room talking to me, after knowing my size, he doesn’t reply, and I just wait for him till I turn off the computer, but still no response. But I think it’s ok, as no matter he replies or not, it won’t disturb me. In fact, I have so much experience of having delays, no matter long or short. Every time, if no replying for a long time, I will type “are you here?”, “busy?”, “do I scare you?”, but most of the time, they won’t reply.

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This example reminds us that conversational style is not simply a matter of personal psychological disposition or group norms, it is also often a matter of power and ideology. Different sets of rhythmic expectations either consciously or unconsciously become submerged into the “historical bodies” (Jones 2005) of users through sustained interaction in a particular kind of social environment and in response to the values the environment reflects and the possibilities it makes available to different kinds of people.

6.

Timing and pleasure

Finally, I would like to suggest that rhythm and timing serve not just to help users manage their conversations and judge the relative interest of their interlocutors, but that they also play a fundamental role in the pleasure participants take in this activity. When chatting, users not only synchronize their rhythms to the multiple rhythms of their interlocutors, but they also build up their own personal rhythms (see also de Siquera and Herring 2009), characterized by almost constant rhythmic activity. Even when they are engaged in just one or two interactions, users are rarely idle: While waiting for responses from others, they fill in the time, either chatting with someone else, scrolling though the list of names in the chat room for new possibilities, surfing the web, answering their email, or playing games. Thus, while the pace of each individual conversation might be much slower than most face-to-face encounters, this multitasking gives to this activity a constant, rapid, rhythmic character. According to Chapple (1982), in face-to-face conversation, people associate feelings of pleasure and well-being with the rhythmicity of the interaction. Eve (2004) suggests that computer chat, with its rapid alternation of sending and receiving messages, also creates similar feelings in users. In interviews, several participants noted how “absorbing” and even “addictive” this activity of chatting with multiple prospective sexual partners could be. “Once you get into it”, one said, “it can be hard to stop”. Another noted, “I tend to lose [sic] track of time. Two or three hours can pass, and I don’t even realize it”. Csikszentmihalyi (1982) refers to this phenomenon of becoming “lost” in an activity as “flow”, a state in which a person loses “self-consciousness” and a sense of time, focusing on “the present, blocking out the past and the future” (38). Others (Trevino and Webster 1992; Webster, Trevino, and Ryan 1993) have evoked Csikszentmihalyi’s theory not just to explain the pleasure people associate with CMC but also the heightened sense of presence the medium creates, despite the reduced cues it makes available.

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7.

509

Conclusion

The main point of this chapter is that, despite the many extraneous factors that might affect rhythm in computer-mediated interaction, timing and rhythm can have important pragmatic functions in this medium, especially for certain communities of users engaged in focused activities, for functions such as showing involvement and interest, and for creating conversational implicature, managing and signaling different stages in the interaction, and negotiating power relations. It may also play a role in the enjoyment users experience in the activity of chatting. I do not wish to suggest that timing is equally important or used in the same way in all CMC or even in all chat-based environments; indeed, because of its important role in communicating desire, attractiveness, and seduction, timing may take on a heightened importance in the kinds of interactions I have been describing – just as in face-to-face interaction, timing is used differently and takes on different meanings in different communicative contexts. It is both the “bodily” nature of this communicative context, which makes timing so important, and rhythm and timing that make the experience of the context more of an “embodied” one for users. Rhythm, van Leewuen (2005) points out, provides an important link between semiotic articulation and the body; it contributes not just to organizing communicative events, but also to vitalizing them, allowing, in the case of these conversations, users to reach very high levels of empathy and intimacy in a shorter time as compared to face-to-face communication. In many ways, social identities online are very much “identities of rhythm” (Capra 1982). Future work in this area should include more studies of the timing of turn-taking in computer chat, integrating quantitative and statistical methods (see, e.g., de Siqueira and Herring 2009; Kalman et al. 2006), as well as pragmatic and conversation analytic studies of the effects of timing on the conduct of conversation and the negotiation of meaning. It should also focus more on the specific rhythmic patterns that develop in particular genres of CMC and in particular activity types (comparing, for example, task-oriented interaction with casual interaction). Finally, more work needs to be done on the psychological and relational effects of rhythmicity in computer-mediated interaction, not just in chat, but also in other types of online interaction such as multiplayer games. Timing is an analytical site where issues of involvement, attention, pleasure, and power converge. As Prior and Shipka (2003: 230–231) argue, timing is central in all interactions for “the production of embodied chronotropes, the production of a lifeworld with a certain tone and feel, populated by a certain people and their ideas, calibrated to a certain rhythm”. Different media, with the different “attention structures” (Jones 2003, 2005) they make available to users, affect the kinds of relationships and “lifeworlds” users are able to enter into and the kinds of meanings that can be made.

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Note 1. Versatile (abbreviated vers) means able to participate as an active or passive partner in anal sex.

References Barthes, Roland 1975 The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Bays, Hillary 1998 Framing and face in Internet exchanges: A socio-cognitive approach. Linguistik Online 1. http://www.linguistik-online.de/bays.htm Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron 2004 Love Online: Emotions on the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Capra, Fritjof 1982 The Turning Point. New York: Simon and Schuster. Chapple, Eliot D. 1982 Movement and sound: The musical language of body rhythms in interaction. In: Martha Davis (ed.), Interaction Rhythms, 28–50. New York: Human Sciences Press. Clore, Gerald C. and Karen Gasper 2000 Feeling is believing: Some affective influences on belief. In: Nico H. Frijda, Antony S. R. Manstead, and Sacha Bem (eds.), Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts, 10–44. Paris/Cambridge: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Cambridge University Press. Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 1993 English Speech Rhythm: Form and Function in Everyday Verbal Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth and Margaret Selting (eds.) 1996 Prosody in Conversation: Interactional Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 1982 Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. San Francisco, CA: Jossey and Bass. de Siqueira, Amaury and Susan C. Herring 2009 Temporal patterns in student-advisor Instant Messaging exchanges: Individual variation and accommodation. In: Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Donath, Judith 2004 Sociable media. In: William Sims Bainbridge (ed.), The Berkshire Encyclopaedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 631–32. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group. Erickson, Frederick 1980 Timing and context in everyday discourse: Implications for the study of referential and social meaning. Sociolinguistic Working Paper Number 67. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

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Eve, Robin 2004 Rhythm in interaction. Research Journal of the School of Environmental Studies, Himeji Institute of Technology 6: 191–200. Garcia, Angela C. and Jennifer B. Jacobs 1998 The interactional organization of computer mediated communication in the college classroom. Qualitative Sociology 21(3): 299–317. Garcia, Angela C. and Jennifer B. Jacobs 1999 The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication. Research on Language and Social Interaction 32: 337–367. Goodwin, Charles 2002 Time in action. Current Anthropology 43: S19–S35. (Supplement August–October 2002, Special issue on Repertoires of Timekeeping in Anthropology, Andre Gingrich, Elinor Ochs, and Alan Swedlund, eds. Gumperz, John 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Edward T. 1959 The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday. Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html Jacobson, David 1999 Impression formation in cyberspace: Online expectations and offline experiences in text-based virtual communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 5(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol5/issue1/jacobson.html Jones, Rodney 2003 Inter-activity: How new media can help us understand old media. Paper presented at the International Conference of Historical Linguistics, Copenhagen, August 11–15. Jones, Rodney 2005 Sites of engagement as sites of attention: Time, space and culture in electronic discourse. In: Sigrid Norris and Rodney Jones (eds.), Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, 144–154. London: Routledge. Kalman, Yoram M., Gilad Ravid, Daphne. R. Raban, and Sheizaf Rafaeli 2006 Pauses and response latencies: A chronemic analysis of asynchronous CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1). http://jcmc.indiana. edu/vol12/issue1/kalman.html Kendon, Adam 1974 Movement coordination in social interaction. In: Shirley Weitz (ed.), Nonverbal Communication, 150–68. New York: Oxford University Press. Lankshear, Colin and Michele Knobel 2002 Do we have your attention? New literacies, digital technologies and the education of adolescents. In: Donna E. Alverman (ed.), Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World, 19–39. New York: Peter Lang. Lea, Martin and Russell Spears 1995 Love at first byte? Building personal relationships over computer networks. In: Julia T. Wood and Steve Duck (eds.), Under-studied Relationships: Off the Beaten Track, 197–233. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Lehtonen, Jaakko and Kari Sajavaara 1985 The silent Finn. In Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike (eds.), Perspectives on Silence, 193–201. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Mantovani, Fabrizia 2001 Cyber-attraction: The emergence of computer-mediated communication in the development of interpersonal relationships. In: Luigi Anolli, Rita Ciceri, and Giuseppe Riva (eds.), Say Not to Say: New Perspectives on Miscommunication, 229–245. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Markman, Kris 2004 To send or not to send: Turn construction in computer-mediated chat. Texas Linguistics Forum 48: 115–124. Millard, William B. 1997 I flamed Freud: A case study in teletextual incendiarism. In: David Porter (ed.), Internet Culture, 145–159. New York: Routledge. Prior, Paul and Jody Shipka 2003 Chronotopic lamination: Tracing the contours of literate activities. In: Charles Bazerman and David Russell (eds.), Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives, 182–238. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Mind, Culture, and Activity. Rintel, Sean E. and Jeffery Pittam 1997 Strangers in a strange land: Interaction management on Internet Relay Chat. Human Communication Research 23(4): 507–534. Rintel, Sean E., Jeffery Pittam, and Joan Mulholland 2003 Time will tell: Ambiguous non-responses on Internet Relay Chat. Electronic Journal of Communication 13(1). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/013/1/ 01312.HTML Ruesch, Jurgen and Gregory Bateson 1951 Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: Norton. Schegloff, Emmanuel A. and Harvey Sacks 1973 Opening up closings. Semiotica 8: 289–327. Shankar, Tara R., Max VanKleek, Antonio Vicente, and Brian K Smith 2000 Fugue: A computer mediated conversational system that supports turn negotiation. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. Scollon, Ron 1982 The rhythmic integration of ordinary talk. In: Deborah Tannen (ed.), Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk. Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics, 335–49. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Smith, Mark, J. J. Cadiz, and Byron Burkhalter 2000 Conversation trees and threaded chats. Computer-Supported Collaborative Work 9(3): 97–105. Tannen, Deborah 1984a Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Tannen, Deborah 1984b The pragmatics of cross-cultural communication. Applied Linguistics 5: 189–195.

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Tannen, Deborah 1989 Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ten Have, Paul 2000 Computer-mediated chat: Ways of finding chat partners. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php Trevino, Linda K. and Jane Webster 1992 Flow in computer-mediated communication. Communication Research 19(5): 539–573. van Leeuwen, Theo 2005 Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. Walther, John B. 1996 Computer mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research 23(1): 3–43. Walther, John B. and Lisa C. Tidwell 1995 Nonverbal cues in computer-mediated communication, and the effects of chronemics on relational communication. Journal of Organizational Computing 5(4): 355–378. Webster, Jane, Linda K. Trevino, and Lisa Ryan 1993 The dimensionality and correlates of flow in human-computer interactions. Computers in Human Behavior 9: 411–426.

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21.

Conversational floor in computer-mediated discourse James Simpson

1.

Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the patterns of interaction known as conversational floors in synchronous, text-based computer-mediated communication (commonly known as text chat; henceforth in this chapter SCMC).1 This type of discourse is familiar to participants in many online environments, and it is central to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), text-based and text-supported multi-user domains (MUDs and MOOs), and instant messenger services such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger. This chapter outlines the significance of conversational floors in the ascription of coherence in SCMC and, through a case study, illustrates how they develop. In the traditions of conversation and discourse analysis, the definitional scope of the floor in this chapter extends beyond the turn or the exchange: It is the interactionally-produced “what’s going on” in discourse (Edelsky 1981). It brings together the topic of discourse (what is being talked about), the way things are being said (the communicative action, e.g., “chatting”), and – crucially – the participants and their sense of what is happening in the interaction. Hence participants might describe a floor thus: “Jack’s telling us about his holidays” (in which case Jack holds the floor); or “We’re chatting about the film we’ve just watched” (in which case the floor is jointly produced). There is a tendency in multi-participant SCMC for distinctive patterns of conversational floor to emerge. In this chapter, I ask: What factors account for the development of these particular patterns? As with much CMC research, the underlying aim is to contribute to an understanding of the extent to which human interaction is affected by mediation via computers. There is increasing variation across computer-mediated environments, as well as a growing range of purposes for interaction within such online spaces (for chat, see Paolillo and Zelenkauskaite, this volume). Nonetheless, the SCMC used in online spaces shares certain characteristics: It happens in real time; it can be multiparty; turns cannot be seen by other participants until after they have been sent – i.e., message transmission is one way; communication is therefore quasi-synchronous rather than truly synchronous; and participants can scroll up and down the screen to re-read previously sent stretches of text – i.e., it has a quality of persistence (Herring 1999, 2007). Given the properties of text-based SCMC and their departure from the dyadic spoken prototype used in much analysis of conversation,

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the two modes (text-based and spoken) should not be seen as possessing the same properties. For example, cohesion will be manifest in different ways, and participants will ascribe coherence in different ways, in SCMC (see the chapters by Herring and Markman, this volume). There are, however, striking similarities between SCMC and multiparty spoken discourse in particular, and a consideration of floor in multiparty spoken discourse provides something of a “way in” for analysis of its computer-mediated equivalent. The chapter begins with a review of the literature on floor in spoken and written (i.e., SCMC) conversation, which I relate to the concepts of inter-turn cohesion and coherence in CMC. I then introduce a case study from which I draw my subsequent examples. The case study is in two parts. The first part exemplifies the elements and some types of conversational floor; in the second part, I turn to three key dimensions of interaction which influence the development of floors: the role relations of the participants; the communicative action and topic of the discourse (i.e., the verbal activity); and certain medium-related factors. Their influence is discussed with reference to an extended sample of SCMC text from the case study, in which I trace the development of conversational floors.

2.

Literature review: Coherence and floor in SCMC

This review first addresses the question of cohesion in SCMC, its relationship with coherence, and how it operates in different ways from cohesion in spoken discourse. I then draw on the CMC literature to explain why conversational threads as they relate to certain types of conversational floor are relevant to an SCMC account of cohesion and coherence in discourse. 2.1.

Coherence and cohesion

Coherence relations are central to the study of pragmatics. Cook’s (1989: 4) definition of coherence in discourse is “the property of being unified and meaningful”. The search for coherence, in whatever discourse type, and whether by the participants or by analysts, is an interpretive process. It is said that coherence is “in the eye of the beholder” (Bublitz and Lenk 1999; cf. Garcia and Jacobs 1999). Participants in SCMC certainly appeal to linguistic form at clause level (lexis and syntax) to aid them in the process of ascertaining what gives language in use coherence. On a broader inter-turn level, as with spoken discourse, the formal surface connective linkage of text – lexical and referential cohesion (Halliday and Hasan 1976) – goes some way toward explaining how a text is coherent. In one-way SCMC discourse, inter-turn cohesion such as it exists in spoken discourse is often not readily apparent. However, participants ultimately accord meaning and unity to the text in the discourse process. The discourse of SCMC is coherent for its participants, despite

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its frequent lack of cohesion (Örnberg Berglund 2009); if it were not, it would not be so popular, as noted by Herring (1999). In SCMC discourse, coherence is not fundamentally dependent on the coordination of transfer in turn-taking, as it would be in spoken discourse. Rather, broader and looser constructs such as the conversational floor, as described below, are the cohesive “glue” that contribute towards participants’ ascribing coherence (unity, meaning) to the discourse. One result of the lack of cohesion in turn-taking – what Herring (1999) calls the lack of sequential coherence – is, as Herring also notes, disrupted turn adjacency. Example 1 is a typical instance of disrupted turn adjacency in SCMC, as it occurred in a two-dimensional graphics-enhanced chat room called The Palace. The extract is from a saved log of the interaction and appears as it was typed. It shows how, in comparison with spoken conversation, SCMC displays a reduced sensitivity to coordination of transfer in turn-taking, which can be viewed as a lack of fine tuning. Here and in subsequent examples, turns have been numbered for ease of reference. Example 1. (The Palace) 1 MichaelC: Good evening Ying. How are things? 2 Ying-Lan: Not so good. 3 Ying-Lan: I took a test this morning. 4 MichaelC: What’s wrong?

A number of commentators on linguistic features of SCMC note the dissimilarity of turn-taking patterns in SCMC and in spoken discourse (Cherny 1999; Garcia and Jacobs 1998, 1999; Herring 1999; Panyametheekul and Herring 2007). The following remark by Chun (1994: 26) illustrates the view that turn-taking in SCMC is entirely unlike that in spoken discourse: “In terms of discourse management during a discussion, turn-taking as done in spoken conversation is not a factor in CACD [computer-assisted class discussion]”. Relatedly, Kitade notes that there is “no turn-taking competition” in SCMC (2000: 149). The lack of fine tuning in SCMC turn-taking is the result of two fundamental facts about one-way SCMC: (1) turns cannot be seen until they are sent; and (2) the visual and auditory (paralinguistic and prosodic) cues which in spoken discourse underpin the turn-taking system are missing. The consequence is disrupted turn adjacency. Herring describes disrupted turn adjacency in SCMC (1999: 3): “[A] message may be separated in linear order from a previous message it is responding to, if another message or messages happen to have been sent in the meantime”. Likewise, in an early study of SCMC, Murray (1988) noted that “the sender may make a second move before receiving a response to the first and a message may interrupt a turn”. In example 1 above, turns 1 and 2 follow the pattern of an adjacency pair (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). In an adjacency pair the relationship between the first and second pair parts is one of conditional relevance (Schegloff [1968] 1972). Put

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simply, the presence of the first pair part opens a slot in conversation for an expected, or conditionally relevant, second pair part. MichaelC’s first pair part (turn 1) is followed by the second pair part (2) from Ying-Lan. This response, “not so good”, is a dispreferred response (Heritage 1984: 265–269; Nofsinger 1991: 71–2). That is to say, although the response is expected, or conditionally relevant, it is not as expected (or preferred) as a response such as “I’m fine, thanks”. Following a tendency noted in dispreferred second pair parts, the response is followed by an elaboration in turn 3. But MichaelC’s next turn (4) seems to be in response to Ying-Lan’s turn 2, rather than to turn 3. This is a case of disrupted turn adjacency. The disrupted turn adjacency in example 1 may well be a result of reduced coordination of transfer, in that MichaelC was typing turn 4 at the same time as YingLan was typing her elaboration following her dispreferred response (turn 3). It happened that they sent their turns at about the same time, but Ying-Lan sent her turn fractionally before MichaelC sent his. Thus it appears in the log of the chat, and appeared at the time on the screen, that Ying-Lan answers MichaelC’s question before he asks it. On a broader level, these observations on disrupted turn adjacency tend to support the view that applying models of turn-taking in spoken conversation directly to SCMC discourse is not profitable (Beißwenger 2008). The chapter now turns to an alternative approach to cohesion: the conversational floor. 2.2.

Floors in SCMC

2.2.1.

Defining the floor

A detailed treatment of the notion of floor in SCMC is found in Cherny (1999). She states (1999: 174): Given that there is no competition for the [MOO] channel per se, but rather competition for attention or control of the discourse, notions of shared or collaborative floor seem to be more helpful than the standard turn-taking literature. These notions also appear more useful for theorising multi-threaded topic discourse.

Cherny found that previous research on floors of conversation in multiparty spoken discourse was helpful in developing her categorisation of floor types in a social MOO. And on the face of it, multiparty SCMC discourse bears more similarity to the fluid threads of dinner party conversation or discussion groups than to the twoparty conversation which is the foundation of much spoken conversation analysis (e.g., Sacks 1995). Floor is a notoriously slippery concept; as Jones and Thornborrow (2004: 400) note, “floor” is “problematic and has not been employed in one single sense”. In her review of early conversation analysis work on turn-taking and floor in conversation, Edelsky (1981) observes that frequently no distinction was made between floor and turn, although in any multiparty discourse such a distinction is vital. Sten-

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ström’s (1994: 34) definition of the turn as “everything A says before B takes over, and vice versa” is basic but entirely workable in SCMC, a discourse environment where turns cannot be co-constructed and where there is no overlap. It is a technical definition with little ambiguity. Definition of the floor is less clear-cut, dependent as it is upon inferring how participants themselves view the unfolding discourse. The definition as provided by Edelsky (1981: 405) in her influential work is as follows: The floor is defined as the acknowledged what’s-going-on within a psychological time/ space. What’s going on can be the development of a topic or a function (teasing, soliciting a response, etc.) or an interaction of the two. It can be developed or controlled by one person at a time or by several simultaneously or in quick succession. It is official or acknowledged in that, if questioned, participants could describe what’s going on as “he’s talking about grades” or “she’s making a suggestion” or “we’re all answering her”.

A reading of Edelsky suggests that there are three definable elements to the floor: (1) the topic, or the “aboutness” of the discourse; (2) the communicative action: how things are being said in the discourse; and (3) the participants’ sense of what is happening in the conversation. From the analyst’s point of view, these are each evident only to the extent to which they can be inferred from the text, a constraint which should be acknowledged as a caveat in a discussion of floor. Nonetheless, the text of SCMC allows an analyst to gain a closer participant’s sense of what was going on than, for example, a transcription of spoken discourse. This is because the chat participants themselves are denied the range of visual and aural feedback cues available in spoken discourse; any ratification must ipso facto appear in the text itself. “Simply talking, in itself, does not constitute having the floor”, note Shultz, Florio, and Erikson (1982: 95). “The ‘floor’ is interactionally produced, in that speakers and hearers must work together at maintaining it”. Thus one can be the speaker but not hold the floor. In her study of floor and gender patterns in asynchronous CMC, Herring (2010) supports Edelsky’s assertion that to be a floorholding turn, a message must be ratified by other participants. In spoken discourse, such ratification can be done verbally or through non-verbal nods and backchannels. In SCMC, floor ratification can also be done verbally or through responses that represent non-verbal behaviour. 2.2.2.

Participant structure and floor types

Research into conversational floors in computer-mediated discourse has quite naturally concentrated on applying and testing findings from analysis of multiparty spoken conversation. Edelsky’s (1981) research into floors and gender in spoken conversation identified two types of floor: a singly-developed floor (F1) and a floor which is a “collaborative venture” (F2). F1’s are “characterised by monologues, single-party control and hierarchical interaction where turn takers stand out from non-turn takers and floors are won or lost”, while F2’s are “inherently more infor-

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mal, cooperative ventures” (Edelsky 1981: 416). Herring (2010) found that these two floor types were evident in her study of asynchronous discourse in two academic discussion lists. Missing from Edelsky’s bipartite distinction are cases where two or more floors of conversation are continuing in parallel. A broader classification deriving from research into dinner table conversation and classroom discourse by Shultz, Florio, and Erikson (1982) (also in Erikson and Shultz 1977) posits categories of participation structure where floors are single or multiple. Although there are further subdivisions in this classification, single floors, broadly speaking, correspond to Edelsky’s F1 and F2: a single speaker with a number of attenders, or a floor which is more collective or collaborative. Multiple floors, “type IV participation structures” in the typology of Shultz et al., are described by these authors (1982: 102) as having “subgroups of the persons present participating in topically distinct simultaneous conversations”. Hayashi’s (1991) summary grouping of floor types draws on the findings of Shultz et al. and Edelsky. Hayashi also divides floor types into single conversational floors and multiple conversational floors, and also subdivides the single floor type into the single person floor and the collaborative floor. Further sub-categorisations are described, based on relative levels of interaction. Hayashi’s taxonomy was adapted by Cherny (1999: 176ff) to describe floor types in SCMC discourse in a social MOO. 2.3.

Accounting for floor development

Many factors may influence the development of particular floor types. In this section I outline three contextual aspects of the discourse that shape floor development: participants and their roles within the group; verbal activity (topic and communicative action); and a selection of medium-related features (see Herring 2007). In section five (below) the effects of these factors are investigated with reference to examples of specific floor types as they occur within a single stretch of SCMC discourse. 2.3.1.

Participant roles

Both Edelsky (1981) and Herring (2010) focus on gender as a key contextual variable in floor development. Edelsky is careful to assert that the F1 and F2 floor types are gender independent, although participation by men in F1 floors was far greater than participation by women in her data from face-to-face meetings at an American university (1981: 415). Herring considers that her findings are of two gender styles rather than two different floor types: a male style associated with individual power and a female style associated with accommodation to others. In addition to gender styles, the influence on computer-mediated interaction of the flexible and dynamic role relations among participants has from the outset received attention in the lit-

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erature on CMC; see Turkle (1995) on the elasticity of roles and identity on-screen, Cherny (1999) on the rich online life of a MOO community, as well as Smith and Kollock’s (1999) collection of articles on online communities. Taxonomies of roles in online groups orient around the type and level of interaction at which participants engage, and include such roles as: core participants, newbies, flamers, and lurkers (Marcoccia 2004; Turner, Smith, Fisher, and Welser 2005; White 2001). The examples in this chapter come from an online language learning community, where teacher/learner roles are more flexible than they are in archetypal face-toface classrooms. On the subject of the roles of teachers and students face-to-face and online, see Warschauer (1996, 1999), Kern (1995), Salmon (2004), GodwinJones (2005), and Garrison and Cleveland-Innes (2005). 2.3.2.

Verbal activity and topic

The research of Shultz et al. (1982) showed that floor patterns were associated with the speech activity and that changes in floor patterns occurred when the speech activity changed. “Speech activities”, write Shultz et al. (1982: 96), are “units of discourse in conversation that are longer than a sentence and may consist of one discourse topic, or may consist of a set of connected topics and subtopics”. The term speech activity is from Gumperz (1977) and is a synthesis of the current communicative action and the broad topic of the conversation, for example, “discussing politics” or “chatting about the weather” (Gumperz 1977: 206). The communicative action is the name given to the type of conversation that might be happening at a given time, for example, chatting, explaining, discussing, or arguing. In a participant-oriented view of CMC interaction (see Androutsopoulos 2006), the activity might be considered the fundamental component of the floor. Jones and Thornborrow (2004: 421), in their critique of the notion of floor, “argue for the primacy of the activity: It is this that social actors come together to do, and the floor, as a method of organizing talk, is part of how they do it”. Shultz et al., when making the important link between conversational floor patterns and speech activity, found that certain types of speech activity often corresponded with certain types of floor. That is to say, when the speech activity was “chatting about how much everything costs in the stores nowadays”, the appropriate floor was a multiple conversational floor with overlapping speech. And when the speech activity was “explaining why and where the father … is going out of town”, there is only one floor, where the parents are the primary speakers (Shultz et al. 1982: 97). Because SCMC is written rather than spoken, the term verbal activity is used here in preference to speech activity. The floor, then, is not defined by topic, or aboutness, alone. This is partly, but not entirely, because topics and their boundaries themselves are so difficult to identify. Following Brown and Yule (1983: 71), topic can be considered “what is being talked about”. In addition, Brown and Yule explain that within a broad topic

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framework there are elements of personal “speaker’s topics”. By considering speaker’s topic, they recognise that within a particular framework where the overall topic may be generally or loosely agreed, the individual participants sometimes have differing views on what the topic is or where the focus should be. When investigating speaker’s topic, discourse is analysed “not in terms of how we would characterise the participants’ shared information, but in terms of a process in which each participant expresses a personal topic within the general topic framework as a whole” (1983: 88). Topics frequently drift; that is, they move gradually from one area into others, without an easily discernible topic boundary. Topic drift, or shading, as a feature of spoken conversation has been commented on by Hobbs (1990), Schegloff and Sacks (1973), and Jefferson (1984), among others. In SCMC topic drift – or topic development – over time is the subject of a line of research by Herring and colleagues that they refer to as Dynamic Topic Analysis (Herring 2003; Herring and Nix 1997; Zelenkauskaite and Herring 2008). 2.3.3.

Medium-related factors

There are also medium-related reasons for particular floors to develop in SCMC. In particular, the emergence of the multiple conversational floor may be associated with the way in which a computer-mediated conversation occurs. Cherny (1999: 180) maintains that “[m]ultiple participant floors are in fact easier to achieve [in SCMC discourse] than they are in face-to-face conversations”. She claims this is due to the lack of overlap (i.e., the inability to co-construct turns) in the medium. Moreover, the ability to scroll up and re-read previous turns, coupled with the slower speed of the unfolding discourse compared to spoken conversation, facilitates the emergence of multiple floors and enables an individual to participate in a number of floors simultaneously (Herring 1999). Topics in SCMC are prone to recur, leading to the re-emergence of particular floor types. This is the case when participants are carrying out more than one onscreen activity – that is to say, when they are multitasking. At certain points in the discourse something happens in another space on the Internet that is relevant to a previous topic, which then over-rides the current topics. The floor type may consequently revert to a previous one.

3.

The case study: Synchronous chats with Webheads

The illustrative data in this chapter are from a virtual group dedicated to exploring ways of language learning online, Webheads. This long-standing and expanding online community of English language learners and teachers was instigated by Vance Stevens and colleagues in 1998 and has been meeting on the Internet ever

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since. The Webheads (more recently, Webheads in Action) community engages with a complex intertwining of CMC modes: websites, email, voice and video conferencing, and experiment with blogs, wikis, and other Web 2.0 technologies. The Webheads synchronous text-based CMC chats are held weekly at the MOO2 Tapped In;3 previously, participants met in the two-dimensional graphics-enhanced chat room The Palace.4 The data presented in this chapter are from interaction in these two environments. The case study is in two parts: Part 1 exemplifies floor types in SCMC with reference to data from the Webheads interaction, and part 2 discusses the emergence of different floors in one particular log of SCMC from the Webheads group.

4.

Part 1: Floor types in SCMC

4.1.

Floor ratification

For a floor to be a floor, it needs to be ratified as such in the text by the participants (see 2.2.1 above). In example 2, Vance (turns 1, 2 and 4) is holding the floor; this is ratified by BJB (turn 3) and SusanneN (turn 5) through their verbal responses. Example 2. (Tapped In) 1 VanceS says, “I go to Guangchow and get Maggie (she needs a travel partner to travel in the summer)” 2 VanceS says, “Then we go visit Moral in Kunming” 3 BJB exclaims, “sounds like fun, Vance!” 4 VanceS says, “Then to Wuhan ot visit Lian (2000 km)” 5 SusanneN says, “Oh really, sounds exciting.”

In example 3, BJB ratifies Susanne’s turn with a ‘nod’. This is an action, a turn sent in the third person to represent non-verbal behaviour (on performative actions in text-based CMC, see Virtanen, this volume): Example 3. (Tapped In) 1 SusanneN asks, “Really, Minsk is closer to us in Europe than Pennsylvania, I guess?” 2 BJB [HelpDesk] nods

Floor ratification by members of the Webheads group has the dual purpose of signalling both that the participants are paying attention to the floor holder and that they comprehend what has been written. In her investigation into backchannel responses in a MOO, Cherny (1999: 194) similarly maintains that “it is difficult if not impossible to separate affect out from the back channel function in this medium, since an appropriate emotional response to a turn (e.g., a laugh) indicates both attention and understanding just as well as a nod does”.

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In multiparty SCMC discourse, problems can arise with floor ratification being misdirected or mistaken. In example 4 below, Maggi’s response (turn 4) to Gold10’s turn (1) is misinterpreted by Ying in turn 5 as a ratification of her own turns 2 and 3: Example 4. (The Palace) 1 gold10: Is here a lession about reading or writing? 2 Ying-Lan: They were worry about the world … we will be worry about the computer. 3 Ying-Lan: ^not will be … we are worry about the computer. 4 Maggi: which do you prefer? 5 Ying-Lan: prefer what? 6 Maggi: no, we are worrying about the computer 7 gold10: what will be taught at section 7? 8 Maggi: I meant Gold Ying …

Turns are often directed in SCMC by naming the participant to whom they are addressed. This cohesive device characteristic of SCMC, cross-turn reference (Herring 1999) or addressivity (Werry 1996), is used by Maggi in turn 8 of example 4 to repair the misunderstanding. In other cases, as with example 5 below, addressivity is included in the original floor-holding and floor-ratifying turns (turns 1 and 4). This can be considered a navigation technique in response to the fact that there are a number of participants and potentially simultaneous multiple threads of conversation in the interaction. Note that turns 2 and 3 belong to a different thread from turns 1 and 4. Example 5. (Tapped In) 1 SusanneN [to Maggie]: “A webhead, has a lot of furry hair, and a fuzzy old jacket, thick glasses and is all pale because of the lack of daylight, plus pimlpes due to unhealthy snacks and black coffeee?” 2 PhilB says, “Margaret – that’s right! Jacket & tie become mandatory pedagogical accessories.” 3 JohnSte says, “Back when I was a Department chair, my dress code was shorts and a tee-shirt.” 4 MargaretD exclaims, “ROTFL at Susanne description!”

Again, ratification is carried out by a representation of non-verbal behaviour: ROTFL is sometimes used as SCMC shorthand for “rolling on the floor laughing”. 4.2.

Habitually-occurring floor types

Within the context of the interaction in the Webheads community described here, identification of floors is straightforward enough, suggesting a similarity of floor

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structure across contexts of SCMC use. Three habitually-occurring floor types that also occur in MOOs are described and illustrated below: the speaker-and-supporter floor, the collaborative floor, and the multiple conversational floor. 4.2.1.

Speaker-and-supporter floor

The speaker-and-supporter floor is a single conversational floor. One participant can be regarded as the floor holder, and others are supporting through the use of back-channel devices and other short interjections. In example 6, Vance is holding the floor; his short turns are followed with the occasional supporting comment, question, and back-channel from Maggi and Ying-Lan: Example 6. (The Palace) 1 Vance: Go to this url: http://www.geocities.com/members/ tools/file_manager.html 2 Vance: You might want to bookmark that url. 3 Vance: You can’t use it just yet. 4 Vance: But you’ll want to come here later: http://www.geocities.com/members/tools/file_manager.html 5 Ying-Lan: ^why? 6 Vance: Geocities will now email you a password. 7 Maggi: Hey, I’m getting the hang of this. [11 turns omitted] 19 Vance: Here’s what you have to do next: 20 Vance: When you visit your new url, you will see the file index.html by default. 21 Maggi: ok 22 Vance: Geocities created an index.html file for you. If you put in your url you’ll see it. 23 Maggi: ok 24 Vance: What you want to do now is replace that file with your own, which has to be called index.html 25 Maggi: ok 26 Vance: So you create a little web site. The introductory page to your site is called index.html. And you just upload the files to your server space using the file manager. 27 Maggi: neat!!!1111t 28 Vance: I make my web sites in ms Word. I just start a document, save it as html, and link it to other documents. 29 Maggi: a whole lot easier than I thought!!!!!!!!!!

Note that the verbal activity is “instructing” here: Vance is instructing Maggi and Ying-Lan how to create a web page, step-by-step, and their attention is directed towards him. It is no surprise, therefore, for the floor pattern most associated with the activity “instructing” is a speaker-and-supporter floor.

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Collaborative floor

In SCMC, a single floor can be constructed by a number of participants; i.e., it is collaborative. In example 7, Ying-Lan, Vance, and Maggi co-construct the collaborative floor: All the participants are engaged in one single verbal activity. Example 7. (The Palace) 1 Ying-Lan: How long will you take your vacation? 2 Ying-Lan: Sounds nice. 3 Vance: I will take 6 days for my vacation. 4 Vance: But it’s not a vacation, really. 5 Ying-Lan: You will go alone? 6 Vance: I will be in Europe alone but my son will fly to New York and camp out 7 in my hotel room. 8 Ying-Lan: You son who lives in California? 9 Vance: Yes, he’s never been to New York City before. 10 Maggi: Be sure the mini bar is stocked with snacks … 11 Vance: No way, I’ll stock up at the deli. 12 Vance: He’s been trained to stay out of mini bars in upscale hotels. 13 Maggi: That’s a good place to start … 14 Vance: The mini bar? 15 Maggi: no … the deli’s 16 Ying-Lan: ^New York is a big city … why do you call her as “Big Apple”? 17 Maggi: … best in the world 18 Vance: Good question! 19 Maggi: Has to do with jazz Ying … 20 Maggi: or at least one story does … 21 Vance: Does it? 22 Ying-Lan: Has to do with Jazz? 23 Ying-Lan: one story? 24 Maggi: Yes … remember I was born in New York …

4.2.3.

Multiple conversational floor

When two or more floors exist in parallel, a multiple conversational floor is evident. In the following stretch of 12 turns (example 8), the floors have been identified and labelled by the feature of topic. Five turns are associated with the topic of thanksgiving (floor A), while seven relate to discussion of the TOEFL5 exam (floor B): Example 8. (Tapped In) 1 A Ying [guest] says, “Hi … everyone … it is a little late to say ”Happy Thankgiving!“” 2 A sara [guest] says, “hi ying”

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SusanneN [to Sara [guest]]: “the TOEFL Exam tomorrow, how can we help you prepare for that?” Ying [guest] asks, “How was your turkey at the table?” sara [guest] says, “i have one practice i will do it later” Ying [guest] asks, “Toefl Exam?” sara [guest] says, “yes” SusanneN asks, “And vance, how was the turkey outing with your Spanish friends?” SusanneN says, “it is the Test Of Englsih as a Foreign Language” Ying [guest] says, “I knew that.” BJB [to Ying [guest]]: “it is never to late to say happy Thanksgiving … we all have so much to be thankful for!” SusanneN [helpdesk] smiles to Ying I just learnt a new acronym.

Within a multiple conversational floor, as Cherny (1999: 176) notes, there can be a main floor and side floors, or there can be two or more main floors running in parallel. In SCMC discourse it is possible for an individual participant to be involved in more than one floor of conversation. In the above example of a multiple conversational floor, three of the four participants contribute to both floors. This tendency of the proficient SCMC participant to switch between floors is an echo of other traits of CMC use. For example, multitasking – attending to a number of different on-screen activities at once – is commonplace (Jones 2002). And in some SCMC contexts, participants cycle among on-screen identities that they have created (Donath 1999; Turkle 1995). In example 6 above (the speaker-and-supporter floor), one participant was explaining to others how to do something – in this case, how to build a website. This is in contrast to the pattern in example 7 (the collaborative floor), where the participants could be said to be “chatting”, which is, after all, the prototypical activity in a chat room. Again it is notable but not surprising that a certain type of communicative action (e.g., “chatting”) is associated with certain floor types: collaborative or multiple. In the following section, I expand on this point, relating floor development to the topic and purpose of the conversation (the verbal activity), the role relationships of the participants, and the computer-mediated nature of the discourse.

5.

Part 2: Floor development observed

In the discourse of the virtual community under consideration here, Webheads, the status of the participants and their various role relations are influential in shaping

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floor structure. A primary, albeit troublesome, distinction is that between expert user teachers of English, on one hand, and learners of English, on the other.6 Although there are students and tutors in the Webheads group, care is taken by tutors to minimise any perceived divide. Nonetheless, the role of participant as learner, as tutor, or as other interested party (e.g., help-desk volunteer; researcher) can often be discerned, although not always. Another distinction may be made between the more and the less technologically able, or electronically literate, members of the group, regardless of their level of English. Proficiency in English does not automatically confer proficiency in the use of the technologies of CMC, as any firsttime visitor to an online or virtual environment can testify. Thus a proficient technophile may find her- or himself cast in the role of tutor, not of language, but in the use of the technologies of electronic literacy. This is by way of introducing some details about the individual participants in the extract in this section: VanceS is the founder tutor of the Webheads group; LianA and Sue are English language learners with Webheads; BJB works as a volunteer on the helpdesk at Tapped In, the online environment which hosts the Webheads chats; and PhilB is an English teacher who coordinates another group of students that meets at Tapped In. Here follows a worked example of floor development in a sample of SCMC text of 36 turns in length, presented below as example 9: Example 9. (Tapped In) 1 VanceS says, “I never knew what chili was exactly before” 2 BJB. o O (that will open a web window to go with your text client) 3 LianA says, “come to china, then you will know what it is, vance.” 4 BJB. o O (I hope) 5 LianA oO 6 PhilB says, “Vance, there’s a lot of confusion between the words ”chili“ and ”chile“ (borrowed from Spanish.” 7 Sue [guest] asks, “Lian, how much did you take on GRE?” 8 LianA asks, “what does burn the scandle from the two ends mean? who can help?” 9 LianA says, “not very high, only 2160” 10 BJB [to Lian]: “how long do you think a candle will last if you burn both ends?” 11 LianA says, “nol not candle but scandle” 12 LianA says, “no – typo” 13 Sue [guest] says, “so hight? i am wondering i can only take 1500” 14 PhilB says, “Lian, it’s a play on words.” 15 VanceS says, “I’ve been to China several times, but never to Wuhan”

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16 LianA says, “it said if you burn the scandle from 2 ends, you will be a busy man.” 17 BJB thinks there are several threads to this conversation 18 VanceS says, “Also you will burn yourself out” 19 LianA says, “welcome vance to wuhan next time to china.” 20 PhilB says, “Normally to ”burn the candle on both ends“ means to work so much you tire yourself out. With ”scandal“ instead of ”candle“ it sounds like Bill Clinton with his hot interns. ” 21 BJB chuckles. Same result, though. 22 VanceS. o O (this is a normal consequence of multitasking) 23 VanceS says, “he must have had too many hot interns in the fire” 24 LianA giggles 25 PhilB asks, “Hey, I found a new free resource called ”stuffincommon virtual communities“. Anyone heard of it?” 26 VanceS says, “never” 27 Sue [guest] says, “no” 28 LianA says, “no” 29 PhilB asks, “Wanna see?” 30 VanceS says, “sure” 31 Sue [guest] says, “sure” 32 PhilB says, “It has chat, tools, and a neat whiteboard.” 33 LianA says, “yes.” 34 PhilB asks, “I’m going to project. Sue, Lian, do you know about projections?” 35 LianA says, “yes” 36 Sue [guest] says, “not sure”

There are three distinct phases to this stretch of SCMC text: Turns 1–22: a period where a number of conversations continue simultaneously (a multiple conversational floor); Turns 8–24: a period where there is one main conversation where many participants hold the floor (a collaborative floor); Turns 25–36: a period where one participant is the floor holder, supported by others (a speaker-and-supporter floor). It will be noted immediately that the first and second phases overlap considerably, whereas there is a clear boundary between the second and third phases. Floor boundaries in SCMC are not necessarily distinct. On this occasion, a collaborative floor is the main floor in a multiple conversational floor; when the other conversations in the multiple floor are completed, it becomes briefly the only floor in a single collaborative floor. Here the multiple floor continues from turn 1 to turn 22. The floor which emerges at turn 8 becomes the main floor, and at turn 23 it becomes the only floor, as previous conversations are com-

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pleted. At turn 25 the pattern shifts decisively to a single speaker-and-supporter floor. A technique for analysing floors in SCMC is to isolate individual conversations from the text. Naturally, an objection to this might be: How can we know post hoc and without being informed by the participants which turns belong to which conversation? The answer must be that we cannot be certain. Nonetheless, despite the possibility of there being other interpretations, it seems quite clear that all but one turn (turn 5) can be accounted for in the way described below. In examples 9a to 9f below, the individual floors and elements of floors in the stretch of SCMC discourse presented above as example 9 are discussed with reference to the features that influence floor development. Before I turn to these isolated sections, three points should be noted. Firstly, this stretch of discourse is not a complete textual record of the interaction. The log was originally recorded by VanceS and begins 40 turns after his arrival at Tapped In. However, the other participants had already commenced the interaction. Thus some of the conversations in the example are incomplete, either because they had started before the extract begins or because they continue after it ends. The example contains no instances of a participant entering or leaving the conversation. (See Rintel, Mulholland, and Pittam [2001] for an illuminating study of openings in IRC, a type of SCMC.) Secondly, it should be recalled that the disrupted turn adjacency inherent in the medium lends a certain arbitrariness to the position of the individual turns in the text in relation to the other turns. In example 9a, the turns of Vance, LianA, and PhilB belong to the end of the same conversation, a collaborative floor within a multiple conversational floor which has the verbal activity chatting about chili and China. The discussion about chili had been continuing for a number of turns before the beginning of this extract. Example 9a. 1 VanceS says, “I never knew what chili was exactly before” 3 LianA says, “come to china, then you will know what it is, vance.” 6 PhilB says, “Vance, there’s a lot of confusion between the words ”chili“ and ”chile“ (borrowed from Spanish.” 15 VanceS says, “I’ve been to China several times, but never to Wuhan”

Contextual and temporal aspects of the discourse would suggest that much attention is paid to individual participant’s topic in SCMC. In example 9a above, within a broad topic framework that could be said to be about chili, LianA’s topic is China. This also becomes Vance’s topic in turn 15; a topic drift has taken place

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within a floor of conversation. Neither the topic of chili nor of China is developed further in the interaction. Example 9b is the end of another conversation. BJB has been explaining to Sue how to open the graphical interface of Tapped In: Example 9b. 2 BJB. o O (that will open a web window to go with your text client) 4 BJB. o O (I hope)

BJB is using a device whereby her turn is displayed inside an ASCII “thinks” bubble. This is done in Tapped In by prefacing the turn with the command /thinks. One might infer that she uses this technique because the turns are directed towards only one among many participants. However, it is possible in Tapped In to send a turn privately to another participant using the /whisper command. That BJB does not do this suggests, in line with her role at Tapped In, that she feels the information might be of use to more than one participant. Example 9c is an exchange of three turns spread over seven turns of the extract. Example 9c. 7 Sue [guest] asks, “Lian, how much did you take on GRE?” 9 LianA says, “not very high, only 2160” 13 Sue [guest] says, “so hight? i am wondering i can only take 1500”

The two language learners here are discussing an English language test. Although perhaps not highly proficient in English, they are both adept at SCMC discourse. Both Sue and LianA participate in more than one conversation in this extract; turns by LianA appear in four of the six isolated examples highlighted here. Example 9d is an aside: Example 9d. 17 BJB thinks there are several threads to this conversation 22 VanceS. o O (this is a normal consequence of multitasking)

The topic here is the conversation itself. In spoken discourse the turns would be expected to appear together, as an adjacency pair or as the initiation and response of an exchange. However, in this sample of SCMC they are separated by four unrelated turns. Also of note is the fact that BJB’s turn is posted in the third person as a metacomment; that is, a comment on the unfolding conversation. Vance’s turn is also a representation of something other than speech, using, as BJB did earlier, the cartoon “thinks” bubble (see Cherny 1995 on the modal complexity of

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speech events in a social MOO and Virtanen, this volume, on performativity in CMC). Example 9e is the main floor of the multiple floor. The previous examples (9a to 9d) can be considered side floors, or even mere asides, of the multiple floor. Example 9e. 8 LianA asks, “what does burn the scandle from the two ends mean? who can help?” 10 BJB [to Lian]: “how long do you think a candle will last if you burn both ends?” 11 LianA says, “nol not candle but scandle” 12 LianA says, “no – typo” 14 PhilB says, “Lian, it’s a play on words.” 16 LianA says, “it said if you burn the scandle from 2 ends, you will be a busy man.” 18 VanceS says, “Also you will burn yourself out” 20 PhilB says, “Normally to ”burn the candle on both ends“ means to work so much you tire yourself out. With ”scandal“ instead of ”candle“ it sounds like Bill Clinton with his hot interns. ” 21 BJB chuckles. Same result, though. 23 VanceS says, “he must have had too many hot interns in the fire” 24 LianA giggles

This is a collaborative floor, in as much as four participants are involved in its development. My contention is that it dominates because the verbal activity is “explaining about a phrase LianA has read”, which involves the communicative action “explaining”. The topic, raised quite explicitly by LianA in turn 8, is a phrase that LianA has presumably read or heard and that she wants help in understanding. As noted above, LianA is an English language learner, and Webheads is a virtual community dedicated to language learning. In other words, when a language learner raises a language learning point, much of the focus redirects towards that particular floor, the floor becomes collaborative, and the communicative action of the verbal activity orients towards “explaining”. In example 9f the floor type can also be attributed directly to the participant and the verbal activity: Example 9 f. 25 PhilB asks, “Hey, I found a new free resource called ”stuffincommon virtual communities“. Anyone heard of it?” 26 VanceS says, “never”

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Sue [guest] says, “no” LianA says, “no” PhilB asks, “Wanna see?” VanceS says, “sure” Sue [guest] says, “sure” PhilB says, “It has chat, tools, and a neat whiteboard.” LianA says, “yes.” PhilB asks, “I’m going to project. Sue, Lian, do you know about projections?” 35 LianA says, “yes” 36 Sue [guest] says, “not sure”

This is a single floor with one floor holder being supported by other participants. In the terminology adopted here from Hayashi (1991) and Cherny (1999), it is a speaker-and-supporter floor. The communicative action of the verbal activity is primarily didactic: PhilB is “demonstrating an Internet resource called stuffincommon”. There is a sub-topic in turns 34 to 36: using the “project” command in Tapped In. The communicative activity remains explanatory. In analysing this extended example, the concern has been with a limited set of patterns of participation and floor types. There are undoubtedly many other patterns that relate to the development of other floor types. This notwithstanding, the conclusion can be drawn from this analysis that floor development – in these data at least – is related to verbal activity. When the topic of the verbal activity is a language point raised by a learner, the floor becomes collaborative. It either develops as the single collaboratively constructed floor or as the main floor of a multiple conversational floor. When the topic is related to the technologies of electronic literacy (for example, how to build a website, or where a particular resource can be found) the floor develops into a speaker-and-supporter floor. The participant role is also important. In each case the communicative action (explaining/demonstrating) is pedagogic. However, when the verbal activity is directly related to the acquisition of the second or foreign language (English), a number of participants contribute substantive turns. When the verbal activity is related to the development of the skills of electronic literacy, other participants focus their attention on the single floor holder.

6.

Conclusion

Conversation in SCMC is quite different in many ways from spoken conversation. It follows that established approaches to spoken discourse analysis do not necessarily map directly onto a text-based computer-mediated form of discourse. For example, as shown in this chapter, patterns of turn-taking in SCMC are affected by disrupted turn adjacency, itself a characteristic of the discourse setting: the virtual environ-

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ment. Hence certain axioms concerning turn-taking in spoken discourse do not apply to computer-mediated written conversation. In this chapter it has been maintained that the notion of the conversational floor is a useful one in the study of discourse where sequential cohesion is looser than in the spoken mode. Furthermore, a claim has been made that the development of certain floor types is associated with (a) the roles of the participants in the discourse; and (b) the current communicative action and topic, or, generally speaking, the purpose of the discourse. Developments in CMC have implications for the study of floor development. The variety and sophistication of CMC systems (visual-based virtual worlds, textsupported voice and video chat, the increased blending of modes – see Jenks 2009a, 2009b; Jenks and Firth, this volume) present interesting challenges for the future. The conclusions of this chapter can thus be broadened by engaging with the notion of communicative competence (Canale and Swain 1980; Hymes 1972). Effective participation in a particular SCMC environment requires a measure of electronic communicative competence, which now encompasses an ability to navigate within and between the multimodal environments of contemporary online communication (Kenning 2003; Rassool 1999; Royce 2002; Royce and Bowcher 2007).

Notes 1. This chapter contains data and analysis first discussed in Simpson, James 2005 Conversational floors in synchronous text-based CMC discourse. Discourse Studies 7(3): 337–361. 2. A MOO is a type of MUD (multi-user domain), a user-extensible text-based virtual reality environment (see Cherny, 1999). 3. Tapped In: http://www.tappedin.org 4. The Palace: http://www.thepalace.com 5. The TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language, is an admission requirement for non-native English speakers at many English-medium universities. 6. The term “expert user” is used in preference to the term “native speaker” because expert users of a language are not necessarily native speakers. For discussion of this and other issues surrounding the notion of the “native speaker”, see Rampton (1990).

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2006 Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 419–438. Beißwenger, Michael 2008 Situated chat analysis as a window to the user’s perspective: Aspects of temporal and sequential organization. Language@Internet 5, article 6. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1532/index_html/

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Brown, Gillian and George Yule 1983 Discourse Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bublitz, Wolfram and Uta Lenk 1999 Disturbed coherence: “Fill me in”. In: Wolfram Bublitz, Uta Lenk, and Eija Ventola (eds.), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. Selected Papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg, 24–27 April 1997, 153–174. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Canale, Michael and Merrill Swain 1980 Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1(1): 1–47. Cherny, Lynn 1995 The modal complexity of speech events in a social MUD. Electronic Journal of Communication 5(4). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/005/4/00546.HTML Cherny, Lynn 1999 Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Chun, Dorothy M. 1994 Using computer networking to facilitate the acquisition of interactive competence. System 22(1): 17–31. Cook, Guy 1989 Discourse. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Donath, Judith 1999 Identity and deception in the virtual community. In: Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, 3–24. London: Routledge. Edelsky, Carole 1981 Who’s got the floor? Language in Society 10(3): 383–421. Erikson, Frederick and Jeffrey Shultz 1977 When is a context? Some issues and methods in the analysis of social competence. Quarterly Newsletter of the Institute for Comparative Human Development 1(2): 5–10. Garcia, Angela and Jennifer Baker Jacobs 1998 The interactional organization of computer mediated communication in the college classroom. Qualitative Sociology 21(3): 299–317. Garcia, Angela and Jennifer Baker Jacobs 1999 The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication. Research on Language and Social Interaction 32(4): 337–367. Garrison, D. Randy and Martha Cleveland-Innes 2005 Facilitating cognitive presence in online learning: Interaction is not enough. American Journal of Distance Education 19(3): 133–148. Godwin-Jones, Robert 2005 Emerging technologies: Messaging, gaming, peer-to-peer sharing language learning strategies and tools for the millennial generation. Language Learning and Technology 9(1): 17–22. Gumperz, John J. 1977 Sociocultural knowledge in conversational inference. In: Muriel SavilleTroike (ed.), Linguistics and Anthropology: Georgetown University Round

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Table on Languages and Linguistics 1977. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. and Ruqaiya Hasan 1976 Cohesion in English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hayashi, Reiko 1991 Floor structure of English and Japanese conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 16: 1–30. Heritage, John 1984 Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html Herring, Susan C. 2003 Dynamic topic analysis of synchronous chat. In: New Research for New Media: Innovative Research Methodologies Symposium Working Papers and Readings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/dta.2003.pdf Herring, Susan C. 2007 A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@ Internet 4, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761/ Herring, Susan C. 2010 Who’s got the floor in computer-mediated conversation? Edelsky’s gender patterns revisited. Language@Internet 7, article 8. Special issue on ComputerMediated Conversation, Part I, Susan C. Herring (ed.). http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2857 Herring, Susan C. and Carole Nix 1997 Is serious chat an oxymoron? Academic vs. social uses of Internet Relay Chat. Paper presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics, Orlando, FL, March 11. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/aaal.1997.pdf Hobbs, Jerry R. 1990 Topic drift. In Bruce Dorval (ed.), Conversational Organization and its Development, 3–22. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Hymes, Dell 1972 On communicative competence. In: John B. Pride and Janet Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Jefferson, Gail 1984 On stepwise transition from talk about a trouble to inappropriately next-positioned matters. In: J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, 191–222. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jenks, Christopher J. 2009a Getting acquainted in Skypecasts: Aspects of social organization in online chat rooms. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 19(1): 26–46. Jenks, Christopher J. 2009b When is it appropriate to talk? Managing overlapping talk in multi-participant voice-based chat rooms. Computer Assisted Language Learning 22(1): 19–30.

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Jones, Rod and Joanna Thornborrow 2004 Floors, talk and the organization of classroom activities. Language in Society 33: 399–423. Jones, Rodney H. 2002 The problem of context in computer mediated communication. Paper presented at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics, Washington, D.C., March 7–9. Kenning, Marie-Madeleine 2006 Evolving concepts and moving targets: Communicative competence and the mediation of communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16(3): 363–368. Kern, Richard 1995 Restructuring classroom interaction with networked computers: Effects on quantity and characteristics of language production. The Modern Language Journal 79: 457–476. Kitade, Keiko 2000 L2 learners’ discourse and SLA theories in CMC: Collaborative interaction in Internet chat. Computer Assisted Language Learning 13(2): 143–166. Marcoccia, Michel 2004 On-line polylogues: Conversation structure and participation framework in Internet newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics 36(1): 115–145. Murray, Denise E. 1988 Computer-mediated communication: Implications for ESP. English for Specific Purposes 7: 3–18. Nofsinger, Robert E. 1991 Everyday Conversation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Örnberg Berglund, Therese 2009 Disrupted turn adjacency and coherence maintenance in instant messaging conversations. Language@Internet 6, article 2. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2009 Panyametheekul, Siriporn and Susan C. Herring 2007 Gender and turn allocation in a Thai chat room. In: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring (eds.), The Multilingual Internet, 233–255. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rampton, Ben 1990 Displacing the “native speaker”: Expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. ELT Journal 44(2): 97–101. Rassool, Naz 1999 Literacy for Sustainable Development in the Age of Information. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Rintel, E. Sean, Joan Mulholland, and Jeffery Pittam 2001 First things first: Internet Relay Chat openings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 6(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue3/rintel.html Royce, Terry D. 2002 Multimodality in the TESOL Classroom: Exploring visual verbal synergy. TESOL Quarterly 36(2): 191–205.

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Royce, Terry D. and Wendy L Bowcher (eds.) 2007 New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sacks, Harvey 1995 Lectures on Conversation. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Salmon, Gilly 2004 E-Moderating, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge Falmer. Schegloff, Emanuel A. [1968] 1972 Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist 10(6): 1075–1095. Reprinted in John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, 346–380. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Schegloff, Emanuel A., and Harvey Sacks 1973 Opening up closings. Semiotica 8(4): 289–327. Shultz, Jeffrey J., Susan Florio, and Frederick Erikson 1982 Where’s the floor? Aspects of the cultural organisation of social relationships in communication at home and in school. In: Perry Gilmore and Allan A. Glatthorn (eds.), Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and Education, 88–123. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Smith, Marc A. and Peter Kollock (eds.) 1999 Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge. Stenström, Anna-Brita 1994 An Introduction to Spoken Interaction. Harlow, UK: Longman. Turner, Tammara C., Marc A. Smith, Danyel Fisher, and Howard T. Welser 2005 Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(4), article 7. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/ vol10/issue4/turner.html Turkle, Sherry 1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson. Warschauer, Mark 1996 Comparing face-to-face and electronic discussion in the second language classroom. CALICO Journal 13(2): 7–26. Warschauer, Mark 1999 Electronic Literacies: Language, Culture and Power in Online Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Werry, Christopher C. 1996 Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Crosscultural Perspectives, 47–63. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. White, Nancy 2001 Community Member Roles and Types. Seattle, WA: Full Circle Associates. http://fullcirc.com/community/memberroles.htm Zelenkauskaite, Asta and Susan C. Herring 2008 Television-mediated conversation: Coherence in Italian iTV SMS chat. In: Proceedings of the Forty-First Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/ hicss08.pdf

22.

Conversational coherence in small group chat Kris M. Markman

1.

Introduction

Early analyses of the language of computer-mediated communication (CMC), noting the informality often found in online communication, attempted to determine if it was more like speech or more like writing (Ferrara, Whittemore, and Brunner 1991; Maynor 1994). However, modes of CMC differ in many ways, most notably in the degree of synchronicity they afford. Email and electronic bulletin boards are generally considered to be more asynchronous, because the process of message production, reception, and response can take place over minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months. Channels such as instant messaging and text-based multiparty chat are more synchronous, as the parties to the interaction must be logged in at the same time in order to interact. This degree of synchronicity has led a number of scholars to observe that interaction in computer chat, despite its textual nature, is in fact a type of conversation and can be studied as such (e.g., Colomb and Simutis 1996; Garcia and Jacobs 1999; Herring 1999, 2010; Simpson 2005; Werry 1996; Zitzen and Stein 2004). Levinson (1983: 284) claims that “conversation is clearly the prototypical kind of language use” and as such can provide insight into most pragmatic phenomena. However, in text-based conversation, the properties of the medium may alter the way pragmatic phenomena are manifested. Some indexical terms may lose their referents in the absence of visual cues (e.g., there is no pointing in a chat room). Herring (1999, this volume) has noted that the properties of chat can result in frequent violations of Grice’s (1975) maxim of relevance, such that loosened relevance may even become the norm in some chat rooms. There is considerable evidence, in fact, that despite the channel’s apparent synchronicity, chat conversations can be difficult to follow (Davidson-Shivers, Muilenburg, and Tanner 2001; O’Neill and Martin 2003; Repman, Zinskie, and Carlson 2005), particularly for users new to the chat environment. Following the flow of conversation in chat is not an intuitive process, but rather one that must be learned and internalized (Werry 1996). Nevertheless, people continue to use chat for a variety of recreational and institutional purposes, and participants in chat interaction learn how to make these conversations coherent. The question of interest for pragmatics, then, is how exactly do chat participants accomplish conversational coherence? This chapter takes up this question by examining one specific context of computer-mediated conversation: small group chat. The primary goal is to shed light on how chat conversations are made to be coherent by the parties to the interaction.

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Following Levinson’s (1983) argument for an empirical approach to the study of pragmatics, the chapter is grounded in the tradition of Conversation Analysis (CA), treating chat as a type of text-based talk-in-interaction. Specifically, it is shown how the character and context of chat interactions can play a role in conversational coherence, using data drawn from a series of computer-mediated team meetings. The next section presents a brief review of literature on chat conversation, with a focus on studies that describe the properties of chat interaction from a conversation analytic perspective. This is followed by an analysis of chat meeting data that demonstrates how coherence in these interactions is established primarily by a topical orientation. I conclude with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the findings for small group chat in an institutional setting and previous published studies of chat conversation.

2.

Observations about chat interaction

2.1.

Interaction management in chat

One strand of existing research on chat conversation focuses broadly on strategies for managing interaction, often in the opening stages of conversation. In ten Have’s (2000) examination of chat openings, for example, he concluded that by and large chat participants used pre-existing communicative practices (based on oral communication), with only minimal changes, to engage partners in chat conversations. In an examination of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Rintel and Pittam (1997) described a four-stage process whereby chat participants attempt to secure partners with whom to chat. After the server announced the presence of a new chat participant, the newly joined member sent either a blind/mass greeting (e.g., “hi everyone”) or a generic statement or question to the chat channel. This was often, albeit not always, followed by an exchange of non-verbal cues such as emoticons. If participants were successful at gaining attention, they followed with transition signals in an attempt to move into the next phase of interaction. In a related study, Rintel, Mulholland, and Pittam (2001) found that the automated joining message sent by the chat server functioned similarly to a telephone ring, allowing new users to initiate interactions. However, unlike receivers of telephone rings, participants in IRC chat did not orient to joining messages as requiring attention, and therefore these messages did not guarantee that an initiation move would be ratified. Thus Rintel et al. (2001) concluded that successfully securing a chat partner in IRC required a complex series of steps, and many attempts at openings were unsuccessful. Similarly, Markman (2009) found that participants in chat-based team meetings adapted a two-stage process for both opening and closing their chat sessions. In addition to managing the openings of conversations, chat participants must negotiate the ongoing flow of interaction; one strategy for doing so is repair (see

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Jacobs and Garcia, this volume). Schönfeldt and Golato (2003) found that participants in German IRC channels adapted the same basic repair mechanisms used in oral conversation to the chat medium. Trouble sources, once identified, caused the ongoing sequence to be stopped while the trouble was addressed. Schönfeldt and Golato noted that the preference for self-repair in oral interaction holds for chat, as well. The most frequent type of repair they found was other-initiated self-repair, followed by self-initiated self-repair, despite the fact that the sequential locations normally associated with repair in oral conversation (transition space, third turn) were not available in the chat medium. Schönfeldt and Golato also identified a trouble source unique to the chat environment, the non-response (Rintel, Pittam, and Mulholland 2003): Participants frequently initiated repair when a first-pair part was felt to have been ignored. Indeed, frequent silences or gaps between posts are a prominent feature of chat interaction. In examining such gaps in IRC, Rintel et al. (2003) found that participants employed specific strategies to help them differentiate among types of ambiguous non-responses. One of the most common strategies was to clarify that a non-response was due to user action and not to a technical system problem. To do this, the IRC users engaged in activities such as re-greeting, reconnecting, or checking connections with the system. Rintel et al. (2003) also noted that many of the problems associated with ambiguous non-responses could be eliminated if IRC or other chat systems adopted monitoring systems. These are now common features of various instant messaging systems, whereby the system tells users when an interactional partner has begun typing a message. It is clear from the research discussed thus far that although obvious points of difference between oral conversation and chat exist, chat participants often make use of (and adapt) strategies for the management of oral conversation to chat environments. The next section looks at research that specifically examines how chat conversations are organized with respect to turn management and coherence. 2.2.

Coherence and turn organization

Schegloff (1990) notes that although conversational coherence is often thought to be largely related to the topic of conversation, the sequential organization of spoken interaction also provides a source of coherence. Moreover, he argues that sequential structure “provides the basis for finding some topical linkages across what are, at the surface, topically unrelated and noncohering utterances” (1990: 64). A common feature of chat, however, is disrupted turn adjacency (Herring 1999). Most chat systems are designed such that participants are not able to monitor the ongoing construction of their interlocutors’ turns, thereby rendering the systems only quasi-synchronous (Garcia and Jacobs 1999) when compared to oral interaction. In addition, participants in chat have no control over when their messages are posted in the chat window, and therefore they are unable to control pre-

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cisely the sequential organization of turns as they are displayed. The result is disrupted turn adjacency; turns that are designed to be adjacent are “interrupted” by other turns. This problem is especially common when there are large numbers of participants in a chat room (Herring 1999). The inevitability of disrupted turn adjacency means that sequential organization cannot be relied upon to provide coherence in chat interaction (see also Jacobs and Garcia, this volume; Simpson, this volume), and in fact, Herring (1999) points out that violations of sequential coherence are the rule in most forms of CMC. As a result, participants have adapted other strategies to cope with the disjointed nature of chat conversations, for example, using punctuation or other means to indicate that a turn is incomplete (Herring 1999). Werry (1996) identified four conventions typically used in IRC to manage conversations: addressivity, abbreviation (of turn length and words and phrases), paralinguistic and prosodic cues, and actions and gestures. Of these, addressivity, or the practice of routinely naming the intended recipient within each post, has been shown to be important for conversational coherence in large group chat interactions (Herring 1999; Panyametheekul and Herring 2003; Simpson 2005). A common convention for addressivity in chat is to type the recipient’s name followed by a colon before beginning a turn, as in: ariadnne: what the hell does that mean? shaq: what are you yapping your lips about? (Werry 1996: 52) In most chat systems, the speaker’s name, here enclosed in angle brackets, is automatically appended at the beginning of the message, and the message sender optionally designates the intended recipient of the turn. This is not the only format for addressivity, as any use of the recipient’s name in a post will suffice; it should also be noted that turns may be addressed to all participants or to no one in particular (Werry 1996: 53). Addressivity also plays a role in turn allocation. In oral interaction, the sequential organization of talk is provided for by the turn-taking system (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974: 704). Part of the turn-taking system includes provisions for managing speaker exchange (i.e., allocating turns). Generally, a current speaker may select the next speaker, who in turn selects the next, and so forth. If the current speaker does not select a next speaker, then a next speaker may self-select, with the rights to the turn going to the first starter. If a new speaker does not self-select, then the current speaker may continue. This process recurs so as to provide for minimal gap and overlap between speakers. Turn-taking in chat is a disjointed process, resembling less of an exchange system than a system of adding to an evolving conversation. In fact, it is necessary to distinguish between turns and posts in chat. A post is one complete unit of text sent to the chat window, after which another post may appear. It is the arrangement of posts in the chat window that provides a semblance of a turn exchange system. In contrast, a turn may be defined as a complete idea or thought unit. Participants may include multiple turns in a single post or spread one turn across multiple posts, al-

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though the default rule in chat is one turn per post (Condon and Cˇech 2001). Therefore, in such data a turn construction unit (TCU), or a chunk of text that is analyzable as a possibly complete turn (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), may encompass part of a post, a complete post, or multiple posts. Accordingly, the transition-relevance place (TRP), which in oral interaction is the first place where a next speaker can start a turn so as to provide for minimal gap and overlap (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson: 703–704), is more nebulous in chat. However, to establish coherence in chat conversations, participants must still orient to some form of turn allocation. Panyametheekul and Herring (2003) found that, although the technical design of chat systems favors speaker self-selection, the turns that were most successful in garnering responses in a Thai web chat room were those that followed a current-speaker-selects-next strategy, which was generally achieved through addressivity. In their data, self-selected turns were the least successful, and turns that were constructed as current speaker continues were only moderately successful, because they represented the continuation of initially unsuccessful turns. Panyametheekul and Herring conclude that current-speaker-selects-next is the preferred turn allocation strategy for promoting coherence in Thai web chat interactions. Using data from small group, classroom-based chat interactions, Garcia and Jacobs (1999) described a turn-taking system for the medium. In contrast to other research on chat, Garcia and Jacobs did not rely on chat logs for data analysis, but instead used video recordings of each participant’s computer screen as the primary data. They described the participant roles in chat as those of message constructor, message poster, waiter, reader, and worker (when participants were engaged in nonscreen activities). Garcia and Jacobs noted that in chat, participants could play multiple roles at one time. They also described the differences between the roles of current and next speaker in face-to-face and chat interaction. They found that the current-speaker-selects-next technique was not always successful and argued that in chat, a “current” poster can really only select a “future” poster, as opposed to a sequentially next poster. Garcia and Jacobs also argued that the strategy of next poster self-selects is best understood as future poster self-selects, again because participants cannot guarantee that their posts will be placed next to the intended referent. Overall, the findings reviewed here underscore that problems can occur when participants attempt to rely solely on sequential placement of turns to provide coherence (see also Jacobs and Garcia, this volume). Different strategies have been adapted to cope with temporal displacement and provide coherence. In particular, previous research has shown that discourse topics can be a source of coherence in chat (Herring 2003), instant messaging (Herring and Kurtz 2006; Örnberg Berglund 2009), and in text messages sent via interactive television (Zelenkauskaite and Herring 2008). In the next section, I demonstrate how an orientation towards discourse topics helps to establish conversational coherence in the context of virtual team meetings.

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Case study

The data for this illustration are drawn from a larger case study (Markman 2006) of conversational structures in virtual team meetings. The team members were five undergraduate students from a large university in the southwestern United States who were enrolled in a five-and-a-half week summer semester independent study course designed to teach them how to work in a virtual (i.e., physically dispersed) team. The students held four virtual meetings using the chat function in the Blackboard course management system. (They did not receive any specific training on the Blackboard system or chat interface.) The author also participated in the team meetings. Because CA demands that analysts study the unfolding of interaction, moment by moment, it is necessary to study computer chat as it happens, rather than after the fact, in order to describe precisely how participants manage conversation in these spaces. To do this, software was installed on each participant’s computer in order to record the activities visible on each member’s screen during the team meetings. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, screen recordings are not available for all team members for the first two meetings. The chat conversations were also logged automatically by the Blackboard system. Both the video recordings and the chat logs were used as data for the analysis. The video recordings from each team member’s computer screen were transcribed using a system of the author’s design based on the principles of conversation analysis. Text was transcribed exactly as entered, timed in one-second intervals and aligned with the time stamps given to each turn in the chat by the server. Pauses were counted when 10 or more frames of the video recordings indicated no activity. Symbols were used to indicate cursor movement, deleted text, and the action of pressing the “enter” key or clicking “send”. Other screen actions were described verbally and enclosed in double parentheses. Each team member’s individual transcript was then integrated into a single transcript to allow for side-by-side comparison of the entire team’s interaction. In the transcription examples in this chapter, the Chat Window column indicates turns posted to the chat, accessible to all, and the Chat Time column indicates the clock time (in hh:mm:ss) of actions in the chat window and on the participants’ computer screens. The remaining columns show the individual team members’ screen actions. Abbreviated versions of the full team transcripts are presented here due to space considerations. A description of the transcription conventions is provided in the appendix. 3.1.

Conversational threads: Resources for interactional coherence

A feature of many types of CMC that is not present in spoken interaction is “threading”. In many asynchronous CMC systems, such as email, threading is an automatic technical process that links messages with their replies in a visual format. Most synchronous CMC systems, including chat, do not feature formal threading (cf. Smith,

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Cadiz, and Burkhalter 2000 for an example of true threaded chat). However, a number of scholars have identified conversational threads as a recurring feature of chat (Greenfield and Subrahmanyam 2003; Holmer 2008; O’Neill and Martin 2003; Shi et al. 2006; Simpson 2005; Zitzen and Stein 2004), where threads are defined as a series of related messages (Holmer 2008; Shi et al. 2006) or parallel conversations (Greenfield and Subrahmanyam 2003; O’Neill and Martin 2003; Simpson 2005, this volume). What makes a “thread” in chat is not a visual tie between related posts, but rather the observable contextual relations (O’Neill and Martin 2003: 44) between messages, most notably the discourse topic. Thus conversational threads, understood as a series of topically-related messages, serve as a primary source for coherence in synchronous chat, although in chat rooms with large numbers of participants and multiple topics of conversation, topics tend to decay rapidly, making conversational threads inadequate as a sole source of coherence (Herring 1999). A detailed examination of the conversation in the chat meetings presented here shows that participants organize their conversations and maintain coherence primarily through an orientation towards discourse topics in their patterns of turn construction. Specifically, I demonstrate how adjacency sequences, lexical cohesion, and addressivity are used in turn design to contribute to a coherent discussion. In all examples, the names of the team members have been changed and other identifying information has been omitted to protect confidentiality. (1) Chat Time Chat Window 5:21:17

THADINE

REBECA: what do you think? is it doable?

((pause))

5:21:18 (omitted) 5:21:49 5:21:50 5:21:51 5:21:52 5:21:53 5:21:54 5:21:55 5:21:56 5:21:57 5:21:58 5:21:59 5:22:00 5:22:01 5:22:02 5:22:03

REBECA

[omitted] REBECA: what areas are we all interested in reearching? ((pause))

((returns to chat)) ok I-f ang, it’s ((pause)) on Bl ackboar d ((pause)) ((pause)) now

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5:22:04

THADINE: ok I-fang, it’s on Blackboard now

(omitted) 5:22:14 5:22:15 5:22:16 5:22:17 5:22:18 5:22:19 5:22:20 5:22:21 5:22:22 5:22:23 5:22:24 5:22:25 5:22:26 (omitted) 5:22:41 5:22:42 5:22:43 5:22:44 5:22:45 5:22:46 5:22:47 5:22:48 5:22:49 5:22:50 5:22:51 5:22:52 5:22:53 5:22:54 5:22:55 5:22:56 5:22:57

I“ d d” do think its do able ((pause)) , and Ia m ine etereste d ((pause))

EVAN: I like wireless as you all know

detseretni ma I dna, ee

THADINE: I do think its doable

I am intere sted in ((pause)) ni in et tither r eally

THADINE: I am interested in either really

((pause))

I do too ((pause)) , but i wo uld rathe r lo ok int o the game ing in cl ass r ooms ((pause))

5:22:58 5:22:59 5:23:00 5:23:01 5:23:02 5:23:03 5:23:04 5:23:05

((pause))

stuff REBECA: I do too, but i would rather look into the gaming in class rooms stuff.

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Prior to this excerpt, team member Rebeca had ascertained that the other members present at the meeting had received some documents she had emailed to them earlier in the day. She then posted two questions in a single turn at 5:21:17, designed to elicit an assessment of those documents from her teammates. After a 17-second pause, during which no new turns were posted to the chat, Rebeca began typing a new turn that was posted at 5:21:49. This turn is also phrased as a question, this time introducing a new topic (what the team planned to study for their project). The next contribution to the chat was provided by Thadine, who had been complying with a request made by another team member. Thadine began typing as soon as she returned to the chat window, and her turn at 5:22:04 indicated that the request had been fulfilled. After a pause, Thadine turned her attention to Rebeca’s two sets of questions at 5:22:14. As transcript 1 shows, Thadine began by addressing Rebeca’s two turns in one post, addressing the first question (“is it doable?”) first, then linking this answer with the conjunction “and” at 5:22:20 to her answer to the second question (“what areas are we all interested in re[s]earching?”). However, Thadine only gets as far as the word “interested” before pausing and then, at 5:22:43, deleting the second half of her turn. She then immediately sends the first response at 5:22:47 and without pausing, re-types her second response, which she completes at 5:22:56. By deciding to split her response into two consecutive turns, Thadine mimics the structure of Rebeca’s original posts and aligns her responses to their respective topics. Rebeca’s turns at 5:21:17 and 5:21:49 and Thadine’s turns at 5:22:47 and 5:22:57 display some of the elements commonly used in these data to construct turns that are sensitive to topical coherence. Adjacency sequences, such as questions/answers and greetings, are frequently used. By phrasing her two posts as questions, Rebeca makes it more likely not only that her turns will receive responses, but that the responses will be in a form, namely answers, that will be more easily matched to the appropriate prior turns. However, it is often the case that other elements are necessary to make the topical connection clear. Thadine provided an answer to Rebeca’s first post with her turn at 5:22:47 by providing an assessment. Thadine could have simply answered “yes” and achieved the same meaning. Instead she repeats specific lexical items from Rebeca’s turn, namely “do think” and “doable”, to make her second pair part cohesive with Rebeca’s first pair part. “Cohesion is a semantic relation between an element in the text and some other element that is crucial to the interpretation of it” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 8). One type of cohesive tie that is found recurrently in these data is that of reiteration (Hasan and Halliday 1976: 288); see also Greenfield and Subrahmanyam 2003). Lexical cohesion is also illustrated by Thadine’s repetition of the word “interested” in her turn at 5:22:57, which links her turn to Rebeca’s post at 5:21:49. Reiteration can also be accomplished with a synonym, as in Evan’s turn at 5:22:44. By starting his turn with “I”, Evan indicates his inclusion in “we all” of Rebeca’s

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question. Additionally, in Evan’s turn “like” provides a semantic match with “interested”, and “wireless” has a cohesive tie with “areas” through collocation (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 285), as it had been discussed earlier in the meetings. The analysis of example 1 has thus far demonstrated how the use of lexical cohesion and adjacency sequences can contribute to a topically-coherent interaction. Before moving on, it is worth noting another element present in this extract. Previously, the practice of addressivity was identified as a coherence-maintaining device commonly used in public chat rooms. Interestingly, the use of address terms is relatively uncommon in the virtual team data. In fact, these data do not contain any instances of the name+colon convention described by Werry (1996). When address terms are used in these meetings, it is usually in greetings (e.g., “hi evan” or “hi guys”), to express agreement, support for an idea, or thanks (e.g., “yeah I-fang”, “rebeca that sounds pretty cool …”, and “thanks evan”), or less frequently, as repair initiators (e.g., “what do you mean sid?” and “sorry, that was for Rebeca”). In example 1 above, Thadine’s post at 5:22:04 (“ok I-fang, it’s on Blackboard now”) is an example of another use for address terms. Thadine’s turn is specifically addressed to the team member I-Fang, who approximately five minutes earlier had made the following request: 5:17:03 5:17:13 5:17:22

I-FANG: can someone post what rebeca sent … coz i cant access my email … THADINE: it’s kinda long I-FANG: on blackboard i mean

Thadine’s use of an address term (I-Fang) at 5:22:04 serves to help link her turn to the correct conversational thread by indicating the intended recipient. 3.2.

Speakership roles and turn allocation in the virtual team meeting

Further evidence of the role of discourse topics in interactional coherence becomes apparent when considering the speakership roles oriented to by the team members. I use terms such as “speaker” and “conversation” here deliberately to reinforce my assertion that chat interactions are a type of text-based talk-in-interaction. This section shows how these speakership roles are related to conversational threads and provides examples that demonstrate that participants are orienting to two basic units in the chat conversation system: the post and the turn, as discussed earlier. Although Garcia and Jacobs (1999) identify the transition-relevance point in chat as following a complete, posted message, there is evidence in these data that the participants orient to multiple possible points for beginning a new turn. In contrast to large public chat rooms such as those studied by Panyametheekul and Herring (2003), Rintel and Pittam (1997), and Werry (1996), the number and frequency of posts in these small group meetings are such that participants did not find it necessary to designate a turn recipient for most turns. Moreover, because chat does not allow participants to control the sequential order of posts in the chat

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window, they are not able to designate a specific, sequentially next speaker; the next possible speaker is anyone/everyone, and thus there is no need to do much in the way of formally allocating turns. However, it is sometimes useful to design turns in such a way that they make particular team members relevant future speakers. Because there is a conceptual difference between a post and a turn in CMC, it is also possible for chat participants to adopt the role of a continuing current speaker. Thus, participants in the virtual team meetings may adopt three possible speakership roles: self-selected new speaker, continuing current speaker, and relevant future speaker. The next sections examine how these roles work in conjunction with conversational threads. 3.2.1.

Self-selection: Starting a new thread

By far the most prominent role in this team’s chat is that of the self-selected new speaker. The structural characteristics of the medium favor self-selection (Panyametheekul and Herring 2003), and it appears that the context of a team meeting, where the number of participants is small and the general goal is to generate ideas, also favors self-selection. One of the most important functions of selfselected turns in these data is to begin new topics of conversation. This team conducted very informal meetings, with no pre-ordained format, agenda, or official leader. Thus one of the participants’ most pressing needs upon entering the chat was to organize their discussion, and they did this by self-selecting to start new topics of discussion, as in example 2 below. (2) Chat Time Chat Window 10:14:27

THADINE: Yeah, we probably should start without him.

10:14:28 10:14:29 10:14:30 10:14:31 10:14:32 10:14:33 10:14:34 10:14:35 10:14:36 10:14:37 10:14:38 10:14:39 (omitted)

SIDNEY

wo owso wh at ((pause)) shall e we ((pause)) e we we t alk abou SIDNEY: so what shall we talk about

t

((pause))

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In example 2, after an extended period of pre-meeting talk, including speculation about an absent team member, Sidney uses a self-selected new turn at speaking to attempt to open the meeting. Given their lack of formal meeting agenda, Sidney uses this turn as an opportunity to start a discussion about that agenda. He does this by prefacing his turn with the discourse marker so. One of the possible functions of so is to mark incipient action that has been delayed in the conversation (Bolden 2006: 668). In this case, the action that has been pending is the official start of the meeting discussion. Additionally, as a marker of incipient action, so can be used to launch new conversational topics (Bolden: 668), and in fact the strategy of using a self-selected new topic turn constructed with a so-preface as a way of attempting to open the meeting was recurrent in these data. 3.2.2.

Self-selection: Adding to threads in progress

Whereas self-selection to start new topics is the process that forms the basis for these chat conversations, the body of the chat is maintained by posts that continue topics already in progress. These turns are considered self-selected because no provisions have been made in previous turns that specifically call for a response or address a turn to a particular individual. Three types of self-selected topic continuer turns can be identified in these meetings. The first type is general turns that show agreement or support for ideas, add opinions or information, or elaborate on topics currently under discussion. These make up the bulk of continuer turns and much of the overall meeting discourse. The other two types of self-selected topic continuer turns are repair initiators and repair efforts made by someone other than the speaker of the trouble source turn. However, because of space considerations, I discuss here only examples of self-selected topic continuers of the first type. As with example 1, asking a question is one strategy for generating responses that continue a topic. Topic continuer turns may also be used to show agreement or disagreement and add new information or elaborate on a thread.

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(3) Chat Time Chat Window 5:11:48

THADINE

Ye ah, ((pause)) the genera

and ev en more specifica lly ((pause)) a ((pause)) r ound camp

l idea

pus

is t oSget oSt

((pause))

THADINE: the only thing about the articles Rebeca found (and I didn’t read them all yet) is that I believe we’re supposed to be focusing on what’s going on in [city name]

5:11:49 5:11:50 5:11:51 5:11:52 5:11:53 5:11:54 5:11:55 5:11:56 5:11:57 5:11:58 5:11:59 5:12:00 5:12:01

EVAN

THADINE: and even more specifically around campus

5:12:02 5:12:03 5:12:04 5:12:05 5:12:06 5:12:07 5:12:08 5:12:09 5:12:10 5:12:11 5:12:12 5:12:13 5:12:14 5:12:15

I-FANG: are we?

5:12:15 5:12:16 5:12:17

[KRIS joined the session]

5:12:17

THADINE: that’s the impression I got

5:12:18

EVAN: Yeah, the general idea is to get Students perspectives … though we are able to expand outside of that

ude nts per spective s… thou gh rweaa re able rto exp and ou tside of th

that’s th e imp res

((pause)) at ((pause))

sion I got

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Example 3 shows how topics can be continued by the use of assessments. At 5:11:48, Thadine posted a self-selected topic continuer post that referred to materials sent by another team member prior to the meeting, framed as an assessment of Rebeca’s articles. As it turns out, Thadine’s post at 5:11:48 did not constitute a complete turn, but it was analyzable as complete by Evan, and at 5:11:56 he responded with a second assessment (Pomerantz 1977) by displaying agreement with Thadine’s assessment and by elaborating on his interpretation of the project’s goals. Evan was still typing when Thadine’s turn-completing post arrived at 5:12:01, so it is likely that his mention of student perspectives was produced independently of Thadine’s similar reference to “around campus” and therefore may more closely resemble a weak agreement prefacing a qualification. Pomerantz notes that first assessments make relevant a response; however, the person whose information was being assessed in Thadine’s self-selected post (Rebeca) was not yet present in the chat and therefore was unavailable to respond. That left the other two team members, Evan and I-Fang, as possible relevant future speakers, although it was up to them to self-select to step into this role. A detailed discussion of relevant future speakers is presented in section 3.2.4. 3.2.3.

Continuing turns: Maintaining the role of current speaker

There are clear indications in these data that in some instances, team members are oriented toward their roles as current speakers, metaphorically holding the floor over multiple posts. These instances of current-speaker-continues occur when the participant immediately continues typing upon sending the first post and when the subsequent post is analyzable as a continuation of the first post. (4) Chat Time Chat Window

SIDNEY

THADINE

5:28:23 5:28:24 5:28:25 5:28:26 5:28:27

so li thought lthe who le pr ((pause))r urp ((pause))

maybe , bu t it

5:28:28 5:28:29 5:28:30 5:28:31 5:28:32 5:28:33 5:28:34 5:28:35 5:28:36

ose of othis ((pause)) proje ((pause)) ct cwas to f ind ((pause)) the in ((pause)) nov ators not to

all has to be out of class stuff, and grad reserrarch isn’t exacy

Conversational coherence in small group chat 5:28:37 5:28:38 5:28:39 5:28:40 5:28:41

SIDNEY: so i thought the whole purpose of this project was to find the innovators

5:28:42 5:28:43

THADINE: maybe, but it all has to be out of class stuff, and grad research isn’t exactly out of class

5:28:44

come wit

((pause))

tth a list of th em ((pause))

yt ly out of cl ass

553

((pause))

SIDNEY: not to come with a list of them

Example 4 demonstrates how current speakers can continue their turns over multiple posts. In this extract, we see the screen activity of team member Sidney. The first unit of his turn is a self-selected, new speaker contribution to an ongoing topic about what and whom the team should study for their project. He begins typing during a lull in the conversation; the immediately prior post arrived 23 seconds earlier and marked the end of a short side-sequence about being late to the meetings. At 5:28:35, Sidney completes the first TCU of his two-post turn with the word “innovators”; he hits enter and continues typing with no break in action at 5:28:36. Although the first TCU could possibly be complete at “innovators”, Sidney’s use of the conjunction “not” to begin his second TCU clearly links the two units together and therefore serves as a cue to the other team members that both posts are meant to be read together as a single turn. There are some instances in these data where breaking up a turn over multiple posts appeared to be motivated by the limited size of the message entry box in the chat application. However, in example 4 Sidney had his chat window maximized, and the first TCU does not come close to filling the entire message entry box on his screen; thus a different explanation is needed for his choice. Further examination of the two TCUs in this turn shows that Sidney is drawing a distinction in his turn between what he sees as two forms of action the team members can undertake: They can find innovators, and they can list them. While he could have typed all of this turn together as one post, by splitting his idea into two posts he can highlight more effectively for the rest of the team the distinction he is trying to make. This is, however, a somewhat risky strategy, as there is no guarantee that two units of the same turn will be posted adjacently. In this case, Thadine began typing an unrelated turn two seconds after Sidney began his first TCU, and she hit enter one second before Sidney, resulting in her turn “interrupting” Sidney’s turn. The effect is that the other team members must work to re-align Thadine’s turn with the turn it is responding to (an earlier post by another team member) in order to link the two units of Sidney’s turn.

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Whereas one strategy for maintaining the role of current speaker is to continue a single turn over multiple posts, these data also show that participants may act as current speakers over multiple turns. In these instances, TCUs may be typed continuously or near continuously, as seen in the previous examples, or they may be separated by a brief pause. What marks these posts as continuations, as opposed to self-selected new turns, is that they are analyzably complete turns that relate to the same topic. Extract 5 shows a typical example of this phenomenon. (5) Chat Time Chat Window

EVAN

I-FANG

(omitted) 5:32:44 5:32:45

ble

((pause)) i

5:32:46 5:32:47 5:32:48 5:32:49 5:32:50 5:32:51

EVAN: I noticed that we are all bringing our own definitions of technology to the table

((pause))

d ((pause))

W e all assume it has to do

out of or dinary way? ((pause))

5:32:52 5:32:53 5:32:54 5:32:55

I-FANG: cool … but did he do it in a out of ordinary way?

with com

5:32:56

EVAN: We all assume it has to do with computers and electronics

puters and elec tronic

((pause))

5:32:57 (omitted) 5:33:01 5:33:02 5:33:03 5:33:04 5:33:05 5:33:06 5:33:07 5:33:08 5:33:09 5:33:10 5:33:11 5:33:12 5:33:13

s

MOOM Comp uters speci fically EVAN: Computers specifically But I was in the show er an d realiz ed that

it does nt have to be … but those are the most p opula r ((pause)) ones

Conversational coherence in small group chat 5:33:14 5:33:15 5:33:16

I-FANG: it doesnt have to be … but those are the most popular ones

5:33:17 5:33:18 5:33:19 5:33:20 5:33:21 5:33:22 5:33:23 5:33:24 5:33:25

THADINE: true

5:33:26

EVAN: But I was in the shower and realized that it spreads beyond that as I thought about it

it sor

555

((pause))

eaaer ppopr eads bey ind thatt aht dni onee d that a s I though t about it

new cool s tu ff o

((pause))

u

At 5:32:45, Evan has completed a self-selected turn that introduces a new topic into the conversation. After a very brief pause, he begins typing a new turn. Evan’s new turn is cohesively linked to his first turn specifically by repeating the pronoun “we” and using the superordinate “computers and electronics” for “technology” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 288). The transcript also shows that, although an unrelated turn by I-Fang (at 5:32:52) gets posted to the chat before Evan’s second turn, he began typing his turn before any responses had been received. It is possible that the silence had motivated him to expand on his original idea, but given the length of his pause (just under three seconds), it is unlikely that anyone else in the meeting would have had a chance to respond before he began typing again, thus reinforcing this as an example of a current speaker attempting to hold the floor. After Evan sent his post at 5:32:56, he followed a similar pattern, pausing for approximately four seconds before beginning another turn that further refined his previous post. Evan posted “Computers specifically” at 5:33:07, then immediately continued typing a new turn at 5:33:08, which displays a link to the previous set of turns through the use of the conjunction “but”. What Evan was able to accomplish in extract 5 was a set of four individual yet related turns that, taken together, expressed and elaborated on a single idea. In doing so, he was also able to establish a new topic and was successful in moving the conversation in that direction. Thus far it has been demonstrated how participants in these virtual meetings adopted speakership roles as a self-selecting new speaker or as a continuing current speaker. The final segment of data analysis examines the third speakership role present in these data, that of the relevant future speaker.

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Selection by others: Relevant future speakers

Earlier it was noted that some small group chat interactions show a much lower use of addressivity as a turn allocation device as compared to interactions in large chat rooms. There are still times, however, when participants make it relevant for others to respond to a specific thread. As noted previously, participants cannot control who will be sequentially next in the chat, so this orientation is to a future, rather than a next, speaker. One very effective way to start a new topic is to ask a question. Generally, topicinitiator questions in these data are designed for the whole group and thus make all team members relevant future speakers. When questions or other turn types designate a specific recipient, that recipient then becomes a specific relevant future speaker for the purposes of that topic. Thus there are two types of future speakers: those who are made generally relevant (i.e., someone/anyone should respond) and those who are made specifically relevant (i.e., a specific person or persons should respond). In example 3 above, I pointed out an instance of a general relevant future speaker; I turn now to an example explicitly naming a future speaker. (6) Chat Time Chat Window 5:12:26 5:12:27 5:12:28 5:12:29 5:12:30 5:12:31 5:12:32 5:12:33 5:12:34 5:12:35 5:12:36 5:12:37 5:12:38 5:12:39 5:12:40 5:12:41 5:12:42 5:12:43 5:12:44 5:12:45 5:12:46

THADINE

EVAN: You still planning on turnign that in by 10:00 Thadine

I-FANG: ugh … the hotmail one?

((returns to chat win))

EVAN: yep

no, I already turned it i ((pause)) n, I did that ls

Conversational coherence in small group chat 5:12:47

I-FANG: 2mg is just not enough … oh well … send it to my [school] email

5:12:48 5:12:49

557

sast night

THADINE: no, I already turned it in, I did that last night

Just as questions are commonly used to make general future speakers relevant, as seen in example 1, they are also employed when a response from a specific person is sought. Example 6 shows a typical instance. Here, Evan requested information about the status of part of the team’s project. Thadine was the team member responsible, and thus Evan addressed his turn specifically to her at 5:12:26. Thadine did not have the chat window visible on her computer screen at the time Evan’s turn posted, but five seconds after she returned to the chat window she replied to his question, displaying her orientation as a specific relevant future speaker. Thadine does not use an address turn in her response, but by recycling the phrase “turni[ng] that in” from Evan’s turn in her post, Thadine makes a cohesive tie to Evan’s question (Halliday and Hasan 1976). In general, these data show that questions are the most common way that specific future speakers are made relevant, but other first pair parts are sometimes used. As noted above, general questions and other first pair parts make all participants generally relevant as future speakers. However, there are a small number of instances where a specific future speaker is made relevant, but a second individual treats the first pair part as an opportunity to respond as a general future speaker (see also Panyametheekul and Herring 2003). (7) Chat Time Chat Window 10:12:43

SIDNEY

KRIS: if you set your display to 256 colors it will reduce the file size

(omitted) 10:13:43

I-FANG: how do we set it to 256 colors?

(omitted) 10:13:50 10:13:51 10:13:52 10:13:53 10:13:54

right click THADINE: ok, blue bars gone now. sorry about that

on

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10:13:54 10:13:55 10:13:56 10:13:57 10:13:58 10:13:59 10:14:00 10:14:01 10:14:02 10:14:03 10:14:04

REBECA: Well, I think evan must be runing late.

your desk top ((pause))

10:14:05 10:14:06 10:14:07 10:14:08 10:14:09

SIDNEY: right click on your desktop – properties – gs de settings pendin g ((pause)) g ((pause)) n idnepedfor windows

10:14:10

SIDNEY: for windows

((pause)) – – por roropte eterti es – -s e e ettin

((pause))

Example 7 is part of a longer discussion about technical issues related to the chat room. As part of this discussion, Kris offered a suggestion at 10:12:43 about adjusting the computer’s screen settings. One minute later, after some intervening discussion (omitted from the transcript), I-Fang requested instructions for adjusting her computer’s display. I-Fang’s turn did not explicitly name Kris as a recipient, but because she offered the initial suggestion, Kris is a specific relevant future speaker for this turn. However, Sidney also possessed the required knowledge for adjusting the screen settings, and he began typing a response to I-Fang’s question at 10:13:52. In one sense, Sidney’s turn at 10:14:05 could be understood as simply a self-selected topic continuer. However, because the turn he was responding to was a question, and he is providing an answer, he is also acting as a relevant future speaker. This is made more plausible by the fact that I-Fang’s first pair part did not contain a specific recipient.

4.

Discussion

The findings described above illustrate that several factors play important roles in how people organize and maintain coherence in chat conversations. These factors include the size of the group, the specific technical features of the chat environment, and the purpose and context of the talk (institutional versus recreational, etc.).

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The size of the chat group is important in a number of respects. With a smaller number of people in a chat room, there is less competition for the floor. More participants generally equals more turns, and therefore potentially increases not only the instances of disrupted turn adjacency but also the distance between adjacent turns. To compensate for the increased competition, participants in large public chat rooms tend to construct relatively short turns (Cherny 1999; Werry 1996). Posting shorter turns more frequently increases the likelihood that a given turn will be posted close to its antecedent turn, thereby potentially securing the floor for a given participant. By contrast, the turns in the data discussed here varied in size, but they were generally longer than turns observable in data drawn from large public chat rooms. It was not uncommon for turns in these data to consist of multiple clauses or sentences, a characteristic also observable in the small chat groups studied by Garcia and Jacobs (1999). In addition, the size of the group appeared to influence participants’ use of addressivity, which was much less frequent than what has been observed in large chat rooms (e.g., Werry 1996). Finally, the size of the group, coupled with team members’ tendency to post long turns, meant that there were fewer turns overall posted during these meetings, compared to what might be expected in a large, public chat room. Features of the chat environment also crucially affect the overall organization of conversation in this medium. The persistence of talk is an advantage that text-based conversational systems have over oral interaction. Many chat systems used in education, such as the one used here and those examined by Simpson (2005, this volume) and Colomb and Simutis (1996), offer users access to an ongoing log of the interaction, allowing them to scroll back to previous parts of the conversation. This feature was used recurrently by the team members in this study, and on some occasions it contributed directly to the formulation of new turns. Although not all chat environments offer a logging feature, Herring (1999) notes that even in such cases, chat environments are more persistent than in oral interaction, because the most recent posts are typically available for viewing in the chat window for some period of time before they scroll up and off the screen. The ability to read and re-read prior turns gives chat participants additional resources for turn construction, and by extension, for conversational coherence. In chat interactions with numerous participants, it could be decidedly disadvantageous to act as a continuing current speaker by spreading turns over multiple posts or by posting multiple, related turns. However, in small group meetings, this orientation can be an effective strategy for securing attention and increasing the chances of holding the floor. Multiple, related posts have a visual presence that can compensate for the egalitarian nature of the technology. Thus while the chat system’s self-select feature means that no one is prevented from taking a turn at any time, the current speaker continuous role gives participants the opportunity to make their textual “voices” somewhat more prominent, which may encourage others to yield the floor.

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These findings highlight the overall importance of conversational context to coherence. Although their work was based on dyads and not groups, Condon and Cˇech’s (1996a, b) studies of decision-making in chat demonstrated that turn-taking and turn design were influenced by the decision-making frame. It is likely that the structure of the conversations in the meetings presented here was also influenced by the specific context of “team meeting”. This group was meeting for a purpose, and although the members did not organize their meetings with formal agendas, they still had an overall goal of getting work done during the course of the interaction. Institutional talk (Drew and Heritage 1992), and meeting talk specifically, has been shown to influence the turn-taking system in oral interaction (Boden 1994). Evidence for the differences between other forms of institutional talk (pedagogical chat) and recreational chat has been shown by Herring and Nix (1997). Similarly, it is clear that the meeting frame affected the organization of interaction in these chat conversations (cf. Skovholt and Svennevig, this volume). It is telling that the published accounts of other small group chat based in institutional settings (e.g., Garcia and Jacobs 1999; O’Neill and Martin 2003) display findings on conversational coherence similar to those presented in this chapter.

5.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have examined how conversational coherence operates in one context of computer chat: a student team meeting. I have shown that the participants were primarily oriented to discourse topics as a means for designing and structuring turns. In particular, lexical cohesion, adjacency sequences, addressivity, and speakership roles were shown to be important resources for establishing coherence. I also discussed some of the differences between these small group data and other published studies of chat conversation. Although many researchers have taken an interest in the structural organization of chat interaction, many unanswered questions remain. Future research could make use of the data collection and transcription methods presented here to explore chat interactions of different sizes and types, thereby further refining pragmatic understandings of this type of CMC.

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Appendix. Transcription conventions Convention/symbol Double strikethrough

Explanation olleh bob

Deleted characters/spaces Deleted characters are shown in reverse order, unless the entire word and/or phrase was selected and deleted in one action, in which case the deleted information is shown in normal order, e.g., hello bob

Double parentheses

((mouses to chat window))

Transcriber description/comments Enter/Send

Terms used in transcript description: Mouses: Movement of mouse pointer on screen, shown with direction and/or target BBoard: Blackboard, the propriety course management software being used by this team IE: Internet Explorer Win: Window Min: Minimizes Msg Entry: The box where participants type messages to be posted to the chat Disc bd/Disc forum: Discussion board/forum, a section of Blackboard where team members can post asynchronous messages and attach documents

References Boden, Deirdre 1994 The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Bolden, Galina B. 2006 Little words that matter: Discourse markers “so” and “oh” and the doing of otherattentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication 56: 661–688. Cherny, Lynn 1999 Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Colomb, Gregory G. and Joyce A. Simutis 1996 Visible conversation and academic inquiry: CMC in a culturally diverse classroom. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 203–222. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Condon, Sherri L. and Claude G. Cˇech 1996a Functional comparisons of face-to-face and computer-mediated decision making interactions. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, 65–80. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Condon, Sherri L. and Claude G. Cˇech 1996b Discourse management strategies in face-to-face and computer-mediated decision making interactions. Electronic Journal of Communication 6(3). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/006/3/006314.HTML Condon, Sherri L. and Claude G. Cˇech 2001 Profiling turns in interaction. In: Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. http://csdl.computer.org/dl/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640107b.pdf Davidson-Shivers, Gayle V., Lin Y. Muilenburg, and Erica J. Tanner 2001 How do students participate in synchronous and asynchronous online discussions? Journal of Educational Computing Research 25: 351–366. Drew, Paul and John Heritage (eds.) 1992 Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ferrara, Kathleen, Hans Brunner, and Greg Whittemore 1991 Interactive written discourse as an emergent register. Written Communication 8: 8–34. Garcia, Angela C. and Jennifer B. Jacobs 1999 The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication. Research on Language & Social Interaction 32: 337–367. Greenfield, Patricia Marks and Kaveri Subrahmanyam 2003 Online discourse in a teen chatroom: New codes and new modes of coherence in a visual medium. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 24: 713–738. Grice, H. Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds.), The Logic of Grammar, 64–75. Encino, CA: Dickenson. Halliday, M. A. K. and Ruqaiya Hasan 1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman. Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html Herring, Susan C. 2003 Dynamic topic analysis of synchronous chat. In: New Research for New Media: Innovative Research Methodologies Symposium Working Papers and Readings. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis School of Journalism and Mass Communication. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/dta.2003.pdf Herring, Susan C. 2010 Computer-mediated conversation: Introduction and overview. Language@Internet 7, article 2. Special issue on Computer-Mediated Conversation, Part I, Susan C. Herring (ed.). http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2010/2801/ index_html/ Herring, Susan C. and Andrew J. Kurtz 2006 Visualizing Dynamic Topic Analysis. In: Proceedings of CHI’06. New York: ACM Press. Herring, Susan C. and Carol G. Nix 1997 Is “serious chat” an oxymoron? Pedagogical vs. social uses of Internet Relay

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Chat. Paper presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Orlando, FL, March 11. Holmer, Torsten 2008 Discourse structure analysis of chat communication. Language@Internet 5, article 9. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1633 Levinson, Stephen C. 1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Markman, Kristine M. 2006 Computer-mediated conversation: The organization of talk in chat-based virtual team meetings. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Communication Studies, The University of Texas at Austin. Markman, Kris M. 2009 “So what shall we talk about”: Openings and closings in chat-based virtual meetings. Journal of Business Communication 46: 150–170. Maynor, Natalie 1994 The language of electronic mail: Written speech? In: Michael Montgomery and Greta D. Little (eds.), Centennial Usage Studies, 48–54. Publications of the American Dialect Society Series. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. O’Neill, Jacki and David Martin 2003 Text chat in action. In: Proceedings of the 2003 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, 40–49. New York: ACM Press. Örnberg Berglund, Therese 2009 Disrupted turn adjacency and coherence maintenance in Instant Messaging conversations. Language@Internet 6, article 2. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2009/2106/Berglund.pdf Panyametheekul, Siriporn and Susan C. Herring 2003 Gender and turn allocation in a Thai chat room. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9(1). http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol9/issue1/panya_herring.html Pomerantz, Anita 1977 Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In: J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, 57–101. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Repman, Judi, Cordella Zinskie, and Randal D. Carlson 2005 Effective use of CMC tools in interactive online learning. Computers in the Schools 22: 57–69. Rintel, E. Sean, Joan Mulholland, and Jeffery Pittam 2001 First things first: Internet Relay Chat openings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 6(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol6/issue3/rintel.html Rintel, E. Sean, Jeffery Pittam, and Joan Mulholland 2003 Time will tell: Ambiguous non-responses on Internet relay Chat. Electronic Journal of Communication 13(1). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/013/1/01312.HTML

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Rintel, E. Sean and Jeffery Pittam 1997 Strangers in a strange land – Interaction management on Internet Relay Chat. Human Communication Research 23: 507–534. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson 1974 A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50: 696–735. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1990 On the organization of sequences as a source of “coherence” in talk-in-interaction. In: Bruce Dorval (ed.), Conversational organization and its development, 51–77. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. Schönfeldt, Juliane and Andrea Golato 2003 Repair in chats: A conversation analytic approach. Research on Language & Social Interaction 36: 241–284. Shi, Shufang, Punya Mishra, Curtis J. Bonk, Sophia Tan, and Yong Zhao 2006 Thread theory: A framework applied to content analysis of synchronous computer mediated communication data. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning 3: 19–38. Simpson, James 2005 Conversational floors in synchronous text-based CMC discourse. Discourse Studies 7(3): 337–361. Smith, Marc, J.J. Cadiz, and Byron Burkhalter 2000 Conversation trees and threaded chats. In: CSCW’00, 97–105. Philadelphia, PA: ACM. ten Have, Paul 2000 Computer-mediated chat: Ways of finding chat partners. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0008/partners.php Werry, Christopher, C. 1996 Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and crossCultural Perspectives, 47–63. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Zelenkauskaite, Asta and Susan C. Herring 2008 Television-mediated conversation: Coherence in Italian iTV SMS chat. In: Proceedings of the Forty-First Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. http://csdl.computer.org/dl/proceedings/hicss/2008/3075/00/30750145.pdf Zitzen, Michaela and Dieter Stein 2004 Chat and conversation: A case of transmedial stability? Linguistics 42: 983–1021.

23.

Repair in chat room interaction Jennifer Baker Jacobs and Angela Cora Garcia

1.

Introduction

The social use of technology has become an increasingly important area of study as different forms of technology transform ever more arenas of social life. By changing the medium through which humans act and construct meaning, computermediated communication (CMC) creates a new interactional environment, which requires participants to alter the techniques and procedures they use to organize their actions and interpret the actions of others. Textual Chat is used in informal interactions as well as in a variety of institutional contexts (Garcia and Jacobs 1998, 1999; Gergle, Millen, Kraut, and Fussell 2004; Golato and Taleghani-Nikazm 2006; Jepson 2005; Ligorio 2001; Markman 2009; Rintel and Pittam 1997; Rohfeld and Hiemstra 1995; Veerman, Andriessen, and Kanselaar 2000). When the pragmatic features of oral conversation (such as appropriateness of contribution, speed of response, maintenance of flow, feedback, and repair; Todman and Alm 2003) are compared to the features of chat room interaction, it is clear that many of these features are not used consistently. This can be a main source of interactional troubles and a major cause of failures of intersubjective understanding in chat. Research on the pragmatics of repair in interaction generally involves the application of conversation analytic techniques and/or linguistic approaches to the analysis of spoken data. The phenomenon of repair has been explored in a wide variety of languages, including English (McKellin et al. 2007; Schegloff 1987b), German (Egbert 2004; Rieger 2003; Schönfeldt and Golato 2003), Italian (Bosco, Bucciarelli, and Bara 2006), Norwegian (Svennevig 2008), Japanese (Fox, Hayashi, and Jasperson 1996), Spanish (Mason 2004), Thai (Moerman 1977), and the Caribbean language of Bequian (Sidnell 2007). Most of the research on repair in oral communication has been on informal conversation, either face-to-face or over the telephone. In oral conversation, error repair procedures enable participants to present their understanding of the interaction to others and to identify and correct misunderstandings or mistakes as they arise (Jefferson 1974; Kurhila 2001; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 1987a; Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). Kötter (2002) addresses the role of repair in achieving intersubjectivity, which he discusses in terms of the negotiation of meaning. For example, a question creates a space for an answer and an expectation that it will be the next thing that happens in the conversation (Heritage 1984). This structure helps participants interpret the

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next utterance as an answer to the question. Intersubjectivity can be achieved because the answer can be placed reliably after the question; if it is not so placed, there are mechanisms for repairing its absence (Sacks et al. 1974; Schegloff 1968; Schegloff and Sacks 1973). In this chapter, we examine the production and repair of errors in intranet chat discussions among students in a college classroom. We show how students import procedures used in oral conversation to avoid and repair interactional troubles within the constraints and affordances of chat. We show that the types of errors in chat may differ from those typically found in face-to-face interaction and that the resources available to participants for repairing them may also differ. In particular, the occurrence of placement problems (displaced messages) is not only a frequent source of error and misunderstanding in chat, but it is also a missing resource for the repair of errors (because, as we show, procedures interactants use to repair errors rely on context – in particular, the prior messages). We examine how participants manage to achieve intersubjectivity, or manage the interaction even when they cannot achieve intersubjectivity, in the more loosely organized structure that chat creates. We also look at the differences between the organization of repair in chat and in oral conversation.

2.

Previous research on chat: Turn-taking and repair

Garcia and Jacobs (1999), using videotapes of chat participants’ computer screens, showed that chat turn-taking systems provide for the selection of future, rather than next, “speakers” (message posters). Because chat software does not allow participants to determine exactly where in the conversation their message will be posted, a message may not always be adjacent to its referent, and the practicality of structures such as adjacency pairs (e.g., question-answer pairs) for achieving intersubjectivity is diminished. If the answer to the question is not placed adjacent to the question, it may not be interpretable as an answer to that question. While these types of placement problems can sometimes be identified and resolved by participants, situations often cause each participant to have a different understanding of what is happening in the conversation. The message display window and printout, therefore, often do not accurately represent the actual sequence of turns at talk intended by participants (Garcia and Jacobs 1998, 1999; Herring 1999; Negretti 1999; Panyametheekul and Herring 2003). However, much of the previous research on turn-taking in chat does not analyze the message construction process necessary to discern how turn exchange is managed in chat and thus does not explain the significance of the inability of the turn-taking system in chat to manage distribution of next turns. Several studies have noted the interactional confusion that can result in chat when messages are not posted where participants intended them to be placed. Her-

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ring refers to this displacement as “disrupted adjacency” (1999); Garcia and Jacobs (1998) refer to the misinterpretation of adjacency caused by “phantom responsiveness” and “phantom adjacency pairs” in their study of university classroom participants. Negretti (1999) analyzed printouts of web chat conversations among 36 graduate students, including both native and ESL learners, and found that overlapping turns prevented participants from being able to negotiate starting, finishing, and giving turns as they would in face-to-face interactions. Nonetheless, participants “competently managed” (79) the complexity of an interaction in which “the expectation of a relevant reply to each turn is often unfulfilled or delayed” (81). Tan and Tan (2006) compared turn-taking patterns in two instructional discussions between teachers and their classes, one conducted face-to-face and the other via an online chat discussion program. They found the pattern of turn-taking to be markedly different in the two conditions, with many more students producing responses and less topical continuity in the chat condition. Kitade (2000) analyzed second-language learners, using qualitative observations including discourse analysis and conversation analysis to study IRC conversations among students and native speakers in college Japanese classes. She found that the prevalence of multiple topics overlapping and disrupted adjacency caused frustration among some participants. One way that participants compensated for the confusion was to use address terms. Simpson (2005) also analyzed participants practicing secondlanguage skills using an online website and found that disrupted adjacency was not a problem for participants, who expected the conversation to be disjointed and were able to discuss multiple threads in patterned yet intersecting interactions. However, Nilsen and Mäkitalo’s (2010) study of professionals in an online, in-service training course found that participants not only noted that their interaction was disjointed but also interrupted their activity in order to address the discontinuity before continuing their conversation. (See also Herring, this volume, on participants’ reactions to “loosened relevance” in multiparty chat.) Some studies have specifically addressed repair in chat communication. Many of these studies address, directly or indirectly, the role of turn organization in the need for and/or accomplishment of repair. Schönfeldt and Golato’s (2003) study of German-language web chats noted that, while many messages seemed to be unrelated, participants could read the different threads and reconstruct the adjacency of each topic. They found that initiation and completion of repair followed a pattern similar to that in oral conversation, with most incidences of repair being self-initiated and self-repaired within the same turn. Also, like Kitade (2000), they found that participants used address terms to distinguish which prior speaker was being addressed. Jepson (2005) compared the frequency of repair in text and voice chats of ESL students and found that more error repair occurred in the voice chat, which he attributed primarily to pronunciation-related corrections. However, these studies have all relied on logs or printouts of the conversations. Zemel and Cakir (2009) analyzed math problem-solving sessions in chat by

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using a software tool that allowed them to replay the sessions in real time based on time-stamped records of participants’ actions. They found that – unlike in oral conversation, in which overlapping turns compromise speakers’ comprehensibility – displaced turns in chat did not affect the “readability” of the text (270). Nonetheless, participants oriented to the problem of intelligibility by constructing repair messages to indicate both that it was a repair and what it was repairing. More recently, some researchers have also begun to examine video screens, as well as participants themselves. Beißwenger’s (2008) study of 18 chats using 32 participants analyzed video recordings not only of their computer monitors but also of the participants themselves in order to record data on “facial expression, gesturing, posture, and verbal uttering” (7); he found that deletions of text were often a result of a participant’s having read a new onscreen message. Marcoccia, Atifi, and Gauducheau (2008) analyzed recordings of four instant messaging discussions and discovered that the lack of interactivity in instant messaging did not prevent participants from producing “interactional gestures or facial expressions” (8), making instant messaging comparable to telephone conversation. Markman (2010) studied four virtual meetings via the chat function of “Blackboard” that took place among five undergraduate students and their instructor in a university course. Computer software was used to record participants’ computer screens, and both video recordings and chat logs were used for analysis. She found that participants often engaged in “self-initiated self-repair” by correcting mistakes or typographical errors in their immediate next turns and commonly used asterisks to indicate when their posts were repairs of prior turns. In this chapter we show that the turn-taking system of chat is critically consequential for the organization of repair and the avoidance of troubles in talk. With videotapes of each participant’s computer screen, we have access to what was typed in the message input boxes as well as the posting box; thus we can determine where participants intended to place their messages by analyzing when they started typing in relationship to when others’ messages were posted (see Garcia and Jacobs 1998, 1999; Jacobs and Garcia 2002). These data enable us to determine precisely how participants produce, avoid, and repair troubles in chat.

3.

Methodological approach

We use a conversation-analytic approach (e.g., Heritage 1984; Levinson 1983; Sacks et al. 1974) to analyze chat, because its utility for studying the process of interaction has been well demonstrated. The theoretical underpinnings of conversation analysis lie in the ethnomethodological approach to social action and social order developed by Garfinkel (1967). The pragmatics perspective developed by Habermas (e.g., Cooke 1998; Habermas 1998) also focuses on the analysis of utterances rather than sentences, the treatment of communication as a form of human

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action, and a search for the ways in which intersubjectivity is achieved. Levinson (1983) integrates the analytical tools of ethnomethodological conversation analysis (e.g., Sacks et al. 1974) with linguistic approaches. The study of the basic organizing principles of oral conversation, such as turntaking (Sacks et al. 1974), repair (Jefferson 1974), and preference organization (Schegloff et al. 1977), has proved essential to understanding participants’ actions in a wide variety of settings. As the research reviewed above has shown, conversation analysis is increasingly being used to understand interaction in chat in both informal and institutional contexts. In this chapter we use conversation analysis to extend understanding of repair in chat conversations in a college classroom.

4.

Data

As is typical in conversation analytic research, we used naturally-occurring data for the current study. Participants were college students in computer-assisted English composition classes in 1995 and 1996 who routinely spent 20–30 minutes per class in small group chat discussions to critique each other’s written work. Because the classes were small, the participants in the discussions all knew each other, although they used self-chosen pseudonyms in chat. At the time the data were collected, the students had been using chat for two to five months. In this chapter we analyze the videotapes of each participant’s computer screen from four three-person class discussions.1 The transcription system used (Jacobs 1996) reproduces what is visually available to each student on the screen while preserving the sequential order in which actions were accomplished on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis. Our transcripts reveal each participant’s actions (e.g., typing, erasing, editing, pausing, scrolling up or down) in coordination with message postings, thereby recovering the interactional process through which the posted messages were produced. The transcript records messages exactly as students typed them, including typographical errors. In addition, text formatting elements unavailable to participants (e.g., boldface, underlining, italics, superscript, and subscript) were used to notate students’ actions (e.g., typing, erasing, posting messages, or pausing). Figure 1 shows two sample pages of transcript. The box at the top of each page represents the posting box at the top of each student’s screen. The three smaller boxes beneath that represent participants’ message entry boxes, each displaying the last two lines of text typed; previous lines scroll up out of view a full line at a time. Each time a participant sends or “posts” a message, it appears as the last line(s) in the posting box, and her message entry box becomes blank. Each participant sees only her own message composition box; the transcript collapses this information onto one page of transcript.

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Transcript, page 3 1 Lizard: WHASSUP! 2 Frank Sinatra: HELLO. 3 Lizard: HELLO, BLUE EYES … P=0:30 ******* Lizard

Frank Sinatra B=0:31

WHAT D YOU THINK THE “MASK”

W=0:39–0:46, ECUTEP=0:52

Purple

Transcript, page 4 1 2 3 4

Lizard: WHASSUP! Frank Sinatra: HELLO. Lizard: HELLO, BLUE EYES … Frank Sinatra: CUTEP=0:52 *******

Lizard B=0.56HE

Frank Sinatra

Purple B=0.53HELLOP=0.57

Figure 1. Sample transcript from Tape 2

The posting box on page 3 of the transcript shows that three lines have already been posted at this point in the conversation. The most recent posting, Lizard’s “HELLO, BLUE EYES …”, was posted (P) at 30 seconds into the conversation, as indicated by the superscript italics P=0:30. Frank Sinatra began typing (B) his next message 31 seconds into the conversation (superscript B=0:31), waited (W) for seven seconds after typing “WHAT D YOU THINK THE ‘MASK’” (superscript W=0:39–0:46), and then erased (E) his in-progress message (superscript E and the subscripted text of his message). He then typed and posted “CUTE” 52 seconds into the conversation (P=0:52). The other participants would see only Frank Sinatra’s edited message “CUTE” when it appeared as line 4 in the posting box; they did not know that he had begun to compose a different message. Page 4 of the transcript then shows the partici-

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pants’ actions between the time Frank Sinatra posted line 4 and PURPLE posted the next message.2

5.

The avoidance and repair of troubles in chat

Since chat is a written mode of communication, the types of errors that can be avoided and the interactional context of their avoidance differ in some respects from those of oral conversation. While some errors in chat are analogous to errors made in oral conversation (i.e., typographical errors and slips of the tongue), other types of errors are either unique to chat or more common in chat than in oral conversation. For example, in oral conversation, participants generally respond to the most recent utterance, using misplacement markers such as “by the way” (Schegloff 1987b) to refer to earlier utterances. In our data, chat participants do not typically mark a message as out of place even if it does not refer to an immediately prior message. One reason is that, as they are typing a message, participants do not always know whether their message will be placed adjacent to its intended referent, because the textual nature of chat requires a more active role on the part of participants to see, literally, that others are participating. Unless a participant is actually looking at the posting box, she may not be aware of whether – or when – others are participating. Participants in these data respond to postings in two ways: 1) by reading the posting box as a document and 2) by reading it as a conversation. When reading the posting box as a document, the reader starts with the first message posted since the last time she read the posting box and read (and responded) to messages in the order in which they were posted. When reading the posting box as a conversation, the reader first reads the last message posted, responds to that, and then works her way back to respond to previous postings, if necessary. Participants may use the document reading mode habitually, or the conversational mode habitually, or switch from one to the other as convenient. These two ways of reading the posting box make for different types of errors. For example, if one participant is using a conversational mode and responding to the most recent posting, a reader using the document reading mode may interpret that message as a response to an earlier message. Whichever mode participants use, if they read just far enough to find a message they want to respond to and then type a response before reading other messages, they run the risk of missing something or confusing another participant. 5.1.

Self-repair of errors in chat

Chat participants edit or correct their own messages in private while composing them, but they do not typically use the error correction format Jefferson (1974) identifies (“uh” or cutoffs to locate errors). Since the message composition box is private, they do not have to signal to others that a correction is being made.

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The locations for error repair in chat differ greatly from those in oral conversation, given that there is no opportunity for self-repair of a posted message until a future turn or for other-repair until a message is posted. Because chat participants may be typing messages at the same time, it is common for one participant to post a message while other participants are typing. Writers sometimes take advantage of this feature to edit their utterances-in-progress in response to messages that are posted while they are composing, which may enable the writers to avoid a placement problem or simply provide another choice about what to respond to in the conversation. For example, in Excerpt 1 the students are discussing a poem they have read; the most recent posting is Lizard’s line 65 (“I SEE THE AFRICAN THING AS A VALID INTERPRETATION, BUT I DON’T SEE IT MYSELF”), which contradicts something PURPLE had posted earlier. PURPLE was engaged in typing when line 65 was posted (no wait time is indicated in her message entry box). The underlining of “DOE” in PURPLE’s message entry box shows that PURPLE had composed that part of her message before line 65 was posted. PURPLE types as far as “DOES HE WANT US TO HEA”, but apparently she reads Lizard’s message while typing because she erases her message-in-progress and immediately types “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T SEE IT YOURSELF”, which she posts in response to Lizard’s line 65. EXCERPT 1 44 PURPLE: 45 46 PURPLE: 47 48 Lizard: 49 50 Lizard: 51 PURPLE: 52 53 Frank Sinatra: 54 55 56 Lizard: 57 PURPLE: 58 59 60 61 Frank Sinatra: 62 Frank Sinatra: 63 PURPLE: 64 65 Lizard: 66

THE AUTHOR IS SARCASTIC BECAUSE HE KNOWS HOW HE MUST HIDE HIS TRUE EMOTIONS DO YOU GUYS AGREE THAT HE IS WRITING FROM AN AFRICAN AMERICAN STANDPOINT I WAS HOPING HE WAS SARCASTIC, BECAUSE ENJOYING THIS MASK IS A BAD WAY TO LIVE I DONT SEE THE AFRICAN PART YES BUT LOOK AT THE REASONS SURROUONDING WHY “WE” MUST WEAR THE MASK IN LINE THREE, “THIS DEBT WE PAY TO HUMAN GUILE”, HE SEEMS TO MEAN THAT THE MASK IS HARMFUL IN SOME WAY; PERHAPS CAUSING THE “BLEEDING HEARTS OF LINE 4 IT HURTS TO WEAR IT HIS BACKGROUND, AND THE TIME FRAME IS FROM THE LATE 1800’S AND THE AFFRICAN AMERICAN COULD NOT SPEAK HIS MIND BECAUSE HE RISKED LOSING HIS LIFE, BECAUSE “WE” WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SPEAK HOW WE REALLY FELT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN THOUGH DOES HE WANT US TO WEAR IT OR NOT? OF COURSE IT HURTS TO WEAR IT BECAUSE HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE SHUT OUT FROM YOUR OWN WAY OF EXPRESSION. I SEE THE AFRICAN THING AS A VALID INTERPRETATION, BUT I DON’T SEE IT MYSELFP=11:14

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************** Lizard:

Frank Sinatra: B=11:30LI

NOTE: From 11:14 TO 11:27 Frank Sinatra uses his cursor to scroll through the chat box. He displays lines 17–25 (only the first two lines of line 25 are displayed) PURPLE DOES HE WANT US TO HEAEWHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T SEE IT YOURSELFP=11:31

This excerpt shows a chat participant editing her message in response to another participant’s message, posted during the composition of her own message. This type of self-repair is private in that other participants do not know that a message has been edited, but it is interactive because PURPLE clearly changed her message in response to Lizard’s posting. Goodwin (1995: 117) has noted that “speakers [in oral conversation] change the emerging structure of sentences even as they are speaking them in order to maintain the appropriateness of their talk for the dynamic situation which the sentence both emerges from, and helps to further constitute”. Clearly, the same is true of participants in chat, who, despite not having listener responses to the messages they are currently constructing, can nonetheless be responsive to others’ postings (Beißwenger 2008; Garcia and Jacobs 1998, 1999). While the location for self-repair in chat is still within the writer’s turn, there is no opportunity for intervention by others, given that the message entry box is private. Therefore, chat participants need not worry about whether another can make sense of their message-in-progress; others will only evaluate the final product. Within-turn self-repair (editing of the message-in-progress) is, interactionally speaking, more analogous to what Jefferson (1974) calls error avoidance in oral conversation than to error repair. Chat participants can perform self-repair of errors in a future turn position. If they act quickly and are lucky, the repair may indeed be posted after the message they are attempting to self-repair; however, other participants’ posts may intervene. Hence, although sequences may be found in chat that superficially resemble repair sequences in oral conversation, they are only coincidentally similar because chat participants do not have the same control over placement that participants in oral conversation do. Excerpt 2 shows that PURPLE began typing “PLEASE EXPLAIN” in her message composition box at 11:37 as a self-repair of her post in line 67, which was posted at 11:31 and seemed like a challenge (“WHAT DO YOU MEAN …”).

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PURPLE did not mitigate or delay this disagreement with Lizard (Pomerantz 1984) and used format tying (“ … YOU DON’T SEE IT YOURSELF”), which Goodwin and Goodwin (1987) identified as an argumentative move. Format tying is when participants in a dispute tie their oppositional utterances to prior talk by creating their turn out of components of the prior turn. Her use of “please” (a politeness marker) in her repair message suggests that she is trying to mitigate or repair the argumentative tone of line 67. PURPLE succeeds in having her “PLEASE EXPLAIN” message placed adjacent to her complaint by typing and posting it quickly. However, given that the turn-taking system in chat posts messages in the order in which they are received and not in the order in which participants begin typing them, this placement was partly due to luck. Another participant could have posted a message before PURPLE’s, thus displacing “PLEASE EXPLAIN” and rendering it impotent as a repair. EXCERPT 2 46 PURPLE: 47 48 Lizard: 49 50 Lizard: 51 PURPLE: 52 53 Frank Sinatra: 54 55 56 Lizard: 57 PURPLE: 58 59 60 61 Frank Sinatra: 62 Frank Sinatra: 63 PURPLE: 64 65 Lizard: 66 67 PURPLE:

DO YOU GUYS AGREE THAT HE IS WRITING FROM AN AFRICAN AMERICAN STANDPOINT I WAS HOPING HE WAS SARCASTIC, BECAUSE ENJOYING THIS MASK IS A BAD WAY TO LIVE I DONT SEE THE AFRICAN PART YES BUT LOOK AT THE REASONS SURROUONDING WHY “WE” MUST WEAR THE MASK IN LINE THREE, “THIS DEBT WE PAY TO HUMAN GUILE”, HE SEEMS TO MEAN THAT THE MASK IS HARMFUL IN SOME WAY; PERHAPS CAUSING THE “BLEEDING HEARTS OF LINE 4 IT HURTS TO WEAR IT HIS BACKGROUND, AND THE TIME FRAME IS FROM THE LATE 1800’S AND THE AFFRICAN AMERICAN COULD NOT SPEAK HIS MIND BECAUSE HE RISKED LOSING HIS LIFE, BECAUSE “WE” WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SPEAK HOW WE REALLY FELT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN THOUGH DOES HE WANT US TO WEAR IT OR NOT? OF COURSE IT HURTS TO WEAR IT BECAUSE HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE SHUT OUT FROM YOUR OWN WAY OF EXPRESSION. I SEE THE AFRICAN THING AS A VALID INTERPRETATION, BUT I DON’T SEE IT MYSELF WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T SEE IT YOURSELFP=11:31 **************

Lizard: B=11:36I

DIDN’T

Frank Sinatra: LIW=11:31–36ZARD, YOU SA

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PURPLE: B=11:37PLEASE

5.2.

EXPLAINP=11:42

Other-repair in chat

Like self-repair, the organization of other-repair in chat can appear superficially similar to that in oral conversation, but it has structural differences. Excerpt 3 shows an unsuccessful attempt to initiate other-repair. PURPLE posts the message “WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK THE SECOND STANZA MEANS” at 3:32 minutes into the conversation (line 18). Five seconds later, Frank Sinatra begins typing “ANY PARTICULAR LINE?”, which he posts at 3:46. While participants in oral conversation may use lexical items like “Huh?”, “What?”, “Who?”, “Where?”, or “When?” (Schegloff et al. 1977: 367) to initiate other-repair, chat participants cannot count on repair initiations being placed adjacent to messages they are attempting to repair. Frank Sinatra’s question in line 19, “Any particular line?”, specifies what needs to be repaired to avoid confusion if the message ends up being misplaced, and it is a nice chat alternative to “Where?” in oral conversation. PURPLE directed Lizard and Frank Sinatra to the second stanza of the poem they were discussing, but not to a specific line in that stanza. In line 19, Frank Sinatra treats PURPLE’s line 18 as a trouble source. He initiates an other-repair with his question, attempting to get PURPLE to repair her message by specifying a particular line in stanza two of the poem they are analyzing. However, PURPLE had already begun typing a new message (“I B”) before Frank Sinatra posted this message. EXCERPT 3 10 Lizard: 11 PURPLE: 12 13 Lizard: 14 Frank Sinatra: 15 16 17 PURPLE: 18 PURPLE: 19 Frank Sinatra: 20 Lizard: 21 22 Lizard: 23 Lizard: 24 Lizard: 25 Frank Sinatra:

THE WAY WE REACT AND COEXIST WITH THE EXTERNAL WORLD FOR EXAMPLE WHEN AS PERSON IS UPSET AND MAD, HE MAY HIDE IHIS FEELINGS AND SHOW HAPPINESS FOR EVERYONE (P 2:42) RIGHT ON (P 2:56) I THINK THAT IT REFERS TO THE WAYS THAT PEOPLE USE TO HIDE THIER FEELINGS, EPECIALLY IN THE INCREASINGLY HOSTILE WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE. (P 3:01A) I AGREE LIZARD, (P 3:01B) WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK THE SECOND STANZA MEANS (P 3:32) ANY PARTICULAR LINE? (P 3:46) THIS “MASK” KINDA KEEPS A COHESION BETWEEN PEOPLE THROUGH THE UGLINESS OF DAY-TO-DAY (P 3:53) SORRY, WE’VE MOVED ON (P 4:08) PEOPLE SHOULDN’T GET TO CLOSE (P 5:01) KNOW TOO MUCH (P 5:07) THE SECOND STANZA SEEMS TO BE TALKING FROM A DIFFERENT

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26 27 28 29 PURPLE: 30 31

POINT OF VIEW THAN THE OTHER TWO. IT TALKS ABOUT THE MASK AS A GOOD THING WHEREAS THE OTHERS SEEM TO POINT OUT THE BAD PARTS OF IT. (P 5:40A) I BELIEVE IT MEANS THAT WHY SHOULD EVERYONE KNOW EXACTLY HOW A PERSON IS FEELING OR WHAT A PERSON IS THINKING ABOUT. SO THE WRITER IS STATING THAT HID YOU R FEELINGS AND KEEP THIEM TO YOURSELFP=5:40B

Subsequent pages of the transcript show that PURPLE continues typing without waiting while Lizard posts two messages, lines 20 and 22, the last one at 4:08 (see Excerpt 3). Frank Sinatra waits 14 more seconds for a reply from PURPLE to his repair initiation attempt and then begins to type an analysis of stanza two. Lizard posts two more short messages (lines 23 and 24) while Frank Sinatra is composing his message, which he then posts at 5:40 (line 25). At the same time, PURPLE finally completes her long message (line 29), which is posted virtually simultaneously at 5:40 and appears in the posting box just after Frank Sinatra’s message. PURPLE’s message in line 29 provides a retrospective warrant for her failure to answer Frank Sinatra’s question in line 19: She was engaged in typing a lengthy message and may not have seen his question prior to posting it. In this way, the interactional organization of chat provides a rationale for PURPLE’s failure to respond to Frank Sinatra’s question. Although Frank Sinatra’s line 19 was an adjacency pair first pair part (a question) and no second pair part was produced, the absence of an answer is not treated as problematic by the participants. The participants appear to be viewing this “absence” through a chat lens, in which delayed responses are not unusual. In chat, participants know that a “silent” participant may be engaged in typing a message, scrolling up in the posting box, or reading hard documents rather than new postings. Chat participants, therefore, may choose not to repair silence. Frank Sinatra lets his repair initiation attempt go unanswered and ultimately answers PURPLE’s line 18 without aid from her as to which line to focus on. PURPLE’s missing response to Frank Sinatra’s question is a type of “placement error” in the interactional environment of chat; it is a silence only from the point of view of Frank Sinatra and Lizard. From PURPLE’s point of view, there was no silence because she was engaged in typing and did not become aware of the question Frank Sinatra asked until later. In sum, this excerpt shows a repair initiation attempt that was unsuccessful because of the interactional organization of chat but which was not problematic for the interaction, in as much as Frank Sinatra displayed an orientation to how chat works and went on with the conversation. Excerpt 1 (above) shows an instance in which an other-initiation of repair was successful in eliciting a repair from the person producing the “error”. However, it took three attempts at other-initiation of repair before the requested repair was produced. In Excerpt 1 Frank Sinatra initiates an other-repair of Lizard’s line 56 (“IT HURTS TO WEAR IT”). Ten seconds later, Frank Sinatra begins his re-

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sponse (“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN THOUGH”), which is posted (line 61) after an intervening post from PURPLE (see Excerpt 1). Frank Sinatra does not use completion punctuation at the end of line 61 and quickly types a follow-up message (“DOES HE WANT US TO WEAR IT OR NOT?”), which he posts at 10:48 (Excerpt 1, line 62). This follow-up message in line 62 could be an attempt to clarify the referent of his line 61; by using the words “to wear it”, Frank Sinatra uses format tying (Goodwin and Goodwin 1987) to link his message with Lizard’s line 56 rather than PURPLE’s line 57, and then he waits for a response to his messages. Instead of a response from Lizard, a posting from PURPLE appears, and then another posting from Lizard (line 65) in response to an earlier message from PURPLE. Frank Sinatra then begins another message (see Excerpt 4), explicitly addressed to Lizard (“LIZARD, YOU SAID EARLIER THAT THE AUTHOR WANTED US TO HIDE OUR FEELINGS, HAS YOUR OPINION CHANGED?”), in which he revises and reissues his previous repair initiation. While Lizard was “silent”, Frank Sinatra waited because he could assume that Lizard was composing a response to his (Sinatra’s) repair initiation; but after Lizard posted line 65, it was clear that he was not. At that point Frank Sinatra begins typing the elaboration/repair of his repair initiation to make a third attempt to get Lizard to respond. This third attempt at repair initiation is not immediately successful because the next message Lizard posts is a response to one of PURPLE’s earlier messages. However, Lizard then types “NO”, which he posts as line 73. This “NO” is an answer to Frank Sinatra’s repair initiations. EXCERPT 4 65 Lizard: 66 67 PURPLE: 68 PURPLE: 69 Frank Sinatra: 70 71 LIZARD: 72 73 LIZARD:

I SEE THE AFRICAN THING AS A VALID INTERPRETATION, BUT I DON’T SEE IT MYSELF WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T SEE IT YOURSELF PLEASE EXPLAIN LIZARD, YOU SAID EARLIER THAT THE AUTHOR WANTED US TO HIDE OUR FEELINGS, HAS YOUR OPINION CHANGED? I DIDN’T READ IT FROM THE STANDPOINT OF AN AFRICAN AMERICAN. I AM WHITE, AND I CAN SEE THIS APPLYING TO MYSELF NOP=12:34

The sequence in Excerpt 4 differs in several ways from repair sequences in oral conversation. First, the original other-repair initiation was not placed in the turn after the trouble source, because chat software allows other participants to post messages at will and does not guarantee placement of a message at a specific point. The delayed placement of Frank Sinatra’s first other-repair initiation attempt could have made it difficult for Lizard to interpret (hence, Frank Sinatra’s repair of his repair message in line 62). Also, because Lizard was engaged in responding to PURPLE’s postings, he was not yet at leisure to respond to Frank Sinatra. Finally,

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when he does respond to Frank Sinatra’s third attempt at error repair, his “NO” is not placed adjacent to the repair initiation and hence may be difficult to interpret. However, in this case, Frank Sinatra seems able to interpret Lizard’s “NO” as a response to his query; he responds to him in his next message (not shown). This repair sequence was eventually completed successfully; however, because of the interactional organization of chat, it took three attempts and was not sequential. In sum, these examples of error avoidance and self- and other-repair in chat show that the interactional organization of chat, in particular its turn-taking system, leads to a different configuration of error and error repair than exists in oral conversation. The placement of messages in slots other than those in which the poster intended or desired them to be placed, or in slots other than those adjacent to the message they refer to, is a common event in chat, with deep implications for the organization of repair.

6.

Techniques for avoiding and repairing placement problems in chat

We found that two types of placement problems occur in chat. The first is an actual displacement of a post, in which a participant’s message is posted after one or more other messages intervene between it and its referent. The second occurs when a participant fails to take steps to avoid misunderstandings that can result from displaced posts. This could be thought of as a failure to anticipate potential displacement of a message. 6.1.

Posting a short or split message

Chat participants can attempt to avoid placement problems by posting short messages which take less time to type, lessening the chance that other posts will intervene between the message and its intended referent. In Excerpt 3, Lizard’s response (lines 20 and 21) to a previous topic was not posted until after PURPLE had introduced a new topic; as a result, Lizard’s post was erroneously placed. Lizard apologizes for having gotten behind and misplaced a post and then splits his next contribution (an answer to the “next” question in line 18) into two short posts in order to increase the chances that at least one of them will be placed appropriately in the conversation (lines 23 and 24); he began typing line 24 immediately after posting line 23. 6.2.

Delaying posting to check the posting board

In both oral conversation and chat, participants may have something they want to say and may be waiting for a place in the conversation to say or post it. Chat participants can write a message and then hold the completed message indefinitely for

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a convenient time to post it in order to minimize the chance that it is placed awkwardly in the conversation. If his or her post would inappropriately appear to be a response to an immediately prior post, the writer can edit the message before posting to avoid comprehension problems. Even when participants wait to post, however, placement problems can occur, simply because it is not possible to know what other participants are writing in their message entry boxes. An example of pausing to avoid a placement problem can be seen in Excerpt 5. EXCERPT 5 1 Mr White: 2 Silver: 3 Mr White: 4 Silver: 5 FRED: 6 Mr White: 7 Silver: 8 Mr White: 9 FRED: 10 Silver:

Hello, is anybody there? (0:01) hello everybody (0:08) Hi ho, silver (0:24) hey what’s up (0:40) YABBA DABBA DO! (1:01) hey Fred (1:12) So who want to go first? (1:17) I will (1:23) HI MR WHITE AND SILVER (1:25) Okay which paper are you going to revise (1:40)

Although Silver’s post in line 7 appears to follow the opening sequence seamlessly, she actually waited approximately 12 seconds after having typed this message before she posted it. Silver waited to begin the substantive part of their conversation until it appeared that all participants had logged on and posted a greeting. Mr White accepts Silver’s invitation to discuss his paper (“I will” – line 8), but FRED’s continuation of the greeting sequence (line 9) interrupts the conversation. While a participant can increase the chance that his or her message will not be displaced by waiting to post it, other participants’ posts can still intervene. Checking the posting box before posting may help a participant to avoid some placement problems; however, the longer a poster waits, the more likely it is that other participants will post messages, increasing the likelihood that his or her post will become “out of date”. 6.3.

Using address terms

Previous research has noted that participants in chat may use address terms to identify the intended recipient of their message (Herring 1999; Werry 1996). Herring (1999) also reports that in some chat settings participants routinely begin their postings with address terms. In Garcia and Jacobs (1999) we noted that while address terms can be used as a technique to select a specific person to respond, they do not have the effect of constraining who will be the next poster. The nature of the turn-taking system in chat is such that while “future” posters can be designated,

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there is no mechanism for reserving a next slot for a specific poster. Subsequent research has noted that participants in chat can use address terms to minimize the likelihood of confusion if a chat message ends up not being posted adjacent to its intended referent (e.g., Herring 1999; Kitade 2000; Kötter 2002). In our data, chat participants also use address terms to ensure that a post can be understood even if a placement problem occurs. Address terms can be used to select a specific future poster (Garcia and Jacobs 1999) and also retrospectively to indicate to which prior message they are referring, as in Excerpt 6. EXCERPT 6 9 Purple: 10 Lizard: 11 Purple: 12 13 Lizard: 14 Frank Sinatra: 15 16 17 PURPLE: 18 PURPLE:

I THINK THE MASK IS A TYPE OF FRONT FOR EMOTIONS (1:50) THE WAY WE REACT AND COEXIST WITH THE EXTERNAL WORLD (2:39) FOR EXAMPLE WHEN AS PERSON IS UPSET AND MAD, HE MAY HIDE IHIS FEELINGS AND SHOW HAPPINESS FOR EVERYONE (2:42) RIGHT ON (2:56) I THINK THAT IT REFERS TO THE WAYS THAT PEOPLE USE TO HIDE THIER FEELINGS, ESPECIALLY IN THE INCREASINGLY HOSTILE WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE. (3:01A) I AGREE LIZARD, (3:01B) WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK THE SECOND STANZA MEANS (3:32)

When Lizard posts line 10, PURPLE is engaged in typing a long message (line 11) and therefore cannot respond immediately to Lizard’s post. However, after PURPLE posts line 11, she begins to type a response to Lizard (“I AGREE”). While she is working on this message, Lizard posts line 13 (“RIGHT ON”) as a response to line 11. PURPLE then completes and posts her message (“I AGREE LIZARD”) virtually simultaneously with Frank Sinatra’s post in line 14; his is posted first, so hers appears as line 17. Because PURPLE knows that she has posted a lengthy message (line 11) and that others’ posts might intervene between Lizard’s line 10 and her agreement with it, she cannot be sure that her “I AGREE” statement will be understood as agreement with Lizard’s line 10 unless she addresses Lizard by name. PURPLE’s precaution pays off: Frank Sinatra’s post intervenes, yet PURPLE’s use of an address term ensures that the participants know with whom she agrees. However, address terms are not a surefire way of counteracting placement problems. Note that because Lizard says “RIGHT ON” in line 13 (responding to PURPLE’s line 11), participants could mistake PURPLE’s line 17 as a response to line 13 instead of to line 10. 6.4.

Using format tying

In these data participants used format tying (Goodwin and Goodwin 1987) to preempt confusion from possible displacement of messages. Like address terms, format tying does not prevent a placement problem from occurring, but it does re-

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duce the possibility of misunderstandings resulting from potential misplacement (see Excerpt 7). EXCERPT 7 77 Frank Sinatra: 78 79 Lizard: 80 PURPLE: 81 82 Lizard:

BUT IF IT HURTS SO MUCH TO DO SO, WHY WOULD HE PUSH US TO DO SO. (13:29) IS HE PUSHING US? (13:43A) TRUE, SO YOU THINK HE IS MEANING THIS POEM TO INCLUDE EVERYONE (13:43B) YES (13:51)

Lizard has posted several displaced messages throughout the conversation and has tried several methods to prevent displacement of his posts (including composing short or split messages, as seen above). In line 79 he repeats the phrase “PUSHING US” from Frank Sinatra’s line 77. Because Lizard used format tying, his question will be understood as a response to Frank Sinatra’s question, even if it is displaced. Had he written simply “IS HE?”, his post would have been vague enough to cause confusion if another message had intervened. In fact, line 80 is a question to which “IS HE?” would be a reasonable response (and to which Lizard actually responds “YES”). If misplaced, Lizard’s line 79 could have created confusion were it not for format tying.

7.

Discussion and conclusions

Differences in how chat and oral conversation are organized have profound implications for the organization of repair. A fundamental problem for chat participants is, given that messages may be displaced, how do participants locate a message’s referent? If the context is unclear, how can the conversation proceed? The interactional problems regarding repair in chat differ from those in oral conversation because the resources available to participants for avoiding and repairing errors in timing, production, and comprehension of messages differ in the two contexts. The frequency and location of errors in chat occur in part because the chat software does not allow participants to view each other’s message composition boxes and because it controls placement of the messages, such that simultaneous turns are impossible. Therefore, participants have no routine way of knowing where a participant intended to place a displaced message; however, messages may intervene unproblematically between a message and its referent if they will not appear to be possible antecedents to that message. Our analysis has shown that chat participants may have difficulty understanding the meaning of a message and may need to re-read several lines or posts preceding the message in question, and not just the immediately preceding line or post, in order to understand it. Even in conversations in which all participants are

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fluent and skillful in chat, failures of interpretation will occur because the actual sequence of messages (the order in which they are noticed and read) may differ for each participant. Learning to avoid and repair errors in chat involves not only learning to change one’s lens from an oral to a chat perspective, but also learning to negotiate between oral and chat approaches within a single conversation. Hence, our participants’ “errors” or misunderstandings are the products sometimes simply of the nature of chat and its probability of producing displaced messages, sometimes of over-reliance on conventions of oral talk in a non-oral medium, and sometimes of incompatibility of varying approaches across different participants in the conversation. Researchers must therefore keep both interactional frames in mind when analyzing chat conversations. Skilled chat participants understand that lack of complete comprehensibility of the conversation resulting from placement errors is the norm, and they do not seek to understand every message that is displaced. They at times agree to misunderstand each other, not to respond to each other’s questions or repair initiations, not to edit their messages in response to priors, etc., in the interests of keeping up with the flow of the conversation. Accordingly, placement problems in chat are not necessarily errors; they are part of the territory, and participants do not always treat them as troubles in the talk or orient to them as errors. The result is that participants do not always understand one another, but they understand that they will not always understand, and this is intersubjectivity of a sort. They learn to negotiate between oral and chat structures and conventions; they construct and interpret messages as if they refer to priors and search out possible referents if the message is not understandable as referring to a prior. Understanding how the interactional work is done is critical to understanding who says what to whom and what each is reading/understanding. Understanding how repair works is an important part of this process. If one goal in using computer technologies in the classroom is to facilitate collaborative learning (e.g., Kötter 2002), we must begin by understanding how effective those technologies are and how they might be made more effective. Teachers should be aware of the types of communication problems that can occur in chat so that they can help students avoid errors and misunderstandings and help to make chat a more valuable learning tool. Discovering how participants understand chat as it is happening and how errors and misunderstandings can arise may help eliminate some of the problems inherent in those interactions in the classroom, in the workplace, and in personal use by giving participants a more comprehensive understanding of the interactional implications of the technology.

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Notes 1. A large body of research in workplace studies addresses what participants are doing bodily with regard to paper documents, gaze, and movements, and how these are coordinated with communication technology (e.g., Crabtree et al. 2000; Heath et al. 2001; Luff and Heath 2002; Suchman 1987). In this chapter our data are limited to what is on the participants’ computer screens. Since students were aware that they were being studied, the study itself may have affected the types of interactions they had. However, the students were used to having their chat room interactions observed, because the instructors routinely “listened in” on their chat room conversations to make sure that students were on task. If these data were being collected today, screen save programs would have been used instead of video recorders. 2. The data collection process required students to use television monitors instead of computer monitors so that the videotaping equipment could be connected to the computers. Because visual clarity was not as sharp as it is on a computer screen, we asked the research participants to type in capital letters to improve visibility.

References Beißwenger, Michael 2008 Situated chat analysis as a window to the user’s perspective: Aspects of temporal and sequential organization. Language@Internet 5, article 6. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1532 Bosco, Francesca M., Monica Bucciarelli, and Bruno G. Bara 2006 Recognition and repair of communicative failures: A developmental perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1398–1429. Cooke, Maeve 1998 Introduction. In: Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, 1–20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crabtree, Andy, David M. Nichols, Jon O’Brien, Mark Rouncefield, and Michael B. Twidale 2000 Ethnomethodologically informed ethnography and information system design. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51(7): 666– 682. Egbert, Maria 2004 Other-initiated repair and membership categorization – Some conversational events that trigger linguistic and regional membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 1467–1498. Fox, Barbara, Makoto Hayashi, and Robert Jasperson 1996 Resources and repair: A cross-linguistic study of syntax and repair. In: Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Interaction and Grammar, 185–237. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Garcia, Angela Cora and Jennifer Baker Jacobs 1998 The interactional organization of computer mediated communication in the college classroom. Qualitative Sociology 21(3): 299–317.

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Garcia, Angela Cora and Jennifer Baker Jacobs 1999 The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication. Research on Language and Social Interaction 32(4): 337–367. Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Gergle, Darren, David R. Millen, Robert E. Kraut, and Susan R. Fussell 2004 Persistence matters: Making the most of chat in tightly-coupled work. CHI 2004 6(1): 431–438. Golato, Andrea and Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm 2006 Negotiation of face in web chats. Multilingua 25: 293–321. Goodwin, Charles 1995 The negotiation of coherence within conversation. In: Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Talmy Givón (eds.), Coherence in Spontaneous Text, 117–137. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Goodwin, Marjorie Harness and Charles Goodwin 1987 Children’s arguing. In: Susan U. Philips, Susan Steele, and Christine Tanz (eds.), Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative Perspective, 200–248. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen 1998 What is universal pragmatics? In: On the Pragmatics of Communication, 21–103. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heath, Christian, Paul Luff, Hideaki Kuzuoka, Keiichi Yamazaki, and Shinya Oyama 2001 Creating coherent environments for collaboration. In: Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 119–138. Bonn: Kluwer Academic Publications. Heritage, John 1984 Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html Jacobs, Jennifer Baker 1996 All the words that are fit to print: Transcribing computer-mediated communication. Paper presented at the Fifth International Conference on Narrative: Self and Other, Lexington, KY, October 18–20. Jacobs, Jennifer Baker and Angela Cora Garcia 2002 The organization of repair in computer-mediated conversation. Paper presented at the American Sociological Association meetings, Chicago, IL, August 16–19. Jefferson, Gail 1974 Error correction as an interactional resource. Language in Society 2: 181–199. Jepson, Kevin 2005 Conversations – and negotiated interaction – in text and voice chat rooms. Language Learning & Technology 19(3): 79–98. Kitade, Keiko 2000 L2 learners’ discourse and SLA theories in CMC: Collaborative interaction in Internet chat. Computer Assisted Language Learning 13(2): 143–166.

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Kötter, Markus 2002 Tandem Learning on the Internet: Learner Interactions in Virtual Online Environments (MOOs). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Kurhila, Salla 2001 Correction in talk between native and non-native speakers. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1083–1110. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983 Pragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ligorio, M. Beatrice 2001 Integrating communication formats: Synchronous versus asynchronous and text-based versus visual. Computers & Education 37: 103–125. Luff, Paul and Christian Heath 2002 Broadcast talk: Initiating calls through a computer-mediated technology. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35(3): 337–366. Marcoccia, Michel, Hassan Atifi, and Nadia Gauducheau 2008 Text-centered versus multimodal analysis of instant messaging conversation. Language@Internet 5, article 7. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/ 2008/1621 Markman, Kris M. 2009 So what shall we talk about: Openings and closings in chat-based virtual meetings. Journal of Business Communication 46(1): 150–170. Markman, Kris M. 2010 Learning to work virtually: Conversational repair as a resource for norm development in computer-mediated team meetings. In: J. Park and E. Abels (eds.), Interpersonal Relations and Social Patterns in Communication Technologies: Discourse Norms, Language Structures and Cultural Variables, 220–236. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Mason, Marianne 2004 Referential choices and the need for repairs in covertly-taped conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 1139–1156. McKellin, William H., Kimary Shahin, Murray Hodgson, Janet Jamieson, and Kathleen Pichora-Fuller 2007 Pragmatics of conversation and communication in noisy settings. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 2159–2184. Moerman, Michael 1977 The preference for self-correction in a Tai conversational corpus. Language 53(4): 872–882. Negretti, Raffaella 1999 Web-based activities and SLA: A conversation analysis research approach. Language Learning & Technology 3(1): 75–87. Nilsen, Mona and Åsa Mäkitalo 2010 Towards a conversational culture? How participants establish strategies for coordinating chat postings in the context of in-service training. Discourse Studies 12(1): 90–105. Panyametheekul, Siriporn and Susan C. Herring 2003 Gender and turn allocation in a Thai chat room. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 9(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue1/panya_herring.html

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Pomerantz, Anita 1984 Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In: J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, 57–101. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rieger, Caroline L. 2003 Repetitions as self-repair strategies in English and German conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 47–69. Rintel, E. Sean and Jeffery Pittam 1997 Strangers in a strange land: Interaction management on Internet Relay Chat. Human Communication Research 23: 507–534. Rohfeld, Rae Wahl and Roger Hiemstra 1995 Moderating discussions in the electronic classroom. In: Zane L. Berge and Mauri P. Collins (eds.), Computer-Mediated Communication and the Online Classroom: Volume III: Distance Learning, 91–104. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson 1974 A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language 50: 696–735. Schegloff, Emanuel. A. 1968 Sequencing in conversational openings. American Anthropologist 70: 1075–1095. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1987a Between micro and macro: Contexts and other connections. In: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser (eds.), The Micro-Macro Link, 207–234. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1987b Recycled turn beginnings: A precise repair mechanism in conversation’s turntaking organisation. In: Graham Button and John R. E. Lee (eds.), Talk and Social Organisation, 70–85. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Schegloff, Emanuel A. and Harvey Sacks 1973 Opening up closings. Semiotica 7: 289–327. Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks 1977 The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53: 361–382. Schönfeldt, Juliane and Andrea Golato 2003 Repair in chats: A conversation analytic approach. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36(3): 241–284. Sidnell, Jack 2007 Repairing person reference in a small Caribbean community. In: Nick J. Enfield and Tanya Stivers (eds.), Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives, 281–309. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, James 2005 Conversational floors in synchronous text-based CMC discourse. Discourse Studies 7(3): 337–361.

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Suchman, Lucy A. 1987 Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Svennevig, Jan 2008 Trying the easiest solution first in other-initiation of repair. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 333–348. Tan, Seng-Chee and Aik-Ling Tan 2006 Conversational analysis as an analytical tool for face-to-face and online conversations. Educational Media International 43(4): 347–361. Todman, John and Norman Alm 2003 Modeling conversational pragmatics in communication aids. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 523–538. Veerman, Arja L., Jerry E. B. Andriessen, and Gellof Kanselaar 2000 Learning through synchronous electronic discussion. Computers & Education 34(3–4): 269–290. Werry, Christopher C. 1996 Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat. In: Susan C. Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and CrossCultural Perspectives, 47–64. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Zemel, Alan and Murat Cakir 2009 Reading’s work in VMT. In: Gerry Stahl (ed.), Studying Virtual Math Teams, 261–276. New York: Springer Publishing.

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24.

Responses and non-responses in workplace emails Karianne Skovholt and Jan Svennevig

1.

Introduction

Email has become the central communication tool for most office workers. It is the medium in which people carry out their daily professional activities and in which workers and business partners build and maintain professional and interpersonal relations. In this chapter, we examine the implicit norms of responding in workplace emails. More specifically, we investigate how employees in a distributed work group produce email responses, with reference to what is known about giving response in oral conversations. We investigate to which communicative acts participants respond, to which communicative acts they may omit to respond, and to what extent they produce acknowledging receipts. The research reported here was inspired by several pragmatic theories. We draw on speech act theory in order to identify the communicative acts that are responded to vs. those acts that are not responded to. Furthermore, the research was conducted within the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), one of the main objectives of which is to identify how participants in face-to-face conversation accomplish social order by orienting to norms. This research is based on the assumption that users of email, as in oral conversation, orient to some basic interactional norms. It has previously been shown that participants trade on mundane expectancies when communicating via new technologies (Garcia and Jacobs 1998, 1999; Orlikowski and Yates 1994). Likewise, in the present study, it is expected that conversational norms constitute a major source for the establishment of new norms in computer-mediated communication (CMC), a medium that is still in the process of being shaped.

2.

Email responses vs. face-to-face responses

Although email is a written medium, it has certain features that make it comparable to oral conversation.1 First, email is interactive. Its speed and ease of delivery enable the exchange of messages with minimal time lapse. Second, email messages may involve extended interchanges, or threads of messages, organized in turns and sequences. However, an important difference between email and face-to-face conversation is that the interlocutors do not share a common temporal and physical context; that is, while face-to-face conversation is synchronous by nature, email in-

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teraction is asynchronous. Furthermore, the technology of email facilitates multiparty interaction at a distance by enabling copying and forwarding of messages and the distribution of attachments to multiple recipients. Because of its interactive character, email may usefully be characterized with reference to the principles of oral conversation, as described in Conversation Analysis (CA). The notion of textual CMC as conversation has been supported by many CMC scholars (see Herring 2010). Some basic rules for turn-taking in conversation have been observed within the tradition of CA. First, conversational turns transfer between speakers in such a way as to minimize gaps and overlaps (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). Second, non-responses and silence in conversation may signal a forthcoming disagreement or some sort of problem (Pomerantz 1984; Sacks 1987). Non-response is considered an accountable action (Sacks 1992: 4) and an event that may lead co-participants to form a set of inferences about the problem source (Schegloff 1972: 76). The temporal aspect constitutes a fundamental difference between email interaction and oral conversation, and it changes the meaning of many phenomena in oral turn-taking sequences, such as delayed or absent response. In contrast to faceto-face conversation, the meaning of non-occurring or delayed responses in email interaction, and the inferences that can be drawn, are more ambiguous. This chapter is concerned with the circumstances under which participants in email interactions hold each other accountable for non-occurring responses and to what extent meanings of specific conversational features in conversation can be transferred to features in email interaction. Can one, following Sacks (1987) and Pomerantz (1984), assume that a delayed email response in a workplace setting marks a dispreferred response? Or are there other established norms of responding in distributed email groups, depending on the institutional roles of the participants involved and the technological constraints and affordances of the medium?

3.

Previous research on responsiveness in computer-mediated interaction

3.1.

Response latencies

Response patterns in various forms of CMC have been studied in diverse contexts, for instance between customers and organizations (Mattila and Mount 2003; Strauss and Hill 2001), between business partners (Pitkin and Burmeister 2002; Tyler and Tang 2003), in discussion groups on Usenet (Jones, Ravid, and Rafaeli 2004), and in questions and answers on the “Google Answers” website (Rafaeli, Raban, and Ravid 2005). Most of these studies seem to agree that online responses are typically generated within a short period of time. This observation was supported empirically by Kalman, Ravid, Raban, and Rafaeli (2006), who measured

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time latencies in three asynchronous datasets (Enron emails, a university forum, and “Google Answers”). The researchers found that the three user groups showed a similar mathematical distribution of response latencies: At least 80 % of the responses were sent within the average response latency of the group. However, the average response latency varied according to the context: In the Enron dataset it was 28.76 hours, in the university forum 23.52 hours, and in Google Answers only 1.58 hours (Kalman et al. 2006). 3.2.

Turn-taking rules and coherence

Past research on CMC grounded in the tradition of CA includes a number of studies of turn-taking procedures and interactional coherence in text-based conversation (Herring 1999, this volume; Garcia and Jacobs 1999; Rintel, Pittam, and Mulholland 2003; Markman, this volume; Panyametheekul and Herring 2003). By comparing chat interaction with the turn-taking rules of traditional conversation (e.g., Sacks et al. 1974), these scholars have shown that common features of chat include disrupted turn adjacency (Herring 1999), preference for selecting next speaker by addressing him/her explicitly rather than next speaker self-selecting (Panayametheekul and Herring 2003), and the organization of actions through a particular threading strategy (Markman, this volume). Markman’s study also argues that the transition relevance place (TRP), the first place where a speaker can start a new turn, is more nebulous in chat conversation than in traditional conversation. Of special interest for the present study is Markman’s observation that chat posts formulated as questions are more likely to receive responses. Correspondingly, one of the main goals of this study is to examine if messages containing speech acts such as questions and requests receive more responses than purely informative messages. 3.3.

Response norms

The norms of responding in computer-mediated interaction were first examined by Severinson Eklundh (1986), who investigated the communicative potentials of the computer-based COM message system, which was developed by the National Defense Research Institute in Sweden in 1978. It enabled users both to send and receive electronic letters, as well as to participate in “real-time dialogues”. An underlying assumption of Severinson Eklundh’s study was that a great variety of responses in an exchange “is a sign of the potential interactivity of a medium and a high degree of channel presence” (Severinson Eklundh 1986: 48). As a result of her efforts to identify the basic structural differences between computer-mediated dialogue and face-to-face dialogue, she found that electronic dialogue consists of an overall two-part structure and lacks a terminating and evaluating third move (Severinson Eklundh 1986). Thus it is relevant to ask whether the same pattern oc-

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curs in the current data, or whether there might be technological, contextual, or even historical differences between the two data sets. A recurring question in previous research is the significance of delayed or absent replies to messages. One study that explicitly addresses this issue, albeit in SMS interaction, is Laursen (2005), who identified a strong obligation to reply quickly to text messages among Danish adolescents. Drawing on CA, her study found that both requesting and non-requesting text messages received a response, and unanswered messages were treated as deviant cases. Specifically, an unanswered message was interpreted as rudeness, and the recipients were held accountable by being sent reminders (Laursen 2005: 1). Despite the different interactional setting in the present study, a comparison with Laursen’s result is highly relevant, since we wish to know to what extent employees are obliged to reply to emails and whether they hold each other accountable for missing replies. However, it must be taken into account that the institutional context in the present study makes relevant other norms of interaction than those in Laursen’s study. The main function of young people’s SMS interaction is to maintain interpersonal relations, whereas in a workplace setting, the organization’s needs and the participants’ institutional roles are more important. Interactional norms operate according to certain rights and obligations in relation to these roles (Drew and Heritage 1992). Another study that explicitly applies CA concepts to the issue of delayed or absent response is Baym (1996). Drawing on Pomerantz’s (1984) study of agreements and disagreements in conversation, Baym identifies structural features of agreeing and disagreeing messages in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps (r.a.t.s.). She emphasizes that verbal behaviors are shaped by media possibilities and constraints and, moreover, that the ways in which language activities are constructed reflect the contexts in which the discourse is embedded. Therefore, delays in the newsgroup’s interaction are merely “responses to the asynchronous written medium” rather than signals of a dispreferred response (343). Baym (1996) implicitly suggests that electronic interaction establishes other expectations and consequently requires different norms from oral interaction. It follows that one cannot assume that the meaning of specific conversational practices will be transferred directly to CMC (Baym 1996: 319). 3.4.

Response norms in workplace emails

Only a few studies have addressed the norms of responding to organizational emails: Kankaanranta (2005a, b), Murray (1991), Condon and Cˇech (1996), and Tyler and Tang (2003). Kankaanranta (2005a, b) collected 282 email messages from eight employees of the Finnish and Swedish Stora Enso Company, a global paper, packaging, and wood products company. She identified three overall email genres in her corpus of company-internal email, namely the noticeboard, postman, and dialogue genres: “The Dialogue genre is used to exchange information about

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corporate activities, the Postman genre to deliver other documents (attachments) for information and/or comment, and the Noticeboard genre to inform employees about workplace issues” (Kankaanranta 2005a: 45 f., 2005b: 207). Most interesting for the present study is the fact that the different genres were identified on the basis of the type of responses they received – that is, whether or not the message triggered a response. The Noticeboard messages did not typically trigger a verbal response, but they could trigger a non-verbal one, such as changing arrangements because of a delayed flight. The Postman messages either did not request a specific response, or they invited comments and therefore displayed an expectation of a verbal response. The Dialogue messages typically requested a verbal response and consisted of two subtypes: opening and response messages (Kankaanranta 2005b: 209). While Kankaanranta relates the issue of absent response to a specific email genre (the Noticeboard genre), Condon and Cˇech (1996) implicitly relate the issue of missing responses to a prototypical decision-routine that provides a basic structure for the interaction in both oral and computer-mediated modalities. The general decision routine provides a structure of shared understanding and expectations that allows participants to reach consensus without providing a responding move. According to Condon and Cˇech: (…) routines are useful because they make it possible to communicate effectively by reducing the amount of linguistic encoding necessary to express discourse functions (…) This reduction is accomplished by relying on a shared understanding such as discourse routines and, especially, the understanding that functions anticipated in routines do not need to be made explicit in the language. Since agreement is expected following a suggestion, it is often reduced to a minimal encoding, such as ‘OK’, ‘yeah’ or ‘cool’. In contrast, a disagreement would require some additional linguistic form to signal the dispreferred function. Consequently, an absence of any linguistic form at all should signal agreement. (1996: 19)

In the quote above, Condon and Cˇech suggest that an absent response signals agreement. A similar point is made by Murray (1991), who interprets a delayed response in a decision routine as an implicit promise. A promise to comply with a request is often “unmarked” (Murray 1991: 110), i.e., it occurs without linguistic signals. “Often the time delay between the original request and the response is hours or even days. The requestor does not consider this rude or unusual, but interprets the silence as a promise to try to fulfill the request” (Murray 1991: 110). Interesting observations have also been made by Tyler and Tang (2003), who interviewed employees about their perceptions of how they responded to emails and how they formed expectations of their co-participants’ responses to them. The researchers found that email rhythms were based much more on relationships than isolated messages. Furthermore, participants accommodated to the email behaviors of others and mostly favored quick responses, for instance by sending short messages which stated when they intended to provide a full reply.

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With regard to how participants in CMC deal with non-responses, Rintel et al. (2003) investigated ambiguous non-responses on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The researchers found that when dealing with non-responses, participants tried the easier solution first. That is, they reconnected and re-greeted before assuming that there was an interpersonal problem. Condon and Cˇech (1996), Baym (1996), Murray (1991), Tyler and Tang (2003) and Rintel et al. (2003) seem to agree that absent or delayed responses can have different meanings in CMC than in oral conversation. Inspired by their research, in this study we ask whether a missing response to a request in an institutional setting corresponds to an implicit response norm. If so, does the absent response signal agreement? Do participants’ tacit expectations about institutional routines allow them not to respond or give acknowledging receipts in certain cases? There seems to be agreement in some of the previous CMC studies that delayed or absent responses to emails are in some circumstances in accordance with participants’ norms of behavior. Some authors relate this to genre, others to routines. In interaction studies it has been shown that different types of activities and settings make relevant different norms and speech exchange systems (Arminen 2005; Drew and Heritage 1992). We expected this to be the case in CMC as well. It is not necessarily the mediating channel that actualizes the norms of talk. Rather, it is the different activities and speaker roles involved. However, none of the studies reviewed above examined how participants actually respond to email messages or show how missing responses are treated in a distributed work group. There is a need for systematic analysis of email interactions with the aim of explicitly accounting for their interactional norms. In the study described below we attempt to do this, and in order to take account of the interactional context we distinguish between responses that occur after questions and requests, on the one hand, and responses that occur after communicative acts that do not explicitly request a response, on the other. Our research questions can be stated as follows: 1. What are the implicit norms of responding to email questions and requests? a) How and when do participants respond to email requests? b) How do participants attend to absent or delayed responses? 2. What are the implicit norms of responding to non-requesting emails? a) What kinds of non-requesting messages are responded to? b) What kinds of non-requesting messages are not responded to?

Responses and non-responses in workplace email

4.

Data and method

4.1.

Data

595

The data analyzed in this study are emails from members of a distributed project group called “Agenda” in a Norwegian telecommunications company, “Telecom” (henceforth, TCM).2 The email exchanges were gathered from August 2004 to December 2004 and total 491 emails. The messages were collected with assistance from the Agenda members, who during the period continuously forwarded their exchanges to the first author.3 Agenda’s main task was to edit all confirmation letters that were distributed to their customers. The members formulated, revised, and standardized letters and templates, with the purpose of giving all letters a uniform style that communicated in a clear and polite manner to the customers. The group was frequently contacted by various divisions in the company with requests to reformulate their letters. In order to give the letters a unified tone of voice, group members followed a set of guidelines concerning orthography, sentence structure, and style. The project group consisted of 12 members, each representing a team from the different divisions of the company: Telephony: Birgitte Hansen, ADSL: Siri Vogt, Dial-up: Elisabeth Eide, Mobile: Jon Olavsen, Customer Service: Per Olsen, Credit: Lise Larsen, and Invoice: Janne Eia. In addition, Agenda includes text designer Maria Monsen, system operator Geir Johnsen, and an observer and system operator from another division, Tore Strand. The manager of the project group was Line Myhre, who in turn reported to Arvid Lervik, the Information Director of TCM. The senders and recipients of the messages were primarily Agenda members, most of whom were physically located in different departments and even different parts of Norway. They had occasional meetings at the main office, but most of their communication was carried out by email or telephone. The members usually interacted in dyads, sometimes with selected co-members copied in, and seldom addressed the group as a whole. Some members were more active than others – for instance, text designer Maria Monsen, manager Line Myhre, and the system operators Geir Johnsen and Tore Strand – yet all of the members are represented in the data. The members also interacted with external collaborators within and outside TCM, such as employees at the print center “Strålfors” and members of Agenda Business. In addition to the email collection, extensive ethnographic and interview data were collected in order to contextualize group members’ communicative practices. The emails were written originally in Norwegian and were translated into English by the authors. The translations are idiomatic, rather than wordby-word, in order to keep the style as close to the Norwegian original as possible.

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Karianne Skovholt and Jan Svennevig

Method

The study applies the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), which entails that the object of study is the participants’ own procedures and norms for interaction and that the approach used to grasp them is sequential analysis, with claims about individual utterances based on the interpretations made by the co-participants as displayed in their subsequent responses. In order to identify communicative acts performed in the email messages, the study also applies terms from speech act analysis (Searle 1969).4 Studying response-giving involves distinguishing between turns (messages) that make a response conditionally relevant and those that do not. Certain types of utterances create the expectation of a specific type of response and thus constitute a first pair part of an adjacency pair. Sacks and Schegloff’s notions of “conditional relevance” and “accountability” provide a useful resource in order to understand this phenomenon: When one utterance (A) is conditionally relevant on another (S), then the occurrence of S provides for the relevance of the occurrence of A. If A occurs, it occurs (i.e. is produced and heard) as a “responsive to” S, i.e. in a serial or sequenced relation to it; and if it does not occur, its occurrence is an event, i.e. it is not only non-occurring (…), it is absent, or “officially” or “notably” absent. That it is an event can be seen not only from its “noticeability”, but from its use as legitimate and recognizable grounds for a set of inferences (e.g. about the participant who failed to produce it). (Schegloff 1972: 76)

In CA, a conversational norm may become visible in two ways: first, when a conversational feature appears as a structural regularity and second, when a norm is breached in so-called “deviant cases”: Only in cases of breach or anticipated breach may the reflexive features of conduct come to be fleetingly entertained, for on the whole it is in cases of breach that actors may anticipate being held to account for their actions and, as part of this anticipation, contemplate its being held that they could have known and done differently and therefore should have done so. (Heritage 1984: 118)

In the following sections, we aim to uncover what sort of email messages provide for the relevance of a responding message and what sort of response are expected. To do this, we follow the method of searching for structural regularities as well as deviant cases, mainly in the form of accounts and prompts oriented to “noticeably absent” responses. In the data, messages that elicit a response are primarily directives such as questions and requests (Searle 1969). Requests for information (e.g., questions) explicitly ask for a verbal response. Requests for action (such as task assignments) primarily elicit a non-verbal response, but they also create the expectation of a verbal display of acceptance or rejection (Lindström 1999). Requests for information and action may take several forms, such as the following:

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1. Imperatives: “Please send me some old letters”. 2. Interrogatives: “Do you have his signature?” (Conveying “send it to me!”) 3. Declaratives (with a question mark): “You’re coming on Thursday?” As Schegloff (1984) and Clayman and Heritage (2002) have pointed out, there is no one-to-one correspondence between an utterance’s grammatical form and the speech act it accomplishes. Declaratives can function as questions, and interrogatives can accomplish non-questioning actions. Whether an utterance constitutes a question or not depends on the sequential context. An additional feature of the context that is of special relevance here is the institutional activities and identities involved. Certain routinized patterns of action can influence the interpretation of individual utterances (Condon and Cˇech 1996, cited above). The fact that the manager routinely assigns tasks to the project group members will make her messages more prone to being understood as requests than messages from other members. For instance, a task may be assigned by the mere mentioning of the type of work involved, as in the following email message: “Textwork. Deadline is 17 sept”. This implicit formulation of a request presupposes a common understanding of the institutional context, including different communicative rights and obligations related to the group members’ respective professional roles. This implies that we need to look beyond the linguistic form and the sequential context to see whether there are organizational structures and procedures that contribute to determining the function of a certain type of utterance. In this study, every email in the data corpus was transferred into an Excel document, given an identifying number, and categorized as a requesting or a non-requesting message. The requesting messages were divided into requests for action and requests for information. Further, each email was coded with respect to the occurrence vs. non-occurrence of responses, response latencies, reminders, accounts, and receipts. Then, a qualitative analysis of the response messages sought to identify a response pattern with respect to the normative expectations of the interactants, depending on the form of the message, its sequential position, the institutional activity involved, and the participants’ institutional roles.

5.

Responses in workplace emails

The quantitative analysis resulted in two major findings. First, almost half – 47 % (230) – of the total number of messages did not receive a response. Even more surprisingly, 34 % (101) of the requesting messages did not receive a response, as compared to 65 % (129) of the non-requesting messages that did not receive response. Second, the average response latency was found to be 28.01 hours. The quantitative response patterns are presented in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Response patterns in the corpus All response types

Response

No response

All messages

491

261 (53 %)

230 (47 %)

Requesting messages

294

193 (66 %)

101 (34 %)

Request for action

202

118 (58 %)

84 (42 %)

92

75 (82 %)

17 (18 %)

197

68 (35 %)

129 (65 %)

Request for information Non-requesting messages

The qualitative analysis produced two general findings. First, the most common types of exchanges were question/answer sequences and requests-for-action/compliance sequences, or even request-for-action followed by no response or a placeholder. Second, absent responses to questions and requests were followed by reminders from the senders or accounts by the recipients, suggesting that absent responses are treated as noticeably absent. In what follows, we present the norms we have identified in more detail and illustrate our findings with examples from our data. 5.1.

A response is conditionally relevant after questions and requests

The data indicate that questions and requests provide for the relevance of a response in email interaction, just as they do in conversation. Two types of evidence for this norm were found. First (and not surprisingly), the exchange of questions/ requests and responses establishes a regular pattern of interaction in the data. The second type of evidence occurs in deviant cases, i.e., when absent responses are treated as noticeably absent. Email recipients seem to orient to two different practices. First, they may choose to reply with what we consider a placeholder, i.e., an email produced within a short time lapse that acknowledges that a message has been received and estimates when the sender intends to produce a full response. Alternatively, recipients may postpone their response until the requested task is carried out. In what follows, MM’s response is an example of a placeholder message: The system operator (GJ) posted a request for information to the text designer (MM): “I was informed by Arvid that the Director CS is Eirik Heiberg. Have you got his signature? Or shall we still give the case to Per? Regards Geir Johnsen”. GJ’s request (Have you got his signature?) realizes both a question (Have you got his signature?) and a request (Send me the signature, please). Eight hours later, MM replied: “I have got it! I’ll send it Monday morning (Sent it to John while I sent the two others to Line). Maria”. In her message, MM orients first to the question (I have got it) and second to the request (I’ll send it Monday morning). Three days later, Maria finally sent the signature to GJ, linking her message to GJ’s original message: “Here’s Heiberg’s signature. :) Maria”.

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By linking the second reply to GJ’s initiating message, MM establishes sequential coherence and an adjacency relationship between GJ’s request and her accomplishment of it. This reply does not produce a second pair part; rather, it functions as a placeholder that estimates a projected answer. By producing the placeholder, MM displays orientation to two aspects: the need to respond and the obligation to comply with the request. It seems as if she reads GJ’s initial message ([…] “or shall we still give the case to Per?”) as implying doubt or even criticism and produces a quick response to show her willingness to comply with the request, at the same time accounting for a projected delay in this action. The alternative to producing placeholders is to postpone one’s response until the requested task is carried out. A group leader from another department (HF) sent text designer MM the following request: “Hi! Textwork. Deadline is 17. sept”. The text to be improved was attached to the message. HF’s utterance “Textwork” is a request addressed to MM; it refers to a forwarded and appended message from SV which explicitly requests MM to revise a letter. Two weeks later, MM gave her response directly to SV, copying in HF, accomplishing the task by attaching the improved letter: “Here it is. :) Maria”. The interaction between HF and MM has a minimal transactional character. The elliptical form of the request (“Textwork”) lacks a verb indicating what action MM is supposed to take. In addition, no politeness strategies are employed to modulate the strength of the request. Implicit in MM’s role as a text designer is the obligation to improve the company’s letters and an obligation to comply with requests to do so; MM’s response and compliance shows acceptance. This minimal transaction is highly routinized in nature. Additionally, SV does not hold MM accountable for her delayed response, for instance by producing a reminder. In this case, the mentioning of a deadline may provide for the legitimacy of not responding until the date indicated. The second type of evidence for the response norm occurs in deviant cases. When questions and requests are not followed by any response, the Agenda members treat the missing response as noticeably absent. As we will see, the senders post a reminder to the recipients, while the recipients on their side produce an account in their delayed reply. In one email BH requests MM to edit some texts: “Enclosed you’ll find a link to the letters for differentiated subscription. The release date for the new subscriptions is Nov. 8th. You should edit them in order to improve the language”. This directive is formulated with deontic modality, strongly committing MM to the requested action (“You should edit them in order to improve the language”/“Du må gå igjennom for språklig forbedring”). One week later, not having received any response from MM, BH appends her original message to the following reminder: “Hi Maria! What’s the status here? If you want I can sit down with you and we can look at it together. Regards Birgitte:-)” By referring to the appended message, BH indirectly re-actualizes her request, reminding MM that she has not yet complied with the request. The question

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(“What’s the status here?”) seems to make relevant an account for not accomplishing the task. Additionally, the offer of sitting down with MM can be interpreted as a way of dealing with a problem. It implies that the task has not been completed and that the recipient may be having trouble with it. In short, by sending MM a reminder, BH treats MM’s absent response as reportable. BH holds MM accountable for the missing reply, and the appended mail functions as evidence for the missing response. Twenty minutes later, MM responds with the following message: “I have moved my Tuesday-Agenda-day to tomorrow […] so I am going to look at this tomorrow. […]. I hope that’s all right – because I’m soooo stressed this week, […]. I had a sick child Thursday last week, and when he recovered Friday I discovered that he had got lice – and then I spent the day eradicating them. That’s why I haven’t looked at this yet. Best regards, Maria”. In her reply, MM produces a narrative account that explains why she has not complied with BH’s request. This lengthy account displays an orientation to the normative expectation of complying with requests without delay or alternatively, of sending a placeholder response. To sum up, email resembles conversation in that requests provide for the conditional relevance of a response in the form of a granting or rejection. In the case of questions, there seems to be a tolerance for delay ranging up to some days. In requests for action, the tolerance for delay seems greater, especially if the requested action is extensive. Support for this is suggested by the quantitative results, which show that 18 % (17) of the requests for information lacked response, compared with 42 % (84) of the requests for action. However, a practice is available for preempting negative inferences from missing responses, namely placeholder messages signaling compliance and committing to a future granting of the request. This seems to be a practice that has developed to deal with expectations based on the meaning of silence that are transferred from oral conversation to the email medium. More important, the strong orientation to a norm of complying with requests in a workplace setting, as in this study, must be seen in light of the participants’ institutional roles. MM’s role as text designer allows her colleagues to make requests of her, on the one hand, and on the other hand it obliges her to comply with their requests. 5.2.

Invitations for comments and corrections

Invitations to correct or comment on what is proposed in a message constitute one class of systematic exceptions to the norm of conditional relevance of answers. In these cases, the original message performs two actions simultaneously: It presents information or makes a proposal, and furthermore it asks the recipients to comment on it. In these cases, the norm seems to be that addressees should respond if they have suggestions to make, and if not, they need not respond. In such cases, silence means acceptance.

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In one message, the system administrator (TS) informs the Agenda group that a photo of group members (which was taken during the previous meeting) has been published on their homepage: “Hi everybody, now the picture is published on the Agenda page. I hope I chose the right picture out of the 3 I received from Line. Should I make any changes? Tore”. In this example, TS performs three separate speech acts. First, he informs the group that the photo has been published; furthermore, he indirectly requests LM to confirm that he has published the right photo. Finally, he interrogatively requests the Agenda members to report if he should make changes. Interestingly, no one responds to this request. The fact that the message includes multiple speech acts makes it possible for the recipients to ignore the request and to merely attend to the informing part. The request invites suggestions for changes and provides a possibility of not responding if one does not have a suggestion to make. In such cases, then, non-response seems to be acceptable after a request and carries the meaning that one has nothing to report. In the next example, TS responds to a message from MM in which she sent him an attached file and (indirectly) requested him to publish it on the Agenda homepage: “For our pages on the intranet. :) Maria”. One hour later, TS responds to MM, adding the Agenda leader LM to the address field: “Is this okay on [reference to website]? Best regards, Tore”. TS’s message above primarily informs MM and LM that the new letter template has been published. However, his utterance is interrogatively designed as a request for approval by MM and LM. As in his previous message, he gets no response, and he seems to treat the silence as approval. The participants appear to adhere to a norm which allows them to remain silent if they approve a proposal and to respond only if they disapprove or have corrections to make. Our main explanation for this pattern of non-response is the multifunctionality of the initiating message – the fact that it informs and invites comments simultaneously. However, this also seems to be a pattern that is more common in emails sent to multiple recipients than in messages to individuals. Addressing a larger group seems to contribute to making it less relevant for the recipients to reply, unless one has a substantial contribution to make. 5.3.

Responses to non-requesting emails

Non-requesting email messages do not require a response, but they are nonetheless frequently responded to. As indicated in Table 1 above, 35 % (68) of the non-requesting messages received a response. In our data, non-requesting messages involve actions such as sending attachments (primarily edited letters) or informing about institutional activities. The analysis shows that responses to informing messages are not normatively expectable but rather volunteered. In the following message, the Agenda leader (LM) informs her group of an article in Telecom’s news

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bulletin in which the Information Director BK underscores the importance of Agenda’s work. In addition, she congratulates her group on their good work: “Hi all participants in Agenda! Read the info from Bente this month and read it thoroughly because we in Agenda are mentioned!!! Congratulations on the good work and keep it up, we have attention from the top. rgds Line”. In traditional face-to-face conversation, compliments are followed by receipts of various sorts (Pomerantz 1978). However, no one responds to LM’s email above. Contextual factors such as multiple addressees may explain the missing response. In the data, other instances of informing messages sent to multiple recipients show a similar pattern of absent response. On October 28th 2004 at 09:40, LM informs the Information Director AL of the progress of an issue by writing an FYI (For Your Information) and appending an email thread: “FYI, Geir will follow this up further! rgds Line”. FYI messages constitute one of the main categories of informing messages; another category is messages that are sent to in-copied recipients (Skovholt and Svennevig 2006). Purely informing messages thus seldom receive responses, and the lack of response is not treated as problematic or deviant, i.e., followed by reminders or accounts. From this observation we conclude that informing messages do not require a response. However, our data show that in certain circumstances non-requesting messages do receive responses. The responses to such messages include such types of actions as reminders, accounts, receipts, and placeholder messages (see Table 2). The practice of sending reminders and accounts has been commented on above, but here we examine a bit more closely the use of receipts. Interestingly, 20 non-requesting messages receive acknowledging receipts. In the responses that occur, the time lapses are short and the messages typically show other signs of social presence associated with oral interaction (cf. Grønning 2006). Table 2.

Responses to non-requesting emails

Response Type

Frequency

Reminders

16 (24 %)

Accounts

8(12 %)

Receipts

20 (29 %)

Placeholders

4 (6 %)

Other

20 (29 %)

Total

68 (100 %)

Responses to non-requesting emails occur, for instance, when recipients link a new message to a previous email (as a means of inserting the recipient’s address in the address field) or when they produce acknowledging receipts and repairs. A

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reply message is not always only a response to a previous message; rather, the sender may use the reply function to initiate a new and unrelated message. TS posted a purely informative message to his leader LM: “Copy to you Line”. Four days later, LM replied with a copy to the Information Manager: “Thanks for your info, Tore. Nice to know how AGB is organized. The pictures of AGP are coming, I’m going to send them over this evening. rgds Line”. Here LM performs two actions. She thanks TS for the information he provided, and she informs (or promises) him that she is going to send over some pictures of Agenda, which he, as system administrator, is responsible for publishing on Agenda’s homepage. These actions are not internally coherent but correspond rather to two unrelated institutional activities. The message was sent four days after the initial message, using the reply function in the mail program. As a result, the “subject” heading was inherited from the previous exchange and was not relevant to the issue of informing about the status of the picture. The thanking may thus be a way of linking back to the heading and to the participants’ previous history of interaction rather than being a relevant action in itself. Although informing messages do not require a response, they may be treated as actions that make a specific type of response relevant. By thanking TS, LM treats the prior message as an offer of a service and thus makes it response-worthy. Non-requesting messages are also responded to by appraisals and supportive statements. Typical instances are supportive responses from leaders. In the next example, TS replies to a message from one of the employees in Customer Services concerning a customer complaint. The request for help was originally addressed to LM, but since she was not available on the day in question, it was forwarded to Agenda’s mailbox and handled by TS. TS copied in LM in his reply: “Hi! We in Telecom have no control over how another sales department has treated this transaction! Unfortunately it will most likely be difficult to have full control of how other sales departments treat transactions. We in Telecom have clear routines for how the letters from the customer shall be treated. See presentation”. Three days later, LM responded to TS: “Great support, Tore, you are very organized and a great reply to Erik! rgds Line”. In contrast to her previous message to TS above (“thanks for the info”), LM does not elaborate on TS’s message or introduce a new activity. Rather, it is a purely responsive message providing positive evaluation and acknowledgement. This is also a volunteered response, occasioned but not made conditionally relevant by the previous message. In the data it is typically superiors who give acknowledging and supportive receipts to non-requesting messages. In one message, LM informs AL of the halt in progression in Agenda: “Hi Arvid! Refer to mail below concerning new participant from Dial-up. In addition I want to inform you that I was a little bit strict on the prior Agenda meeting in cases where I don’t think the work has made any progress. The templates were not finished – I’ll contact you for a chat. rgds Line”. Twenty-one minutes later, AL responds: “Ok. Progress is especially important here! Arvid”.

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AL first acknowledges receipt of LM’s message (“Ok”) and then goes on to signal support of LM’s line of action. The use of an intensifier (“especially”) and an exclamation mark reinforces his display of agreement. The primary role of this response is to acknowledge the information and align with LM’s position. This type of evaluating response from managers enacts the institutional role of a person with the right and obligation to evaluate the performance of his or her employees. Participants also respond to non-requesting messages to check their understanding of or make corrections to the previous mail. Text designer MM receives a copy of LM’s mail to EE: “Welcome to AgendaPrivate, Elisabeth. I’ll invite you to a new meeting with only the two of us, to brief you about your work :-) rgds Lise”. Fifteen minutes later MM responds: “Since you’re sending me a copy – is Elisabeth going to work with text? I have heard that she works with Internet today. Hope you have had a nice week-end! :) Maria”. In the original message, MM is a secondary recipient (Skovholt and Svennevig 2006) and is not addressed explicitly in the address heading. In her response to LM, MM shows that the very fact that she has been copied in gives rise to inferences about relevance, in this case the hypothesis that EE will be working with text, like herself. MM’s question serves to initiate repair, i.e., to check her understanding of LM’s message. (On the topic of repair, see also the chapter by Jacobs and Garcia, this volume.) In sum, we found that participants hold each other accountable for non-responses to questions and requests. However, for a certain class of messages that are primarily informative and only secondarily requestive, a response is only conditionally relevant if the recipients have corrections or comments to make. Also, we found that responses to non-requesting messages are not conditionally relevant but are occasionally volunteered as more interpersonally oriented responses, e.g., to provide positive evaluations, appraisal, and support.

6.

The function of non-responses in email interaction

In email interaction, a missing response can potentially be due to several types of trouble sources. It can be caused by a technical problem or by a content problem, for instance if the recipients have problems understanding the message. Alternatively, the trouble source can sometimes be traced to the time and space restrictions of email. As Tyler and Tang (2003) observed, senders often perceive an absent response as an indication that the recipient is overwhelmed by email. The trouble source could also be considered a relational problem, for instance that the receiver does not consider the sender important enough to deserve an answer. The inferences that senders actually draw from absent responses can not be analyzed empirically by text analysis. However, we may describe the ways participants display their perceptions of missing response through their subsequent ac-

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tions – for example, how sender and receiver collaboratively construe and identify the trouble source in reminders and accounts. Which trouble sources do they address and what kinds of accounts are provided? The reminders sometimes provide a potential explanation for the problem and present it as something beyond the recipient’s control (MM to LH: “I hope you enjoy the summer, and – if you are not on holiday – that you as quickly as possible can conjure up a reply to the mail below. I guess that it has drowned in your holiday mail”). The senders produce reminders with hedges that make the request appear indirect and unobtrusive (GJ to AL: “I wonder if you could find the signatures”). The reminders may be based on the assumption that the recipient has already provided the requested information or carried out the work (JE to BS: “Was there a solution to this?”). Interestingly, the reminders may also construe the problem as rooted in the sender’s own insufficiency (AF to GO: “Now I’m really nagging, but […]”; LM to KB: “Did you get assistance from Tor on this case? Greetings from she who collects old mails”). Accounts from the recipients generally present the problem as time management (MM to LM: “Sorry for this late answer – it is rather hectic nowadays”. GO to AF: “I will do the check Friday this week, other issues have turned up which made me put this on ice for a while […]”. KB to LM: “No, I had forgotten that […]”). The accounts may also be presented as simple apologies (LH to MM: “Sorry, I will come back to you by next Monday”). There are eight instances of accounts in total in the corpus. By treating the trouble sources as systemically occasioned (such as by vacation or a hectic work situation), the participants display that an absent or delayed response is not the result of a relational problem. This observation may suggest that missing responses have other functions in email interaction than they do in faceto-face interaction. It also supports Pomerantz’s (1984) and Rintel et al.’s (2003) finding: Participants try the easier solution first, for example by looking for institutional or technical reasons before they assume that there is an interpersonal problem.

7.

Conclusion

The study presented in this chapter shows that email resembles conversation as regards response and non-response, in that there is a norm that requests and questions should in general be followed by responses. However, there are situations in email where a response to a question or request is not necessarily conditionally relevant, in contrast to conversational norms. This indicates that the participants have developed alternative norms for email interaction. Our analysis identified three general interactional norms:

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1) A response is conditionally relevant after questions and requests. 2) Requests for comments and corrections to a proposal make conditionally relevant only the requested types of responses. Non-response signals acceptance of the proposal. 3) A response to non-requesting messages is not conditionally relevant but may be volunteered as an acknowledging receipt or repair. The first norm is that questions and requests should normatively receive a response. Absent responses are likely to be followed by reminders from the requesters or by accounts and excuses from the recipients. In the case of questions, there seems to be a tolerance for delay ranging up to several days. In requests for action, the tolerance for delay appears to be greater, especially if the requested action is elaborate. In cases where a request cannot be granted immediately, the participants either wait until the task can be carried out to respond, or they send a “placeholder message”, i.e., a message that signals compliance and commits to a future granting of the request. The practice of sending placeholder messages is oriented towards preempting negative inferences from absent responses. This practice seems to have developed to deal with the potential negative implications of silence derived from conversational interaction. These findings are consistent with Tyler and Tang’s (2003) interviews, which revealed that participants often sent short responses to state when they intended to provide a fuller response. The second norm comprises a class of exceptions to the norm of responding to requests. When email messages contain invitations to correct or comment on proposals, they perform two actions simultaneously: They present information to the addressee, and they simultaneously request comments or corrections to the proposal. In these cases, a response is conditionally relevant only if the recipients disapprove, disagree, or have corrections to make. This norm may explain why a surprising 34 % of the requesting messages did not receive a response. Not responding to requests violates traditional norms of adjacency pairs: A first-pair part generally should be responded to by a second-pair part. However, in workplace meetings or classroom interaction, silence means that one has nothing to report, and it is not treated as problematic. Rather, silence conventionally may be understood as conveying acceptance and agreement, consistent with the findings of Murray (1991) and Condon and Cˇech (1996). The third norm we identified shows that non-requesting email messages, e.g., attachments, FYI messages, and in-copied messages, do not require a response. Neither do first-pair parts that do not request information or action beyond a simple acknowledgement, e.g., congratulations and compliments. The lack of response in these instances was not treated as problematic or deviant by participants in this study. This pattern is inconsistent with traditional adjacency pair norms in oral conversation, where congratulations and compliments typically receive thanks.

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A category of email messages that is typically not followed by a response is informing messages sent to multiple recipients. This category corresponds to Kankaanranta’s (2005a, b) “Notice board” genre, which represents messages that do not trigger a response. Even if purely informing messages do not require a response, the technology makes response possible, so that an informing message may turn into a conversational thread. Non-requesting messages do not make a response conditionally relevant, but they are occasionally responded to nonetheless by minimal acknowledgments and receipts. However, these minimal responses occur far less often than in conversation. The main class of minimal responses involves assessments and other forms of “positive evaluations” from superiors. Typically, these messages occur when interaction takes place with just a small time lapse or when other signs of social presence are evident. The observations above contrast with the findings of Severinson Eklundh (1986). Whereas the COM dialogues revealed a two-part structure and lacked a terminating and evaluating third move, participants in the current study to a certain extent produced minimal responses in third position. One possible explanation could be that dialogue has developed significantly and become more common since email was first introduced as a working tool. Participants draw on various contextual cues to interpret an absent or delayed response in email interaction. In addition to the three response norms summarized above, our analysis of reminders and accounts shows that participants oriented to the institutional context and the asynchronicity of the medium when they followed up on absent responses. Their reminders and accounts construed the problem source as systemic (e.g., the recipient was on vacation or overloaded with email) rather than as interpersonally occasioned (as a sign of disagreement or a potential conflict). The practice of sending reminders and accounts indicates that missing responses are treated differently from and have other functions in email interaction than silence does in face-to-face conversation. Email messages are complex utterances that often include multiple speech acts. In contrast to face-to-face conversation, the asynchronicity of email interaction influences participants’ expectations of responses and imposes other premises for how participants coordinate their actions. In email interaction, traditional adjacency pairs are modified and adapted to fit the asynchronous context. There is great variation in patterns of response that are not normatively regulated, such as whether or not to respond to a non-requesting message and when to respond to a requesting message. The contextual factors that seem to be most relevant for explaining such variation in organizational settings are the number of addressees and their relative institutional roles. In addition, there is great idiosyncratic variation, symptomatic of a system of interaction that is not (yet) strongly codified. This variation may be exploited pragmatically to signal interpersonal relations, and high responsiveness may be used to display involvement and intimacy.

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Acknowledgements We would like to thank Susan Herring and Arja Piirainen-Marsh for their helpful comments.

Notes 1. For more on the hybrid nature of CMC language, see Skovholt and Svennevig (2006) and Skovholt (2009). 2. All names of companies and employees have been replaced by pseudonyms. 3. Depending on the employees to forward their emails is a possible error source for a study of responses, in that certain short acknowledging messages may have been deemed unimportant and thus not forwarded, or they may have been forgotten. In cases where we had doubts whether all messages in a thread had been forwarded, we contacted certain members with a request to check their inboxes. 4. For more on the application of CA and speech act analysis, see Skovholt (2009).

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25.

Small talk, politeness, and email communication in the workplace Amelie Hössjer

1.

Introduction

Social small talk or relational-oriented interaction, otherwise known as “phatic communion” (Malinowski 1923), has been found to play an important role in work contexts. Research has shown that this kind of interaction in corridors, close to copy machines, etc., where individuals take time to talk about themes that are extrinsic to work helps to encourage a social sense of togetherness (Eelen 2001; Holmes and Schnurr 2005; Mills 2003; Watts 1992, 2003; Wierzbicka 1999). However, the external conditions for professional communication in modern society may vary considerably as a result of technical developments. On the one hand, colleagues who are co-located may choose among different communication alternatives. They may communicate face-to-face or interact in mediated form: via stationary or mobile phones, via internal post, paper notes, or digitally via home pages, email, etc. On the other hand, professionals at a distance may communicate mainly using one medium for their interaction. A discussion of small talk in work settings thus needs to take into consideration what the external situation means for how interaction is carried out and how a sense of togetherness is created under various external work conditions. This chapter discusses how work-related email messages are constructed in relation to an external context, with linguistic politeness theory as an interpretative lens. The main focus is on how small talk, in connection with politeness, is used to create a work climate that encourages cooperation under various external conditions. From this perspective I will advocate the need for further elaborated concepts within politeness theory in relation to media use and the context in which the interaction takes place. The discussion is based on a case study of work-related email messages from two editorial contexts. The main focus is on email messages in a Swedish print journal where email represents the primary form of communication and is part of a digitally-based work community. Discussions about marketing, planning of issues, following up contacts with advertisers, and decisions and questions regarding manuscripts are all dealt with through email. This type of digital communication is juxtaposed with the kind of email communication that takes place at a traditional Swedish news office. At the news office, email communication is part of a physically-based community and is realized in interaction with other communication alternatives whose mutual relations I examined in an earlier study (Hössjer 2002, 2006; Hössjer and Severinson Eklundh 2005, 2009).

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It will be shown that dedicated behaviors developed among the correspondents in both settings, and that the external context plays a central role as regards the social and pragmatic dimensions of email communication. To be sure, the different sets of data that underlie the discussion were not gathered under fully comparable circumstances, but there are important parallels regarding the work processes that make the character of the messages in the two settings interesting to compare in terms of the face work that they do. Small talk as a type of politeness has primarily been investigated in face-to-face situations, yet it can be seen as highly relevant as well to the elucidation of communicative structures that develop in digital contexts – not least in light of the problems and conflicts that sometimes arise among email writers.

2.

Background: Email and politeness

Email has been characterized as a lean medium (Daft and Lengel 1984), meaning that it does not allow immediate feedback or the use of subtle signals for interpretation normally conveyed non-verbally in spoken communication via tone of voice and facial expression. The lack of such interpretive cues has been seen as restricting the kinds of communication that can take place via email (for overviews, see Abdullah 2006; Bunz and Campbell 2004; Panteli and Seely 2006; Waldvogel 2007). Important information, it is claimed, is lost regarding what is said and how it should be perceived, which in turn increases the risk of misunderstanding and conflict. The use of so-called “flaming” – passages where people become enraged for little apparent reason and exchange incensed comments – has been observed in various studies (for an overview, see Turnage 2007; for a case study of flaming, see Danet, this volume) and taken as evidence that the medium is not especially wellsuited to sensitive subjects of conversation. This view has been questioned to an increasing extent, however. A number of studies have attempted to explain how a “lean” medium such as email can nonetheless produce rich information (Panteli 2002; Waldvogel 2001). Researchers have demonstrated how people in using computer-mediated communication (CMC) tend to develop informal codes, referred to as “emotext” by Persichitte, Young, and Tharp (1997: 280), in order to compensate for the lack of non-verbal cues and make typed CMC more expressive and/or speech-like (Baldauf and Stair 2008). These informal codes include grammatical markers, strategic capitalization, lexical surrogates, and intentional misspelling (e.g., thaaaaaank youuuuuu), as well as emoticons, which are claimed to substitute for facial expression (Bieswanger, this volume; Derks, Bos, and Grumbkow 2008; Derks, Fisher, and Bos 2008; but cf. Dresner and Herring 2010). Email can also be socially rich, including the use of politeness. Several studies have shown how individuals in email use apologies, indirectness, inclusive forms

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(“we”, “you”), and greetings and closings in order to create a good work climate (Job-Sluder and Barab 2004; Kankaanranta 2005; Kaul and Kulkarni 2005; Morand and Ocker 2003; Waldvogel 2007). It has also been discussed how this kind of behavior in email relates to spoken interaction (Boneva, Kraut, and Frohlich 2001; Zack 1993) and other forms of mediated communication (Watts 2007); how the interaction is affected by various pragmatic parameters: content of the message (Biesenbach-Lucas 2005), the stylistic level used by the writers (Bunz and Campbell 2004), and the relative status of the interlocutors (Biesenbach-Lucas 2007, 2005; Chen 2006, 2001; Rogers and Lee-Wong 2003; Sherblom 1988; Skovholt and Svennevig 2006); and how politeness work differs between individuals communicating in their native language and in a second language (Biesenbach-Lucas 2005, 2007; Chen 2001, 2006). Studies of politeness in email have also drawn attention to different first language/cultural backgrounds of the interlocutors (BiesenbachLucas and Weasenforth 2000; Murphy and Levy 2006). Other studies have targeted reactions to messages that are perceived as more polite or less polite (Duthler 2006; Jessmer and Anderson 2001). Still others discuss gender differences in how politeness is performed (Boneva, Kraut, and Frohlich 2001; Herring 1994; Oliveira 2007), with “email” broadly defined to include postings to asynchronous message forums as well as one-to-one communication. While impressive, this body of research on politeness in email communication has tended to leave the actual situation out of substantial consideration by not examining email interaction in close relation to the external contexts in which it occurs. Studies based on more situationally grounded analysis do exist, however. For example, Skovholt (2009) examined how leadership was linguistically accomplished in a Norwegian distributed work group in the leader’s day-to-day email interaction. The study showed how the leader invited group identification by giving the group positively loaded nicknames, using different kind of narrating devices, and providing receipts and supportive acknowledgments. Waldvogel (2007) studied a manufacturing plant and found that use of greetings and closings in email messages reflected and constructed open and positive relationships between staff and management and a direct, friendly, and familial workplace culture. In these studies, rhetorical and politeness strategies were found to play an important role in constructing workplace familarity. These strategies were not explicitly related to the concept of small talk, however. Moreover, although relational content in CMC has been studied in relation to issues of media choice (e.g, Johnson et al. 2008; Utz 2007) and self-disclosure (e.g, Joinson 2001; McKenna, Green, and Gleason 2002) in the context of maintaining and creating friendships, such research has not made an explicit link to small talk. Such a link is needed, in that small talk can facilitate understanding of how a positive climate is created under varying contextual conditions. Small talk is used here with linguistic politeness theory as an interpretative platform, with the aim to deepen such an understanding.

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3.

Politeness theory and some basic conditions for the analysis

3.1.

Politeness theory

Linguistic politeness theory emerged as part of the growing field of pragmatics in the 1970s. The theory achieved its definitive breakthrough with the publication of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use ([1978] 1987). The extensive research now available on politeness comprises divergent perspectives on the concept and its empirical applications (for overviews, see Bargiela-Chiappini 2003; Eelen 2001; Goldsmith 2006; Watts 2003; Watts, Ide, and Ehlich 2005, cf. also Fraser 1990). Central to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model is the notion of social face, an emotional investment that can be sustained, lost, or strengthened and that requires continuous maintenance in ongoing interaction. Social face has two aspects: the wish of the individual to assert his or her own territory (negative face) and the wish to be approved in certain respects (positive face). According to Brown and Levinson, rational actors seek to avoid whatever might threaten the social face of their interlocutor, or so-called face-threatening acts (FTAs). FTAs include acts of criticizing, interrupting, asking a favor, and requesting information. These potentially face-threatening utterances can be mitigated in various ways through the use of two types of so-called politeness strategies. Individuals may actively draw attention to their interlocutor, using forms of address, pleas, compliments, and such types of acts, or they may pull back, thus granting their interlocutor scope and freedom. The former strategy is positive politeness, the latter negative politeness. While Brown and Levinson’s model has been highly influential, it has also been criticized. The chief objections are that the model is constructed around isolated speech acts and that the authors ignore the wider linguistic context. Politeness strategies in which speakers use various means to manage the social conversational climate tend to be interpreted in universal terms regarding what the intention was behind one utterance or another, with the focus on the speaker (Eelen 2001). It has been claimed that it is difficult for an outside observer to know what lies behind what is said or written on the basis of the acts that various utterances represent in isolated conversations (Schegloff 1988) or, as here, in email discourse (cf. Murphy and Levy 2006). It has been alleged that it is difficult even for the individuals involved to specify their exact motives for what was said (Mills 2003: 45). Various researchers have pointed to the crucial importance of context for the interpretation of pragmatic meaning (Fukushima 2004; Matsumoto 1988; Terkourafi 2001). Several scholars have also advocated a more sophisticated conceptualization of face in cultural settings (Gu 1990; Hatipo˘glu 2007; Hernández-Flores 2004; Hongladarom and Hongladarom 2005; de Kadt 1998) that takes into account contextual parameters such as gender, genre, position of the interlocutors, profes-

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sional identities, and the purpose and type of medium in which the interaction is carried out (Danet and Herring 2003; Herring 2007). Politeness is described as “relational work” (Holmes and Schnurr 2005) – a relational practice (Fletcher 1999) that creates a special logical, interactive, context-bound efficiency that finds its meaning in the social commonality in which the interaction takes place (for overviews, see Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 2006; Eelen 2001; Holmes and Schnurr 2005). What needs to be further specified, though, is how such commonalities are related to the use of various media – an important reality in everyday work life in modern societies – and how this usage is connected to the flow of interaction of which email messages form a part. This is addressed in this chapter. First, however, the following section explains the relationship between small talk and the concept of politeness. 3.2.

Basic assumptions underlying the analysis: Small talk, politeness, and communities of practice

The account developed in this chapter is based on an approach that situates politeness across a broad spectrum of social behaviors. These behaviors include small talk as a form of linguistic politeness (Hermández-Flores 2004). Small talk is considered to be an example of positively polite talk that is not necessarily tied to FTAs (Hernández-Flores 2004; Holmes 2000; Koutlaki 2002; Mullany 2006). Rather, small talk involves more generally face-boosting acts through which individuals build solidarity and establish a positive attitude by commenting on social content, sharing anecdotes, etc. Applying a view based on behaviors observed in a group’s interaction rather than on the intentions of the interlocutors, Bayraktaro˘glu (1991: 15) writes of two types of acts affecting face value. The first type is FTAs, whose definition Bayraktaro˘glu borrows from Brown and Levinson (1987). The second is face-boosting acts, or FBAs, by which is meant acts that satisfy rather than threaten the face wants of the addressee and that are related to negative and positive politeness, as described above. In connection with the concepts of small talk and FBAs, I distinguish two types of small talk. First there is small talk functioning as general FBAs that are not tied to FTAs. People make self-references and describe the little annoyances of the day, telling jokes, etc., thereby establishing a generally positive attitude in a situation. Second, there is small talk in which such descriptions have a closer connection with FTAs, for example, functioning as excuses that mitigate FTAs. In explaining why something has not been done, for example, such stories act as justifications that boost the addressee’s face in a situation tied to an FTA. The analysis presented in this chapter is based on these two forms of politeness. A basic concern in the study is the relationship of politeness to the communality in which email communication is realized. The interaction is seen as a joint con-

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struction formed by the turns the correspondents produce in the ongoing exchange of messages, where the meaning of various language acts (including general FBAs and mitigating FBAs) is interpreted based on the definitions that the involved parties ascribe to them through their behavior. This behavior is seen as something socially shared in relation to the context the group represents and the norms developed there for what is acceptable communicative behavior, rather than simply as the product of individual interlocutors (Mills 2002: 69). On this basis I use the concept of “community of practice”, defined as “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour” (Eckert and McConell-Ginet 1992: 464). Politeness is seen “as a set of practices or strategies which communities of practice develop, affirm, and contest” (Mills 2003: 9), and such communities have their own norms for what constitutes politeness (Mullany 2006). I distinguish two basic conditions for how interaction within communities of practice is connected to the external context. On the one hand, there are physicallybased communities of practice, where the interlocutors share an external physical setting. The members may be co-located in the same building and may actively choose among various communication alternatives, such as face-to-face interaction, email, and SMS. Norms (including politeness norms) will potentially be elaborated for use of a certain communication alternative as opposed to another, based on the socially-shared meanings ascribed to the two alternatives (cf. Kim, Kim, Park, and Rice 2007; Murray 1988). On the other hand, there are digitally-based communities of practice, where the interlocutors are geographically remote. That which in a physically-based community of practice may be communicated through various media will in a digitally-based community of practice typically (although not necessarily) be realized through one medium: email, a chat room, etc. Norms (including politeness norms) will develop through dealing with various content within that single medium, and certain strategies will be used in order to further common undertakings. Using these concepts (physically-based community of practice and digitallybased community of practice) entails two consequences for the analysis. First, the focus is on understanding the use of politeness in each analyzed setting in relation to the external conditions surrounding the use of email. In providing contextual information, I distinguish not only what kinds of content, genres, and exchange patterns are used in messages from different interlocutors but, more fundamentally, how these patterns relate to the occurrence of communication face-to-face and via other media during the ongoing email interaction. Second, the study concentrates on broad structures in the groups studied, rather than on individual differences between particular correspondents. The overarching issues of interest are to what extent small talk is employed, where this kind of discourse appears in the messages, and how it relates to complications that risk threatening the addressee’s face – in other words, how small talk is used independent of and in connection with FTAs, as general FBAs and mitigating FBAs.

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From this perspective I compare email messages from a physically-based community of practice and a digitally-based community of practice, even though there are certain differences between them in the study design and conditions tied to editorial production. Nevertheless, the orientation of the email messages in the different communities of practice toward work, including discussions about the same kinds of subjects, the messages’ connection with similar activities (editorial work, production of news texts), similar time frames (time pressure, albeit for different reasons), and the actors’ similar types of relationships (co-workers) means that important parallels obtain regarding work processes, making the character of the messages concerning social face work in the two settings interesting to compare. Studies that have been done on the significance of the work environment for editorial work also support the view that differences in time frames count more than those tied to newspaper products per se (newspaper content, degree of specialization, distribution across larger or smaller regions) as regards the types of collaboration and interaction that arise in editorial office settings (Löfgren Nilsson 1999; Oestreicher 2000).

4.

Data and method

The case study is based on two corpora. The primary focus is on a corpus from the digitally-based community of practice: a Swedish print journal where most of the work is carried out via email. The second corpus is from the physically-based community of practice, a larger Swedish print newspaper office. Each of these is described further below. 4.1.

Digitally-based corpus

The digitally-based community of practice is a Swedish print journal that publishes about 35 issues per year. Its basic content deals with matters related to the cultural and ethical sector, containing essays, reviews, debates, and news articles in this domain. It is distributed all over Sweden, with a circulation of approximately 2,000.1 The editors, board, and various associates are researchers and journalists situated in different parts of Sweden. They form a digital network that is maintained alongside regular day jobs in the members’ respective professions, which creates palpable time pressure in this work. The editorial core consists of two editors and an editorial secretary, all of whom are situated in central Sweden. Besides this nucleus, there is a more widespread editorial group of seven people who contribute ideas and material. Further, there is a board consisting of another 10 members (also widespread), who normally do not actively contribute manuscripts for publication, as well as a staff of associates (20 members) who submit copy fairly regularly. In addition, various writers (40) are temporarily commissioned to produce texts. In-

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dividual editors and the board occasionally arrange face-to-face meetings, and they make phone calls with some regularity, alongside their email communication. However, most contacts are by email. Not part of the network are external senders (companies, etc.) that sometimes circulate information for the journal to the editor-in-chief. For this journal, a corpus of 3,200 messages from the editor-in-chief’s emailbox was selected in order to obtain a rich picture of the communication within the digitally-based community of practice. According to the editor-in-chief, her role involved the most differentiated communication in the community of practice, including both a wide range (in genres and in content) of emails and interaction with different writers. The email messages were written over a three-year period (2002–2005) by individuals in the community of practice, where the writers represent the work categories mentioned above and where the data comprise all messages that were sent and received during the period through the chief’s email program (Eudora). Table 1 gives a breakdown of the correspondence between the editor-in-chief and different groups of writers. Most of these messages were sent from one individual to another (n=2176), but a significant portion were also sent as group messages or were sent to a reciever and cc’ed simultaneously to the editorin-chief for her information (n=1024). Table 1.

Communication in the editor-in-chief’s emailbox

Category of writers, other than the chief

Numbers of writers in the category, other than the chief

Messages received by the chief

Messages sent by the chief

Total messages

Editorial core

2

598

368

966

Editorial group

7

299

269

568

Board members

10

256

164

420

Staff members

20

195

379

574

Various writers

40

273

303

576

External senders not associated w/ the digitally-based community of practice

51

73

23

96

130

1694

1506

3200

Total

Information about the messages was classified by genre, content, exchange patterns (one-to-many vs. “interactive” messages), when in a sequence a certain email appears, and between which actors (in terms of their role in the office hierarchy) the email was exchanged. Every email was also reviewed for the occurrence and

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type of small talk in relation to general FBAs and mitigating FBAs. These data were supplemented by four interviews with the editor-in-chief about the settings for various types of messages and the network’s work routines. The focus in the analysis is not on quantifying instances in these data but on demonstrating what some of the frequent types of politeness strategies in the data look like that occur throughout the period studied. 4.2.

Physically-based corpus

The second corpus is based on data from the physically-based community of practice, a considerably larger newspaper office that publishes six editions per week, meaning that it is a time-critical Swedish news environment with short throughput times for various kinds of information. The newspaper has a circulation of about 170,000 and employs a total of 300 individuals (journalists, administrators), counting both full-time and part-time staffers. Of these, 130 journalists are connected to the news offices (the main office and eight local offices). From this context a corpus of email messages (n=400) was analyzed. To get an overall picture of the flow of different types of messages at the news office, all incoming and outgoing messages were collected during one week in 2002 from the mailbox of one of the news office’s two chief news editors (n=284), who had a central role in the organization, involving diversified communication (both different types of messages and different kind of contacts); this editor is hereafter referred to as the CNE (or by the fictitious name assigned to him in this research, Anders). To get a more varied picture of the communication, selected messages from the CNE’s mailbox were also gathered from 2001 to 2004 (n=116). All the messages were collected as part of a larger ethnographic study (Hössjer 2002, 2006; Hössjer and Severinson Eklundh 2005, 2009) that also included data from observations and interviews with various office employees (a total of 19 individuals) over a three-year period (2001–2004). Thus the email corpus was one of several components of data collected that also included interaction by phone and face-to-face. This meant that the content and interaction in the messages could be juxtaposed with interaction in other modalities. The messages were analyzed using the same categories as for the digitally-based community of practice. Interviews about the messages were carried out with the CNE to gather information about the situations surrounding particular email exchanges.

5.

Email usage in the two work contexts

The following data presentation starts with a characterization of the email interaction in the physically-based community of practice, a context in which alternatives to email are available. This is followed by a discussion of what happens to elec-

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tronic exchanges in the digitally-based community of practice, where email interaction is the primary mode of communication. All names occurring in quoted text from both contexts are pseudonyms assigned by the researcher. The translation of the examples from Swedish into English is idiomatic, rather than literal. 5.1.

Email use and the physically-based community of practice

In the large newspaper office, delicate subjects, negative criticism, and comprehensive discussions are saved for phone and direct communication between those involved, as are various forms of small talk – chitchat designed to lubricate social relationships (Hössjer 2002, 2006). Email is used only to send information and to ask and answer simple questions. This pattern seems to accord relatively well with what was predicted by Daft and Lengel’s (1984) model regarding email as a lean medium (but see section 5.2). The great majority of messages involve one-to-many dissemination of information; that is, messages are sent to multiple recipients simultaneously in one direction, with no replies expected. The emails deal with prospective news stories, planning and documentation of ongoing activities, and attachments of documents. These are strictly formalized text types and genres with parallels to what Kankaanranta (2005: 349) subsumes under comprehensive headings like “noticeboard” and “postman” genres: The messages typically have little or no text, and they attach documents and messages with a strict format, such as an agenda or a press release. Only a small number of messages are interactive, in the sense that they expressly request a reaction from the recipient or themselves constitute a reaction to something previously written. Questions and answers occur, as do suggestions, requests, work directives, and comments, but always in short email exchanges with terse formulations and messages in which the main pattern is a simple question that gets a simple reply. This pattern is in line with what Zack (1993) observed at a news office, where the majority of email conversations analyzed represented what he called “alternating dialogs”: dialogs in the prototypical form of a simple question that is followed by a short answer, in contrast to the more elaborated, interactive conversations that are typically maintained face-to-face. Similar to the structures observed by Zack, the messages in my data (not counting greetings and concluding signatures) are virtually free of small talk containing references to the email-writer’s personal relationships at work or in private life. In the email sequence reproduced in example 1, the exchange between a reporter (Håkan in message 1) and the CNE (chief news editor Anders in message 2) is about planning where and when an article can be published. The reporter sketches two possibilities for dealing with the issue and makes it fairly easy for the CNE to respond in writing without having to craft a detailed answer. The dialogue is generated with passages showing that the interlocutors have a tacit knowledge of the subject through the use of phrases (such as “The pregnant fish”) and abbrevi-

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ations without explanations. The phrase “The pregnant fish” in the message is the title of the article in question in the messages. (1) Exchange between reporter and chief news editor (CNE) Message 1 Hi, […] The pregnant fish, which has been lying her [sic: error in original message] so long, has to be printed tomorrow if we want to keep the phrase “the latest issue of the medical journal BMJ” in the intro – but maybe it would be better to put the whole thing on Monday’s research page? If you think so, I can negotiate it with sune b. […] Håkan Message 2 Yes, The research page is a good idea. I’ve had a hard time putting together a medical or research page this week. Anders In example 2 below, a sequence of four messages, the exchange is between the two chief news editors. Anders is sitting at the news desk – the central place for leading the news work in the open office – and his colleague is in a room for more long-term planning in an adjacent corridor for reporters. The initial contact from the colleague (Ella in message 1) is an idea about how the newspaper should cover International Women’s Day, which is just over a week away. The heading “Hello” in the message refers to a particular feature with short interview questions that recurs with some regularity in the newspaper. (2) Exchange between chief news editors Message 1 What do we say to giving somewhat more scope for special copy on International Women’s Day in the Friday, March 8 edition? Vera is working with matriarchy research, gender equality in society as an idea and that sort of thing, plus we could add some other odds and ends. I have a Hello for instance. And maybe a column. Ella A suggestion is sketched in the message and is backed up by the description of an assignment for a reporter who has been working on the subject. According to Anders in the interviews carried out in the study, the proposal deals with how the

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reporter’s work can be combined with other journalistic efforts. It is followed by a message from Anders (message 2) in which he launches another alternative. At this point the dialog is at a stage equivalent to that in message 1 in example 1 – that is, with two possible ways of dealing with the problem at hand. Unlike example 1, however, example 2 has two complex alternatives, which are difficult to continue to deal with via email. Message 2 We could either do that or we could have the day pervade different sections. One interesting idea would be to point out in many contexts whether men or women are in focus. In some cases you would have to use footnotes. Anders Message 2 is followed by a confirmation (OK) from Ella (message 3) that the issue is undecided and that there are two alternatives that need to be weighed against each other in an oral discussion. Message 3 OK, let’s talk about it. /E Ella’s suggestion in message 3 is followed up by Anders in a further message (message 4). Anders indicates that his idea may be hard to carry out and presents the opportunities they will have to discuss the matter orally during the day. The exchange starts in email, but switches to an oral dialog when it starts to become too complex to be decided in the email mode. Message 4 My idea is probably hard to carry out. Maybe we could do it on a smaller scale, some news page or something. Vera is emailing her text to the chief news editors and the chief photo editor. She is working from home – monthly meeting at 11 and Cupola meeting are pumping up the pressure for me today. This example illustrates an evident reality in this physical workplace. Email is reserved for circulating information and for simple, tersely formulated exchanges in which small talk is not included. A functional divide exists at the office among various communication options according to how the individuals involved view the communication at hand and the ways in which the external setting socially frames various work issues. Oral faceto-face conversation is a site for small talk in corridors; at coffee-makers, desks, and faxing machines; for discussing more complex issues; and for airing sensitive issues – matters about which an addressee can be expected to have a different opinion or be angered or saddened (Hössjer 2002, 2006). Telephone is the pre-

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ferred medium for questions requiring a quick response or guaranteed feedback, whereas email is preferred for circulating information and for simple, tersely formulated exchanges in which small talk is not included. The employment of email in this sense has a well-established external frame of reference that contributes to common ground, making it possible to exclude small talk. The choice of communication channel in this respect also provides information on how the subject matter in question is perceived by the workers (Hössjer 2002: 53). How each communication option is used in the physically-based community of practice is summarized below: a) email: non-problematic issue and/or routine issue b) telephone: questions requiring quick response and guaranteed feedback c) oral interaction: social framing, delicate subject, or complex issue

5.2.

Email use and the digitally-based community of practice

The flow of messages in the digitally-based community of practice editor-inchief’s emailbox (Table 1) partly accords with the uses of email in the physical news office environment. The messages contain information, attach documents, and take up routine matters and uncomplicated issues. They also include questions, answers, requests, work directives, and comments. Such issues are dealt with in 1,088 messages, 34 % of the total of 3,200. Beyond this kind of usage, there are spheres of practice that are exclusive to the digitally-based community of practice. Writers offer criticism, discuss complex issues, and carry on full-scale discussions, actions which in the physically-based community of practice are carried out faceto-face. A total of 2,016 messages – 63 % – are of this latter type. The remaining 3 % come from senders outside the network: publishers, computer companies, or private contacts that fall outside the activities of the journal. A prominent pattern apart from these data (and in contrast to the physically-based community of practice) is that most of the messages (82 %) are part of interactive exchanges; that is, they expressly request a reaction from the recipient or themselves constitute a reaction to something previously written. As noted above, explicit small talk is uncommon in email messages sent in the physically-based community of practice. Such strategies tend to be reserved for face-to-face interaction (Hössjer 2002, 2006). The situation is different in the digitally-based community of practice. Several emails contain small talk (general FBAs and mitigating FBAs), not counting phrases of greeting. There are self-references and descriptions of the little annoyances of the day. Such passages most commonly occur in interactive message exchanges. In example 3, the editor-in-chief (Carin) sends the lines below – a moderately elaborated story about an injured foot and its consequences – as a reply to an earlier message (Christmas greeting) from the chairman of the board of the journal.

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(3) Exchange between editor-in-chief and chairman of the board of the journal Hi! Thanks for the greetings. Yes, Christmas always keeps you running in circles. What’s more, I fell and hurt my foot and I’m having a hard time walking. There’s hope I’ll survive, but it sure complicates life. Hard to walk down the church aisle with any dignity on Christmas morning, for instance! Best wishes Carin It would be possible to see this type of everyday anecdote as evidence that the publishing frequency of this office is lower than at the news office, and thus that there is more scope for social digression. It should be borne in mind, however, that this exchange takes place alongside day jobs and that the overall work situation for everyone concerned is packed to the breaking point, as is commented on in various messages. Given this, a more reasonable interpretation might be that chatting about health functions as a way of maintaining social continuity. This type of social framing creates a common ground that the associates can share. There are sometimes long time intervals (days, weeks) between certain messages. After these long intervals, small talk could be seen as a way of re-establishing a context that might be somewhat remote in the participants’ memories, when inserted quotations are not sufficient to maintain the flow. However, this situation is not the case for the vast majority of messages, which are sent in the course of one or two days. What is provided in the vast majority of messages with small talk is an invoked social space of external events and impressions that can be “seen” and referred to: a shared external social context that helps frame the ongoing work. There are clear similarities here with the type of small talk that occurs at the news office in faceto-face conversations (Hössjer 2006) and that various studies have shown to play a key role in the sense of community that emerges in a workgroup when individuals take time to listen and react empathically to non-work-related information (cf. Eelen 2001; Fletcher 1999; Holmes and Schnurr 2005; Mills 2003; Watts 1992, 2003; Wierzbicka 1999). In this sense, the digitally-based community of practice can be described as a group created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise and a shared repertoire of ways of doing things (cf. Eckert and McConell-Ginet 1992; Wenger 1999). A sense of community is created within the framework of shared work and routines. However, a key difference from a work community that has the form of a physically-based community of practice (e.g., the news office) is that the creation of commonality in the digitally-based community of practice occurs through more varied kinds of email content that includes small talk. In this digitally-based community, small talk in messages makes the job tolerable by creating an atmosphere in which monotonous job practices are woven together with stories, events, dramas, and the rhythms of common life (Wenger 1999: 46).

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The occurrence of this kind of social reference in the messages varies depending to some extent on the nature of the matter at hand, who is writing, and who is receiving. However, two basic situations emerge in how such references are made that relate to two different conditions for the editorial work. This can be seen across various genres of communication (e.g., work directives, requests, discussions of manuscripts, planning of new journal issues) and with interlocutors in different positions. The first condition is that messages are produced with the expectation that duties are being carried out as prescribed by routines. This condition tends to involve messages aiming to provide information, come up with a suggestion, and/or plan simple things. In such messages, the referencing of a social context takes the character of “framing” – linking the work context to another, non-work frame (Goffman 1974, 1981; Tannen 1993, 2007), in more-or-less independent passages. Small talk introduces or concludes messages, and it does not tie in directly with the information provided or requested, beyond contextualizing it in a general social exchange (i.e., it is a general FBA). Such comments might take the form of an initial/concluding remark, a postscript occurring as a relatively freestanding insertion at the end of a message, or as a single off-topic message within a larger sequence of mails devoted to work. The latter is the case in example 3, in which Carin replies to a greeting from the chairman. His greeting was a freestanding insertion at the end of a message (“Hope you’ll have a healthy and peaceful Christmas”), the rest of the text being devoted to routine economic planning. Carin’s reply to his greeting (“Hi!”) is followed by the narrative in example 3. In subsequent messages, after a short reaction from the chairman in the beginning of the following message, the interaction returns to the work topic (economic planning) given in the subject heading of the thread. The second condition under which a social frame is built up around the editorial work involves complications or uncertainty in the work situation that may risk threatening the addressee’s social face, and it constitutes a noticeable departure from the regular rhythm of work. In messages sent under this condition there is a closer connection between the framed contexts than in example 3. Small talk serves as explanation or excuse for why certain outcomes cannot be realized or have not been done so far (this being an FTA). Face in the situation is boosted by writers giving reasonable justification for this shortcoming (i.e., such acts are mitigating FBAs). In example 4, the social framing functions in this way. The message is about coordinating calendars ahead of a meeting, and the writer (chairman of the board) starts by saying that he will be busy during a certain week (work-related context), thereby hinting that an arrangement for meeting this special week (as earlier proposed by Carin) will not be possible (this statement from the chairman is an FTA). This is followed by the reason that will be keeping him busy (social context, a mitigating FBA), which then leads to further discussion about coordinating work

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(work-related content, other mitigating FBAs). The overall effect of this framing of work passages in a social context is to help explain why the writer cannot make it to a meeting next week. The writer treats the addressee’s request for meeting as important and thus mitigates the FTA, while boosting the addressee’s face by using small talk as a mitigating FBA. (4) Exchange between editor-in-chief and chairman of the board of the journal During the week Aug. 11–17 I’ll be busy. We’re going to be looking after our oldest grandchildren that week. The family is moving into their new house in Helsingborg. I can make it during the week starting Aug. 18 though. How does that week look for you? I’d be grateful for a reply. Yours Bo A similar – albeit more pronounced – alternation between different contexts is seen in example 5. This email was preceded by a reminder from the editor-in-chief (Carin) of a deadline that was approaching. The reply proceeds in a sequence of different acts: apology, explanation, information about attached text material, request, wishing the best, praise, and joke – each of these (after the initial workoriented ones) relating to various social contexts: the social well-being of the addressee, the writer’s reading habits, and the life of a legendary mayor. After touching on the reason for the delay and commenting on the attached manuscript, the writer moves from one social act to another. New acts are introduced – chained – with the effect that the initial problem (the delay) is counterbalanced inter alia with social acts (relating to different social contexts). No previous delay in work is evident from this writer in the data, and the alternation between contexts in combination with the approaching deadline therefore can be interpreted as more articulated face work than in example 4. The delay for this individual writer (as opposed to others in the email corpus) thus here represents a noticeable departure from the regular rhythm of work. (5) Exchange between editor-in-chief and article author I’m sorry about the long delay in sending my article, but there are reasons. At any rate, here it comes – we’ll see if there are any reactions. The last word should be “impertinences”, and it was saved in WORD. Could you let me know whether the transfer was successful? Hope all is otherwise well with you and you others on the editorial staff. It’s always a delight to read the journal every week. It’s maintaining its quality des-

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pite its advanced age. When the legendary mayor of Sigtuna Gustav ( ? ) Dahl was interviewed ahead of his 100th birthday and asked how was doing, he answered: “At my age you feel fine, otherwise you wouldn’t be there to talk about it.” Yours Jörgen In example 5, the FTA entailed by the delay of the article is followed by six passages that can all more or less be regarded as mitigating FBAs. These FBAs include an apology for the delay (“I’m sorry …”), an explanation of a general but non-specified reason for it (“but there are reasons”) in connection with the delivery of the delayed material (“The last word should be …”), and a request for confirmation that the message has reached the addressee (“Could you let me know …”). This request can be interpreted both as an FTA, because of the extra work the confirmation might cause the addressee, and as an FBA, because of the importance that the writer is giving the matter in asking for the confirmation. The request is followed by a wish for well-being (“Hope all is otherwise well …”, invoking a social context) and an instance of praise (“It is always a pleasure …”, another social context) in connection with a joke (“At my age you feel fine …”, yet another social context). All of these FBAs are in different ways directed toward the addressee (editor Carin and her work with the journal). The first FBAs relate to work, whereas the latter ones relate to various social contexts. Social harmony is thus reestablished (as confirmed by a subsequent message containing another joke from Carin), following the initial FTA (the delay), in progressive steps through chaining of mitigating FBAs by the writer (Jörgen). The three latter passages in this message can be seen as indirectly enhancing the writer’s (Jörgen’s) face, as well. Praising and showing an interest in other people – their deeds and expressions – as Jörgen is doing here is often perceived as a positive trait in social contacts. This evidence of the co-existence of more and less direct levels provides a glimpse of the complexity of face management carried out through the messages. The framing and chaining evident in these messages is not unique to this community of practice, nor is the implicitness in the face work that can be seen here. Substantial research describes how such politeness strategies are used in various types of (oral) institutional conversations: university tutorials, nurse/doctor-patient dialogs, midwife dialogs, and operator calls (Benwell and Stokoe 2002; Bergmann 1992; Linell and Bredmar 1996; McEnery, Baker, and Cheepen 2002; Spiers 1998). This previous body of research points out, in addition to indirectness, the use of strategies such as avoidance and the invoking of routines and external circumstances in averting interpersonal conflicts. The strategies also evince a similar orientation in the social interaction that occurs among colleagues at various work-

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places – toward favoring a constructive climate for cooperation and the successful execution of work (e.g., Eelen 2001; Mills 2003; Watts 1992, 2003; Wierzbicka 1999). In the digitally-based community of practice, as compared to the physicallybased community of practice, the interaction in email messages can be seen as an adaptation to an external situation in which the writers have no physical contact and no clear channel for immediate feedback. Special strategies (framing and chaining) are mustered in the community to protect social face through linguistic expressions the email writers jointly contribute that do not occur in messages within the physically-based community of practice. These strategies dynamically interact with how sensitive the situation is, whether or not it involves complications that may risk threatening the recipient’s face. The lack of physical peripheral information seems to invoke a kind of chronic cautiousness, which interacts with attempts to establish a shared social frame to compensate for the lack of interpretive cues in the communicative situation. In the physically-based community of practice, where such a frame exists, these strategies can be excluded from email messages without threatening the exchange. The use of small talk as a politeness strategy is thus highly context-bound and related to practices within the communities of practice. As highlighted in previous research on politeness, it is clear that the characterization of email as a lean medium is over-simplified; email is exploited in different ways in different situations within the communities studied here. Moreover, individuals in the digitally-based community of practice use small talk as a more dynamic adapted strategy in relation to the external context (small talk as general FBAs or mitigating FBAs) than has been discussed in the previous email politeness literature.

6.

Conclusion

This chapter discussed the professional use of email at a Swedish print journal where most of the work is carried out via email. This represents a work situation of broad relevance in modern life, where it is common for professionals to make use of CMC as a virtual meeting place. This situation was compared with email communication taking place at a Swedish news office where the workers share a physical context. This comparison showed that politeness is a situationally-adapted strategy that is influenced by the external conditions that hold for email communication within a community of practice. Interlocutors seem to adapt their politeness behavior to the external situation. Small talk plays an important role in these professional contexts. In the physically-based community of practice, small talk is left out of email messages and carried out face-to-face. In the digitally-based community of practice, small talk tends to take the form of independent passages when the workflow fol-

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lows prescribed routines (general FBAs). In cases of a departure from the regular rhythm in the work – complications or uncertainty in the situation that may risk threatening the recipient’s social face – small talk more often takes the form of mitigating FBAs to mitigate the face threat. These findings point to a need for a situated view of politeness in email communication in relation to various external conditions, e.g., in workplace environments. They also suggest a need for more elaborated concepts in politeness theory in line with those demonstrated here using the concept of community of practice. Such elaborated concepts ought to take into account the dynamics of individuals’ politeness strategies in different work formations (e.g., according to size and history, including short term groups), in relation to changing working conditions in actual situations (e.g., more-or-less routine work in connection with more-or-less time-critical work conditions), and in connection with individuals’ use of various modes of CMC. The findings of the study presented in this chapter indicate that different expectations are in place regarding what constitutes polite behavior in connection with the use of email within the different communities of practice. These expectations include, on the one hand, the role the medium as such plays in relation to other media vis-à-vis what type of communication it is used for. On the other hand, they include the type of politeness (normatively) associated with the medium in actual situations, which functions to accomplish this communication in an efficient manner. From this perspective, research in different contexts might be extended to address how the flow of work issues and small talk are woven into the dynamics of turn-taking mechanisms in the process of encouraging a sense of togetherness and successful execution of work. In physically-based communities of practice, this may include questions about how interaction is forwarded when starting in one medium and moving into another when dealing with more or less problematic and time-critical matters. In digitally-based communities of practice, such questions may be connected with the use of synchronous and asynchronous media: Strategies such as framing and chaining may undergo media adaptation in relation to ongoing work.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jonas Carlquist, Else Nygren, and Kerstin Severinson Eklundh for valuable comments on previous versions of the manuscript, and to Donald MacQueen for help with translating and improving the language.

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Note 1. For the sake of anonymity, the operational sphere of this journal is not revealed in this chapter. In cases where the content of individual emails describes phenomena that would make it possible to identify the journal, this content has been replaced by a more general equivalent. The use of fictitious pseudonyms to preserve anonymity also applies to the news office material.

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26.

Flaming and linguistic impoliteness on a listserv Brenda Danet

1.

Introduction

A flame event is a sequence of typed, synchronous or asynchronous, online exchanges involving sudden, intense conflict. This chapter develops a pragmatic approach to flaming and applies it to a sequence from an English-based listserv for Israelis living in the San Francisco Bay area in fall 2005.1 This case study is of theoretical interest, first because it links the study of flaming with that of linguistic impoliteness (Harrison 2004, 2007; Maricic 2005), a topic that has attracted the attention of linguists in the last 20 years (Culpeper 1996, 2005; Culpeper, Bousfield, and Wichmann 2003; Eelen 2001; Huddersfield 2006; Kasper 1990; Kienpointner 1997). Second, by focusing on native Hebrew speakers communicating in English, I extend attention to an increasingly multilingual Internet (Danet and Herring 2003, 2007a, b; Wright 2004). Third, the mix of serious and playful frames of interaction (Goffman 1974; Handelman 1976; Kochman 1983; Tannen 1993) in this sequence challenges the researcher to unpack how it can involve the expression of intense mutual hostility yet stimulate linguistic and typographic creativity. Fourth, in the past most researchers attributed flaming primarily to technological factors, especially anonymity and its disinhibiting effects, and a lack of social norms.2 I will argue that linguistic, sociocultural, organizational, gender, and personality factors should also be taken into account. Recent studies show that linguistic/sociocultural factors can be important online (Danet and Herring 2003, 2007b). In a study of four Usenet newsgroups, soc.culture.japan, soc.culture.canada, soc.culture.indian, and soc.culture.arab, flaming messages were found to be most common in soc.culture.arab and least common in soc.culture.japan, the latter reflecting a culture emphasizing harmony (Kayany 1998). Similarly, in discussions by Hong Kong and American business students, individualistic Americans made more frequent critical comments than collectivistic Hong Kongers (Reinig and Mejias 2004). Linguistic/sociocultural context is pertinent for Jewish Israelis online. Coming from a country of only 7,000,000 (Statistics 2004) and sharing a common native language, history, and identity promotes low social distance and a tendency to speak freely. Some have the illusion that “everyone knows everyone”. A history of persecution, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have further promoted solidarity, which is challenged today, however, by deep social cleavages: between religious and secular Jews, between European and North African/Middle Eastern Jews, between natives and immigrant sub-groups, and between proponents of op-

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posing ideologies regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (Horowitz and Lissak 1990; Kimmerling 2001). These cleavages foster severe conflict and verbal violence in public discourse (Kohn and Neiger 2007; Salzberger and Oz-Salzberger 2006).

2.

Theoretical background

Flaming is a complex, elusive phenomenon. Most past research has viewed it negatively, as “verbal aggression”, “insult”, or “hostile behavior”.3 “Hostility, aggression, intimidation, insults, offensive language or tone, uninhibited behavior, sarcasm, and unfriendly tone (…) are the most consistently used attributes to describe flaming” (Turnage 2007). Kayany (1998: 1135) focuses on “expression of hostile emotions directed at another person, as opposed to criticism (…) directed at ideas and opinions”. However, like profane or hostile language in other contexts, flaming can sometimes express solidarity, not hostility, or even both simultaneously (Blum-Kulka, Blondheim, and Hacohen 2002; De Klerk 1997; O’Sullivan and Flanagin 2003; Schiffrin 1984). Thus, we should conceive of it in a neutral, contextualized manner. 2.1.

Flaming in historical perspective

Flaming may have expressive, playful, sporting aspects, not only aspects relating to “the facts” (Danet 1998; Vrooman 2002). In this, it partially resembles many oral genres: Homeric narrative (Edwards and Sienkewicz 1990; Parks 1990), medieval “flyting” (Halama 1996; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000; Parks 1990), rants (Black and Parfrey 1989; Russell 1997), “sounding” or “playing the dozens” (Abrahams 1973; Labov 1972; Parks 1986), and rapping (Edwards and Sienkewicz 1990; Halama 1996). As in earlier genres, performance is central; the audience is invited to attend to message form (Bauman 1992). 2.2.

Flaming and linguistic impoliteness

Recent interest in linguistic impoliteness is a byproduct of the critique of the politeness theories of Brown and Levinson (1987), Leech (1983), and Lakoff (1973). Drawing on this literature, I posit the following four points. (1) Only speakers or writers are polite or impolite, not speech acts or linguistic forms, whose interpretation may vary widely from one situation to another (Kienpointner 1997: 255). (2) Rudeness is “constituted by deviation from whatever counts as polite in a given social context, is inherently confrontational and disruptive to social equilibrium” (Kasper 1990: 208). Context includes the background sociocultural/linguistic context of posters, norms of the institutional host, and emergent listserv norms. “It is

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only individuals interacting within Communities of Practice who will be able to assess whether a particular act is polite or impolite” (Mills 2002: 76; cf. O’Sullivan and Flanagin 2003). (3) One should focus not only on the impoliteness of individual contributions but on negotiation regarding impolite behavior over time; and primarily, (4) on seriously intended, strategic rudeness. 2.3.

Language choice and code-switching

Recently, computer-mediated communication (CMC) researchers have investigated language choice and code-switching among ethnic and national diasporas (e.g., Alonso and Arzoz 2006; Androutsopoulos 2007; Fialkova 2005; Hinrichs 2006; McClure 2001; Paolillo 1996). Here I ask: In what ways might it matter that Israelis abroad are communicating in a second language? Do code-switching and code-mixing occur? 2.4.

Flaming, gender, and culture

Gender interacts with culture online in ways that shape language and communication, including patterns of flaming. Men and women use different discourse styles online, as they do offline, and patterns of women’s subordination tend to be reproduced online (Herring 2003). Among first-time users in a business context, only males engaged in flames in a study by Aiken and Waller (2000). Herring (1994) elaborates: In asynchronous CMC (…) males are more likely to post longer messages, begin and close discussions in mixed-sex groups, assert opinions strongly as “facts”, use crude language (including insults and profanity), and (…) manifest an adversarial orientation towards their interlocutors (…) females tend to post relatively short messages, and are more likely to qualify and justify their assertions, apologize, express support of others, and (…) manifest an “aligned” orientation towards their interlocutors. (292)

In keeping with these observations, Oliveira (2003) found that male academics on a Portuguese university list chastised transgressions by women, asserting interactional dominance. In work-related English emails in India, women were more polite than men (Kaul and Kulkarni 2005), as in previous studies in English CMC. However, in a Thai chatroom women were quite assertive as regards turn allocation (Panyametheekul and Herring 2003). Despite early aspiration for equality and certain gains since the 1970s, Israeli women remain relatively subordinate – in politics and public life (Herzog 2004; Yishai 1997), the military (Golan 1997), institutional arrangements for home and child care (Izraeli 1992), and religion and law (Halperin-Kaddari 2004). Subordination is reinforced by stereotypes of macho masculinity and discriminatory portrayals of women in the media (Lemish and Tidhar 1999; Weimann 2000).

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The culture of disputing among Jews and Jewish Israelis

Jews have a millennia-long history of expressive and instrumental forms of argument and disputing. Traditional forms include: Talmudic text as a form of conversational argument and oral, religious learning through dialogue (Blondheim and Blum-Kulka 2001; Blum-Kulka, Blondheim, and Hacohen 2002; Helmreich 1982); pithy Yiddish curses (Matisoff 1979; Wex 2005); invective in posters condemning deviance among ultra-orthodox Jews (Baroz 2005); argumentativeness among secular American Jews of Eastern European origin (Myerhoff 1994; Schiffrin 1984; Tannen 1981, 1984); and confrontational political debate in Israel’s Parliament, broadcast media, and online talkbacks (Blum-Kulka, Blondheim, and Hacohen 2002; Kohn and Neiger 2007; Salzberger and Oz-Salzberger 2006). A proverbial saying is: “Where there are two Jews, there are three opinions!” Jewish communication patterns show a cultural preference for disagreement (Blondheim and Blum-Kulka 2001; Blum-Kulka, Blondheim, and Hacohen 2002; Schiffrin 1984), including unmitigated disagreement (Hacohen 2001). In the formative years preceding statehood, Jewish Israelis developed a dugri – ‘straight’4 – style of communication. In Hebrew, to speak dugri is to speak directly, sincerely, assertively, naturally, and spontaneously, in an unadorned, unmitigated manner that speaker and hearer experience as enhancing communitas (Katriel 1986). Dugri style connoted rejection of the image of the weak ghetto Jew (Katriel 1986). Unmitigated directness often characterizes requests and complaints (BlumKulka, Danet, and Gherson 1985; Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989). A more recent development is kasax style, a brutally confrontational, unmitigated style privileging the imposition of power in interpersonal relations. L’kaseax means ‘to cut down’, as in to mow grass. The slang expression kasax refers to “verbal violence that harms the fabric of social relations and is unrestrained by a shared web of meanings and common values” (Katriel 1999: 214; my translation). Kasax communication has moved online, in talkbacks and chat (Blais 2001; Kohn and Neiger 2007).

3.

Corpus and research goals

The sequence analyzed here occurred over four days in October–November 2005, on an electronic mailing list for Israelis in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. Of 800 subscribers, 100 were students at the host university. The list mandate states that posters may announce events, seek people with common interests, ask questions, or get recommendations. Posting messages that are defaming, threatening, or that contain obscene language is prohibited. Presumably, most subscribers are native-born, highly educated professionals or their spouses/partners, part of an Israeli diaspora of 40,000 in the San Francisco/

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Silicon Valley area (Shakhar 2005). Most use their real names in email addresses and when signing postings. Subscribers may know one another offline professionally or socially, participate in the same local activities, or have children in the same schools. Typically, postings are short exchanges about goods and services. 3.1.

Sociolinguistic background: Hebrew-English bilingualism

It is not obvious that the posters are non-native speakers of English; postings are usually in good English. Because of the left-to-right directionality of the English interface and the dominance of the Roman alphabet online, it is difficult to post in Hebrew, a right-to-left language with its own script. However, there is evidence of posters’ Hebrew background in HTML-encoded Hebrew announcements from the local Israeli Consulate, Hebrew Word attachments, and romanized Hebrew expressions and linguistic transfers from Hebrew in some postings. The subscribers’ command of English reflects the fact that English is one of the three main languages of Israel (along with Hebrew and Arabic; Spolsky 1997; Spolsky and Shohamy 1999). Hebrew is the main language of instruction in schools and in most higher education, the primary public language of the state, and the native language of the majority of Jewish citizens. English is the lingua franca for business, science, education, and travel (Spolsky 1997: 145), and the language of much-admired American culture. Taught beginning in the third grade, it is prominent in street and shop signs in cities, the printed press,5 and the mass media. 3.2.

Participants

Nine males and five females participated in the analyzed sequence. Most had contemporary Hebrew first names; three, with Russian first names, may have immigrated to the United States directly, or via Israel. To protect participants’ identity, all names have been changed. Comparable names were assigned: A male with a typical name for a 20-40-year-old Israeli Jew was assigned a similar name; a female with a Russian or French name was given another of similar connotation. 3.3.

Approach and research questions

Whereas many previous studies of flaming focused on individual messages, the evolution of the entire event is analyzed here. Flaming is “a co-constructed communicative event emerging between interactants” (Avgerinakou 2003: 276). Reading the postings rapidly, with other intervening threads removed, creates the illusion of a heated real-time argument. Twenty-eight postings on other matters were interleaved with 24 flame-related ones; I do not attend to these other postings. This case study discusses the following questions:

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– How and why does this flame sequence begin, escalate, and end? What key speech acts are involved? – What evidence is there that conflict is occurring? – What forms of linguistic impoliteness occur? – What remedial activity, if any, takes place? – In what ways might Jewish and Israeli communication styles find expression in this sequence? – Does gender play a role, and if so, how?

4.

How do we know that conflict is occurring?

4.1.

Metatalk

We know that a conflict is occurring in these data, first of all, because participants engage in metatalk about it (Table 1), although they never use the term “flaming” or any Hebrew equivalent. Table 1.

Metatalk about conflict

“this wonderful do-krav [‘duel’] we are having” (Gad) “the efroach [‘chick’] was hatched and became a man-eating pre-historic monster” (Gad) “this whole exchange” (Gad) “a private brawl” (Igor) “The last verbal Tsunami” (Gad) “the whole thing” (Gad) “the whole event” (Gad) “The storm” (Gad) “this topic” (Tal) “putting an end to this” (Tal)

While “this whole exchange”, “the whole thing”, “the whole event”, and “this topic” neutralize the trouble, “monster”, “brawl”, “tsunami”, and “storm” connote extreme conflict. The provocateur who was central in the entire sequence, called here Gad, produces seven of the 10 labels and is the most verbally creative. Among other expressions, he represents the conflict as a “wonderful do-krav”6 (‘a wonderful duel’). Romanizing the Hebrew term for ‘duel’, he indicates that he is enjoying the fight, even if his complaint was initially serious. He also characterizes the torrents of words as “a storm” and a series of “verbal tsunamis”. Gad’s contrast of efroach (efroax in my transliteration system)7 and man-eating pre-historic monster resembles the English “to make a mountain out of a molehill”. The Hebrew equivalent is la’asot pil mizvuv (‘to make an elephant out of a fly’; Doniach and Kahane 1998; Rosenthal 2005; Zilkha 2002). In another posting Gad speaks of typing words metaphorically – “everyone put down their guns and key-

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boards” – characterizing the list as “a battle field” and “a ship that sailed again in safe waters”. 4.2.

Linguistic impoliteness

There are many forms of linguistic impoliteness in this sequence, starting with an insulting challenge by Gad to Yossi, followed by an exchange of spiraling, intentionally hurtful insults. Another indication of impoliteness is obscene language, which does not ordinarily occur on the list. Natasha congratulates Gad for having “the balls” to criticize Yossi, and Gad calls another male, Ohad, “you shit-stirrer”. 4.3.

Citations

Citation of previous messages is a common feature of asynchronous CMC modes. It helps recipients keep track of topics and correspondents, but it also serves other functions (Marcoccia 2004; Severinson Eklundh 2010; Tanskanen 2001; Thompsen and Foulger 1996). Analyzing two asynchronous modes, Tanskanen (2001) suggested that “overt reference by the writers to the viewpoint they are disagreeing with could (…) be a collaborative strategy, motivated by the wish to avoid conflict or even by a fear of flaming” (238–239; italics added). This interpretation is not applicable, however. The 24 postings, including all citations, fill 25 pages of single-spaced text in Word, over 7,000 words!8 Twelve posters include the initial incendiary posting as well as up to five others, suggesting that they were responding emotionally and rapidly. 4.4.

Reprimands

Reprimands also indicate trouble. There were brief reprimands by two females and one male, and lengthier ones by the organization’s president and listowner. Dina, the president, wrote: (1) I am ashamed that I cannot be away from my email for even a weekend without coming back to find my … mailbox littered with irrelevant emails. Tal [list owner] and I do not need to be your kindergarten teachers. The latter is a patronizing transfer from Hebrew, Tal v’ani lo tsrixim l’hiot hagananot shelaxem. While this is a perfectly acceptable English sentence, it is much more probable in the Israeli context. Tal concluded the event as follows: (2) Enough! Do not send any more replies to this topic. No more clarifications. No more last words. I sincerely appologize to the list members for missing the 1st wave of emails and not putting an end to this sooner. I guess the list cannot be left unattended for a weekend.

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Remedial activity

Still other evidence of conflict is the presence of remedial interchanges (Goffman 1967, 1971; Harrison 2004, 2007; Harrison and Allton, this volume; Owen 1983). Gad makes two attempts to neutralize what proves to have been an unjustified attack.

5.

The initial provocation

Minimally, any situation of conflict has three components, an initial statement or other speech act by Speaker A; a challenge by Speaker B expressing disagreement with Speaker A; and a response by Speaker A expressing disagreement with Speaker B (Avgerinakou 2003: 279; Schiffrin 1984: 316). Disruption of peaceful interaction began when Yossi asked: (3) Does anyone know the area codes of the “Bahamas phone scheme”?? Later that day, Gad sent an insulting complaint/challenge to Yossi and to the group. The subject line of his posting was “TO ALL ___ LISTS SUBSCRIBERS”. (4) 1/ PICK UP YOUR PHONE,DIAL OPERATOR AND ASK!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2/ OPEN YOUR PHONE BOOK AND LOOK UNDER NUMERICAL LISTINGS OF AREA CODES.!!!!!!!!!!!! 3/ GO ON LINE AND USE YOUR IMAGINATION WHERE YOU MIGHT BE TO FIND IT, LIKE GOOGLE,OR PHONE DIRECTORIES, DAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4/ WOULD YOU LIKE US ALL TO COME OVER AND SHOW YOU HOW TO USE YOUR BROOM? IS THIS THE JOB OF ALL OF US? TO BE THERE AT THE BECK AND CALL, TO ANSWER THE SIMPLEST QUESTIONS FOR ANYONE WHO IS TOO LAZY TO TAKE A MOMENT, USE THEIR IMAGINATION, AND MAKE THE SLIGHTEST EFFORT TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THEIR OWN QUESTION. PLEASE, LETS ALL OF US STOP LOADING THE ___ LISTS WITH THIS TYPE OF QUESTIONS WHICH WE ALL HAVE TO CONSTANTLY DELETE. AND … ANYONE WHO ANSWERS ONE, BUYS ICE CREAM FOR THE REST OF US AT “STONE COLD”. doesanyoneknowwherethereisastnecoldicecreamplace?9 Complaining about ostensibly unnecessary postings, Gad claims that Yossi could find the information by asking a telephone operator or looking in the phone book or online. The complaint is formulated as a series of directives to avoid the offending act in the future, followed by two rhetorical questions. The bald on-record imperative form, in itself, is not necessarily offensive, since Israelis tend to be direct even when polite (Blum-Kulka 1987; Blum-Kulka, Danet,

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and Gherson 1985; Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989). However, it is not the job of a subscriber to issue orders to others; contextually, these imperatives are impolite. Issuing this challenge in view of all is more insulting than if the challenge were private. In its excessive length the posting violates Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quantity. Its commanding tone is aggravated by writing-specific means that mimic emotionally heightened speech: dramatic play with typography – the use of all caps, multiple exclamation points, and the comics-like “DAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”. Deviating from brief, unmarked list style, these features are known to occur in other incendiary communication online (McKee 2002). In most online contexts, all caps are understood as the textual equivalent of shouting (Crystal 2006: 37; Danet 2001: 17–19), and here they simulate shouting during an oral argument (Schiffrin 1984). That Gad’s text and play with typography were carefully planned and edited is indicated by the numbered listing of items, the three imperatives, and the sudden switch from all caps to all lower-case writing. The structure of this challenge contains parallelism and repetition, which “increases the imposition upon the target and/or emphasizes the negative attitude of the speaker toward the target” (Culpeper, Bousfield, and Wichmann 2003: 1561), thereby boosting impoliteness. Switching to all lower case changes the footing to the play frame (Goffman 1979): Gad effectively downgrades the aggressiveness of his posting. The call for future offenders to buy ice cream for all is absurd, since the communication is virtual, and nobody knows who “all” are. Gad has so far directed five ad hominem insults to Yossi: 1) You are lazy. 2) You waste our time, fill our screens with garbage, and may even cost us modem time and money. 3) You have no imagination. 4) You are stupid. 5) You are so incompetent that you don’t know even how to use a broom. The last item is particularly insulting, since everybody knows how to use a broom, as is implied by the rhetorical form of the utterance, and it is a gross violation of Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Relevance.

6.

Escalation

Insults can manifest three possible combinations of illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect (Austin 1975; Searle 1976; Vrooman 2002): (1) an utterance is intended to hurt, and is experienced as such; (2) an utterance is not intended to hurt, but is experienced as hurtful; or (3) an utterance is intended to hurt, but is not experienced as hurtful.10 The sequence under analysis is full of type 1 personal insults.

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Table 2 lists all the insulters and insultees. The same five individuals are both insulters and insultees. Of seven insult pairs, three are reciprocal. Gad insults two other individuals besides Yossi. Table 2.

Insulters and insultees in the flame event Gad Yossi Natasha Irena Yoav Gad Gad

f f f f f f f

Yossi Natasha Yossi Gad Gad Yoav Irena

Natasha agrees with Gad’s complaint. Typing a portion of her posting in all caps, she signals her identification with him: (5) I totally agree and I’m glad someone had the balls to say something. (I didn’t even see the ice cream question cause I rarely look at the list anymore – BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY STUPID QUESTIONS ON IT) but I DID notice your post because it was addressed to all, so I paid attention. Thanks! Instead of responding directly to Gad, Yossi posts without comment a 630-word explanation from the web about an 809 Area Code scam, in which unwitting dialers incur exorbitant international charges for ostensibly American calls. Seemingly helpful, he shares this information with the others. However, “blasting” the list with this explanation without comment is an indirect, subtly impolite way of counter-attacking Gad, communicating not only “You were wrong to attack me”, but also “You (Gad) flooded me with words; now I am flooding you with even more words, and in view of all the others – so there”! Direct evidence for how Yossi feels about Gad’s attack is revealed when Natasha copies into a posting a private email Yossi had sent her: (6) Thanks for the compliment Yossi. Were you too cowardly to send to the list? Afraid they might see what kind of a person you are? Well, I’ll send it for you … maybe you will get booted off now. -----Original Message----From: Yossi To: Natasha That’s because you are a stupid cow … Yossi has called her a “stupid cow” because of her agreement with Gad, revealing that he was very hurt and angry at Gad. Natasha insults Yossi by violating a general

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online norm – not to forward private email to others without the writer’s permission, especially if the content is sensitive. She sends her ironic response to the list, “thanking” him for the sarcastic “compliment”, calling him a “coward”. Doing so before an audience compounds the insult. Another female poster, Irena, lashes out at Gad: (7) Gad, you are a very sad, pathetic and defective human being. Thank you for sharing your insignificant opinions and spamming the list with that spew of filth you pass for as a reply. I am sure everyone on the list is anxiously waiting for your next idiotic monolog. In attacking Gad in a partially ironic manner (“thank you for sharing”), Irena responds not only to his attack on Yossi, but to a previous posting before this event, in which he had attacked her for twice asking the list to recommend a hairdresser. Yoav, another male, agrees, adding new insults: (8) I second this comment. Gad seems to always complain about the way the community chooses to use the list. Gad, why don’t you stop using it and save us your negative comments and energy. In the same amount of time you took to criticize the person asking the question, you could have just given the answer and been a kind human being instead of a rotten one. I have a solution for you and Natasha … Create a separate folder where all the [list] emails go into automatically. That way it won’t “load up your inbox” as you put it … Do you think you know how to do this, or “do you want us to all come over and show you how” to use your computer? Pathetic! Yoav finds Gad’s comments “negative”; he is “a rotten human being”. Like Irena, he thinks Gad is “pathetic”. Especially hurtful is the suggestion that Gad is computer illiterate, a violation of Grice’s (1975) Maxims of Relevance and Quality. This ironic rhetorical question parallels Gad’s question about the broom, as indicated by the quotation marks around these words. Thus Irena and Yoav ally themselves against Gad and Natasha. In the next posting, another male, Avishai, posts new information: (9) I believe that it is the North American 242 area code. like 1–242-XXX–XXXX from the US and Canada. But I am not absolutely sure. Gad playfully rejects this, seemingly abandoning “the facts” and his challenge to Yossi. He pretends to chastise Avishai for putting a stop to “this wonderful ‘dokrav’” [‘duel’; quotation marks in original]:

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(10) Avishai, are you trying to put a stop to this wonderful “do-krav” [‘duel’] we are having. Shame on you. Shana Tova Umetuka like your wife’s wonderful cakes. Gadi Playfully, he code-mixes again, wishing Avishai Shana Tova Umetuka – ‘A happy and sweet New Year’. Because the fall Jewish holidays are over, use of this expression is incongruous and humorous. Picking up on metuka (‘sweet’), he refers to Avishai’s wife’s cakes as also sweet, another violation of the Maxim of Relevance (Grice 1975). In a final ingratiating move, he signs the posting with his nickname, “Gadi”, a diminutive of Gad (Blum-Kulka and Katriel 1991). Turning playful compounds Gad’s original impoliteness: By transforming communication into a mere game he trivializes the hurt he has caused. Gad’s posting to Avishai was preceded chronologically by his insulting response to Irena: (12) Irena, I am sad for you that humor is not part of your makeup. “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” as the old proverb says. Irena, read my words like mild paprika … feel yours like cayenne pepper. Excuse me Irena, I have to get a tissue to clean your saliva out of my eyes, I hope it’s not venom. Gad’s words were intended as “mild paprika”, not as the strong insult she apparently felt, whereas he feels hers as if they are much stronger “cayenne pepper”, as well as “saliva in his eyes” from a spitting snake. Ostensibly mitigating his previous words to her, he newly insults her, insinuating that she is a snake (“I hope [your words are] not venom”). Verbal inventiveness, a form of fun for him, is inseparable from expression of hostility.

7.

First remedial attempt

Eventually, Gad realizes that his attack on Yossi was unjustified. Twice he engages in remedial activity. Goffman (1967: 20–22) identified four components of a full remedial interchange: (1) offended person draws attention to the offense; (2) offender apologizes; (3) offended accepts the apology; and (4) offender thanks the other for forgiveness received. As in previous research on remedial activity online for serious offenses (see Harrison and Allton, this volume), remedial activity here is extremely truncated. Olshtain and Cohen (1983) identified five types of strategies employed in apologies (Table 3):

Flaming and linguistic impoliteness on a listserv Table 3.

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Five strategies for the performance of an apology (Olshtain and Cohen 1983)

Strategy

Type

(1) (2)

IFID (illocutionary force indicating device) Expression of speaker’s responsibility; relates to speaker’s willingness to admit to fault Explanation Offer of repair Promise of forbearance in the future

(3) (4) (5)

The first category includes formulaic, routinized forms of apolog, such as the performative verb “I apologize” and the expression “I’m sorry”. The others are selfexplanatory. An apology may combine two or more of these strategies. Gad’s initial remedial attempt is primarily category (3), focusing on confusion between “scheme” and “scam”: (13) In the message below, which I reacted to, and responded to, you used the word “scheme”, which does not necessarily have a negative connotation, such as a color scheme,or any system of correlated things. I took it in a positive sense such as a layout or a list of phone numbers for the Bahamas … If you had used the word scam – if that is what you meant – or “would anyone like to know the area codes of the Bahamas phone scam”? there would have been no [doubt] in my mind as to your intention and I would not have responded as I did. And from there the “efroach” [‘chick’] was hatched and became a man-eating-pre-historic-dinosaur. So lets choose and use our words correctly. This whole exchange didn’t bring the nicest things out of some people, you for one, in the eyes of some, me, and of course the cobra who spat at me, what was her name? I hope she has somewhere to channel her anger. Shana Tova Gadi Even native speakers of English might have confused the two expressions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “scheme” as “a plan, design; a programme of action; the designed scope and method of an undertaking (…); often with unfavorable notion, a self-seeking or an underhand project, a plot” [emphasis mine]. “Scam” is “a trick, a ruse; a swindle, a racket”. In Hebrew, too, there are both neutral and negative terms for the equivalent of “scheme”, but only negative terms, tarmit and hona’a, for “scam” (Levy 1995). Yossi’s confusion between two similar-sounding lexical items in English and Gad’s misunderstanding were the initial cause for the conflict. Gad blames Yossi almost entirely for it, conceding only that: (14) This whole exchange didn’t bring the nicest things out of some people, you for one, in the eyes of some, me, and of course the cobra who spat at me.

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Putting Yossi first in the list of those behaving badly is unfair. Yossi’s only postings were the initial question and its answer. In fact, Gad dominated the entire sequence, with four postings before this one and seven in all. In the expression “In the eyes of some, me” Gad concedes only that others thought his behavior “not nice”, thus avoiding the first person pronoun “I”, the agent of responsibility for action. He only uses it in “If you had used the word scam (…) I would not have responded as I did”, thereby evading having to admit exactly how he responded. Gad’s contrast between efroax (‘chick’) and “man-eating monster” grossly minimizes his responsibility. Efroax connotes something small, harmless, cuddly, adorable, bright yellow like the sun; “man-eating pre-historic dinosaur” connotes a huge, frightening killer. While “chick-monster” is animate, “storm” and “tsunami” refer to forces of nature, as if the trouble were a product of forces beyond the control of humans, that is to say, of these posters, especially himself. Gad also deploys affiliative, conciliatory strategies to mitigate responsibility. Again, he signs with his nickname, “Gadi”. Switching strategically to the Hebrew “Shana Tova”, he wishes Yossi and the others a belated Happy New Year. Here, overtly agonistic elements are absent, except for Gad’s reference to Irena as a “cobra”.

8.

Second remedial attempt

Later, Gad offers a more extended account of his behavior: (15) At the end of the last verbal Tsunami I sent an email trying to clarify to all how and why the whole thing began. I was sincere in my effort to calm down the whole event. I was happy it worked, and everyone put down their guns and keyboards. The storm died and the ship “[listname]” sailed again in safe waters. … As for the future, I do not intend to load the lists again with my private “stuff” unless I think it would be of interest or benefit to the community. I hope that all of us will evaluate the content, quality, frequency and quantity of our emails. Gad By “last verbal tsunami” he means the exchange of postings before Dina’s reprimand. He promises not to load the list with “his private stuff” in the future. Usurping the role of listowner, nearly formulating Grice’s Maxims, he urges, “I hope that all of us will evaluate the content, quality, frequency and quantity of our emails”. Signing “Gad” rather than “Gadi” signals that this posting is again serious. There was no formal ending to this sequence. We never learn whether Yossi or anyone else considered Gad’s remedial postings an adequate apology. The reprimand by Tal brought matters to a close, and interaction returned to normal.

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Summing up

Six sets of factors fostered impoliteness in this sequence, some familiar, others perhaps newly identified here. 9.1.

Technological factors

Compared with the ephemerality of oral utterances, the written, asynchronous nature of postings could promote editing one’s posting before sending it. In practice, here, as in earlier studies of flaming – even though total anonymity did not prevail – the textual nature of the list, the ease of hitting the reply button, and the lack of eye contact and instant feedback all probably contributed to the escalation. 9.2.

Organizational factors

Organizational factors also contributed to this flame sequence. Earlier, I noted the role of emergent list norms and institutional norms. Other important organizational factors were the leaders’ behavior and attitudes. This is not a moderated list – the listowner does not screen messages before posting them. However, he and the president do usually monitor postings closely. The fact that they did not see what was happening until it was nearly over allowed it to escalate. Their reprimands suggest a rather repressive leadership style, confirmed by developments 10 days later. Four posters began debating the role of fathers in parenting, and a new “flame war” began to develop. Dina responded sternly, suppressing disagreement, probably partly because of the previous conflict but also, I suggest, because the leaders are wary of the disputatiousness of Israelis and fear being unable to control it. 9.3.

Gender

Nine males but only five females participated. The primary flamers were both male – Gad, the challenger, and Yossi, the victim. Three of the five insulters were male, and a male, Gad, addressed the most insults to others and posted the most (seven postings). Eighteen of the 24 postings were by males. This pattern is consistent with aggressive, assertive masculinity and female subordination in Israeli society (Lemish and Lahav 2004) and with findings that men participate more in CMC and flame more than women (Aiken and Waller 2000; Herring 1994, 2003). Agonistic/jocular elements of playfulness in Gad’s behavior were consistent with Israeli macho masculinity. Herring’s assessment of why men flame more than women and why some women participate fits here, too:

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(…) men flame, at least in part, to regulate the social order, as self-appointed vigilantes on the “virtual frontier”. Such behavior is rationalized within a male system of values that assigns greater importance to freedom of expression and firmness of verbal action than to possible consequences to the addressee’s face needs (…) All act under the influence of a larger culture in which confrontation and aggression are valorized in males (…) flaming is “contagious” – normally polite participants, including women, can be pushed to flame back when sufficiently provoked by another’s flames. (Herring 1994: 292)

9.4.

Personality

Gad’s personality was a contributing factor. His practice of combining a serious message with superfluous playful, provocative additions suggests a stronger than usual tendency to provoke, even for a male. 9.5.

Sociocultural and linguistic factors

One contribution of this case study is its discussion of flaming in a bilingual/bicultural context. The trouble began because of non-native speakers’ misunderstanding about “scam” versus “scheme”. Moreover, the extreme impoliteness may not have seemed so offensive because the posters were communicating in English. Learning a second language may lead individuals to experience a severing or weakening of signifier and signified (Hoffman 1989: 106; Pavlenko 2005, chapter 6). Swearing in a language other than L1 carries different emotional connotations. Dewaele (2004a, b) found that among multilinguals, the earlier a language was learned, the stronger the emotive charge of swear words in that language. Bilingual speakers code-switch to L2 to distance themselves from what they say (Bond and Lai 1986; Javier and Marcos 1989). Thus, the obscene language, insults, and other forms of impoliteness may have been more extreme than if the posters had communicated in Hebrew. However, there is another possibility: Because the posters come from a more disputatious culture than mainstream American culture, the influence of Hebrew language and culture may have predominated over that of typing in L2. While I cannot establish which of these possibilities prevailed, the analysis points to objectively identifiable influences of Hebrew, including strategic use of nicknames and code-mixing (although not code-switching) and linguistic transfers. This exploratory analysis suggests that flaming is influenced by a greater variety of factors than has generally been discussed until now, notably, linguistic and cultural ones. Further studies of flaming and impoliteness in bilingual and multilingual online settings are needed to extend our understanding of this complex phenomenon.

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Notes 1. I thank Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Tamar Katriel, Ayelet Kohn, Motti Neiger, Esther Schely-Newman, Eli Salzberger, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Carmel Vaisman, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors for their comments. 2. See Alonzo and Aiken (2004); Culman and Markus (1987); Joinson (1998); Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire (1984); Siegel, Dubrovsky, Kiesler, and McGuire (1986); Suler (2004); Thompsen (1996); Thompsen and Foulger (1996); Turnage (2007). 3. See Baron (1998); Dery (1994); Dubrovsky, Kiesler, and Sethna (1991); Herring (1994); Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire (1984); Korenman and Wyatt (1996); Lea, O’Shea, Fung, and Spears (1992); Parks and Floyd (1995); Thompsen (1996); Thompsen and Foulger (1996). 4. In colloquial Arabic, dugri means ‘straight’, as in “straight road” (Katriel 1986: 11). 5. There is an English-language daily as well as English editions of some Hebrew papers. 6. The Hebrew term should be du-krav. 7. I follow the transliteration system of Berman and Armon-Lotem (1990) and BlumKulka (1997). 8. Subscribers do not necessarily see all citations; one would have to scroll down to see all cited material. 9. Gad is referring here to the American “Cold Stone Creamery” ice cream chain. 10. In ritual insults (Labov 1972), the utterance is not intended to hurt and is not experienced as such; the recipient does not contest its truth value, retorting instead with another stylized insult.

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V.

Broader perspectives

27.

Code-switching in computer-mediated communication Jannis Androutsopoulos

1.

Introduction

This chapter discusses how processes known as code-switching and code-mixing manifest in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Code-switching is generally defined as “juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems” (Gumperz 1982: 59) or as “the use of more than one linguistic variety, by a single speaker in the course of a single conversation” (Heller and Pfaff 1996: 594). Depending on approach, code-mixing is defined as the juxtaposition of linguistic codes within a single sentence or as an alternation of codes that lacks a specific pragmatic function. Code-switching and code-mixing are common linguistic practices among bilingual and multilingual people and therefore easily find their way into communication via digital media. The research literature discussed in this chapter offers examples of code-switching in a wide range of CMC modes and social settings, including texting among South African young people, chatting among second-generation Indians, emails among Egyptian professionals, forum discussions among Persian expatriates, and fan fiction by Finnish bloggers. Even though code-switching (CS) online attracted the attention of linguists as early as the mid-1990s (Georgakopoulou 1997; Paolillo 1996), it remains less well researched in comparison to other linguistic processes in CMC.1 The topic is equally under-researched in contact linguistics and multilingualism studies (see Dorlein and Nortier 2009). In a study of written CS, Callahan (2004: 92) claims that “[t]he majority of code-switching in nonfiction […] is found in advertising and journalistic writing”. This marginalisation of CS bears no relation to the spread of the practice itself. Given the importance of multilingualism and the pervasiveness of digital media worldwide, it seems safe to assume that digitally-mediated communication (via both networked computers and mobile networked devices) offers opportunities for written CS on an unprecedented scale. CS in CMC is relevant not only because it is there (and not yet well understood) but also for the insights it can offer to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse studies. By its very nature, CS calls into question a number of assumptions that have dominated linguistic scholarship, such as the discreteness of linguistic systems and the primacy of monolingualism as the default condition of language in society (Heller and Pfaff 1996). Likewise, the study of CS challenges fundamental assumptions in CMC studies. Early linguistic research on CMC focused on lan-

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guage/technology relations, and some of its key categories are conceived and best operate within a monolingual frame, such as the position of computer-mediated discourse between spoken and written language. However, CS defies easy classifications based on media factors alone, and it requires an emphasis on the interrelation of medium and social/situation factors (Herring 2007). Moreover, CMC as a discourse field challenges the assumption that spoken face-to-face interaction is the essential site of code-switching. Based on research literature on several languages,2 the aim of this chapter is to organise the available research evidence, identify commonly asked and still untapped questions, and pinpoint limitations of present scholarship. The chapter does not claim to offer a comprehensive overview of forms and functions of CS on the Internet; rather, it can only outline how CS has been studied in the languages and sociolinguistic settings I have been able to identify in the literature (section 4). Still, the available literature offers ample evidence that CMC is a site for the meaningful use of language alternation, and a critical synthesis of available research can offer insights into what are promising perspectives for further research, as well as what methods have been mainly used. The organisation of this chapter is as follows: After a brief outline of codeswitching research frameworks (section 2), I distinguish between conversational and non-conversational CS in CMC and delimit both from other patterns of multilingualism online (section 3). The subsequent two sections provide an overview of research (section 4) and discuss the different types of settings in which CS in CMC has been studied (section 5). The next section turns to forms and functions of CS online (sections 6). The chapter concludes with a discussion of CMC as a new domain for CS (section 7) and an outlook for future research (section 8).

2.

Code-switching frameworks

The question of what patterns of CS are attested in CMC environments cannot be answered independently of the frameworks within which CS is studied. In general, four points characterize the state of the art: – Researchers do not use one single framework of CS analysis but rather a number of different approaches. – A generally accepted methodology that takes the specifics of CMC into account has not yet been developed. Researchers draw on frameworks originally developed for the analysis of spoken discourse, despite criticisms of the adequacy of such frameworks (Hinrichs 2006: 28–30; Leppänen and Peuronen 2012). – The predominant perspective is pragmatic and sociolinguistic rather than grammatical and linguistic (see also Dorleijn and Nortier 2009: 133). While

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structural descriptions are not entirely absent from the extant literature, its main aim has been to understand the pragmatic functions, social purposes, and interactional dynamics of CS online. The correspondence of online written CS to its offline spoken counterpart is a common concern, but it is also a contested issue, as will become obvious in this chapter.

In terms of frameworks, the literature contains elements of the “three most influential contributions to theory in the sociolinguistic branch of CS studies” (Hinrichs 2006: 28): The first is the markedness model of Carol Myers-Scotton (1993), in particular her concepts of code-switching as a marked (i.e., unexpected, unconventional) or unmarked (expected) choice. Second are concepts introduced by John J. Gumperz (1982), such as the distinction between situational and metaphorical CS, the distinction between “we-code” and “they-code”, his classification of discourse functions of conversational CS, and the notion of CS as a contextualization cue. Thirdly, researchers also draw on the conversation-analytic framework for the study of bilingual interaction by Peter Auer (1995, 1998b, 1999, 2000), which builds on and develops some of Gumperz’ ideas.3 Other repeatedly used concepts include the syntactic distinction between inter- and intra-sentential CS; concepts from pragmatics such as politeness, face, and interpersonal alignment (e.g., Georgakopoulou 1997); Myers-Scotton’s notion of matrix language; and Auer’s notion of base language, which refers to the backdrop against which switches to another language or dialect become meaningful. In terms of discourse functions of CS, the classifications by Gumperz (1982) and Auer are widely used in the literature, e.g., by Androutsopoulos (2006a, 2007a), Sebba (2003), Androutsopoulos and Hinnenkamp (2001), and Paolillo (1996, 2011). Both conceive of CS as a contextualization cue, i.e., a resource used by participants to frame their interpretations of what is being said. In a nutshell, Gumperz’ categories include: switching for reported speech; addressee specification; clarification, emphasis, expressivity; message qualification (e.g., separating facts from comment); and contrasting personal with objective viewpoints. Auer distinguishes between preference- (or participant-)related and discourse-related CS. The first comprises switches that suit the speaker’s or addressee’s preference, as well as instances of language negotiation between the interlocutors.4 Discourse-related switching in a conversational episode “contributes to the organization of discourse in that particular episode” (Auer 1995: 125). Its subtypes partially overlap with those by Gumperz, one important addition being the focus on CS as a device for the internal organization of conversational turns. How these categories have been applied to CS in CMC is discussed in the overview of research findings below (section 6). The limitations of a conversation-analytic approach with respect to CMC data are well discussed in the CMC literature (e.g., Beißwenger 2008; Herring 1999).

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CMC technologies rule out one key mechanism of conversational organisation, the turn-taking system; more generally, the lack of visual channels – and, in asynchronous CMC, the temporal gap between contributions – means that important dimensions of the interactional co-construction of meaning are altered or restricted. However, these restrictions do not rule out the sequential organization of computer-mediated discourse,5 which can be studied with conversation analytic categories (see, e.g., the chapters in this volume by Jacobs and Garcia, Markman, and Skovholt and Svennevig). Furthermore, CMC research has established that users develop creative procedures to cope with these limitations, including the usage of specific turn-taking signals and linguistic innovations such as emoticons and laughter acronyms. Related to this, and specifically relevant to CS, is Georgakopoulou’s (1997) suggestion that the lack of ordinary contextualization cues due to the absence of the visual channel “results in an increased reliance on code-centered contextualization cuing, which would be otherwise delegated to different signals” (158). In other words, CMC interlocutors use code-switching, style shifting, and other manipulations of written signs in order to accomplish pragmatic work that would be accomplished by phonological variation, prosody, gaze, posture, and other cues in ordinary spoken conversation. This establishes a productive theoretical link between linguistic choices, communicative practices, and media affordances. These are elements of a basic theoretical vocabulary which CMC researchers appropriate, articulate, and apply in different ways. For example, Hinrichs (2006) combines ideas from all three frameworks with categories from Creole linguistics. Leppänen (2007) draws on the four types of language alternation in Auer’s framework (i.e., insertional switching, insertional mixing, alternational switching, and alternational mixing) to examine alternation between Finnish and English in a range of digital genres. Androutsopoulos (2006a, 2007a) defines the discussion thread of web forums as the equivalent of a conversational episode and therefore as the level at which to determine the base language of discussion (cf. Auer 2000), against which the directionality of switches is examined.

3.

Distinguishing code-switching from multilingualism in computer-mediated discourse

As illustrated by the introductory definitions, CS is typically thought of as a process of (informal or institutional) spoken interaction. This raises the question of how to transfer defining conditions such as “speech exchange” or “conversational episode” to computer-mediated discourse (CMD), where language is typed and the very notion of conversation is contested, as discussed earlier. A rather restrictive reading would be to limit the scope to what has been identified as “interactive written discourse” (Ferrara, Brunner, and Whittemore 1991), i.e., dyadic or multiparty verbal exchanges via technologies of synchronous CMC such as Internet

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Relay Chat, web-based chat systems, or Instant Messaging, which some researchers identify as the closest approximations of spoken conversation. However, a considerable part of the literature examines CS in asynchronous (dyadic or multiparty) CMD, in particular email, newsgroups, web forums, and texting. Still other researchers have located bilingual discourse in edited genres aimed at a reading audience, such as weblogs and fan fiction. These, in turn, are reminiscent of more traditional written CS, which is a practice known at least since medieval poetry and ranges from fictional representations of conversational dialogue (as in novels or stageplay) to diary writing and newspaper discourse (Androutsopoulos 2007b; Callahan 2004). The approach advocated here is an inclusive one. I suggest that there is no a priori reason not to consider blogs or social networking profile pages as sites of bilingual discourse. Nevertheless, a terminological and analytical distinction is required between two main types of CS in CMC: For convenience, I shall call them “conversational” (dyadic or multiparty, synchronous or asynchronous) and “non-conversational” (edited and published by a single author), bearing in mind the caveats mentioned earlier. With these distinctions in mind, CS will now be distinguished from other aspects of multilingual CMD. The aim in doing so is to determine when the coexistence of more than one language in CMD constitutes CS and to identify the discourse units, or equivalents of a “speech exchange”, in which CS can be located.6 I distinguish CS from four other patterns of multilingualism in CMC: a) b) c) d)

The “multilingual Internet” as a whole The coexistence of different languages on a web page or thread Language choices for emblems Sequential language choices lacking a dialogical interrelation

The first pattern refers to the multilingualism that emerges from the coexistence of different websites, channels, forums, etc. on the web. For instance, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as an entire system is massively multilingual, and so are platforms like flickr and blogger.com in their entirety. While this level is sometimes referred to in discussions of the multilingual Internet (see, e.g., some chapters in Danet and Herring 2007a), CS must be located on the more concrete level of individual web pages, discussion threads, or chat channel sessions. At this level, it is necessary to single out the multilingualism that emerges from the coexistence of different discourse units on a single web page. Contemporary websites are composed from textual units of diverse kinds and origins – editorial content, usergenerated content, advertisements, graphic-designed banners, user comments – which are adjacent in screen space. Multilingual surfaces emerge when such adjacent units “speak”, or are cast in, different languages or dialects as a result of different purposes, audiences, or production processes. Consider flickr pages, for example, where headlines, banners tags, and comments are not necessarily in the same language (Lee and Barton 2011). Consider media-sharing sites, where the

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language of posted items is often different from that of comments, and social network profile pages, where different “friends” may contribute wall posts in different languages. These are multilingual or indeed heteroglossic discourse spaces (Androutsopoulos 2011), but they do not automatically constitute instances of CS. To the extent that their constituents differ in terms of authorship and production process, they often cannot be conceived of as part of one “episode”; what holds them together is their spatial coexistence in product and reception and not their dialogic orientation to each other. Indeed, the units that make up multilingual web surfaces are often monolingual in themselves. However, nothing prevents some of these units from containing CS. Think of an online newspaper where comments to news items come in different varieties (e.g., standard and dialect) or languages (e.g., the national and a minority language), thus constituting candidates for CS. Still at the level of single web pages or threads, the third distinction is between CS and language choices for emblems, i.e., textual units that identify and represent individual or institutional actors in CMC. Emblems include website names and screen names, slogans, user signatures, and navigation bars: They are usually graphically designed and placed on website layout. There is evidence that emblematic language choices can extend the multilingual make-up of a website or discussion forum by introducing linguistic resources that are not regularly used in ongoing user discussions or editorial copy (Androutsopoulos 2006a, 2007b). This strategic allocation of languages leads to a sort of emblematic bilingualism, which does not challenge the dominant language in terms of informational load but selects another code as relevant to the identity of an institution or individual. Important as these processes may be to multilingual discourse on the web, they are not instances of CS (to the extent that these textual units do not include CS in themselves), even though they may coexist with instances of CS: Think of a blog that uses emblems in order to make a minority language visible, while its entries and their comments include CS between that minority and the respective majority language. Finally, conversational CMD modes need to be scrutinised in order to assess if the linguistic diversity they host constitutes CS. Consider IRC, a model case of interactive written discourse. Even if IRC is carried out in a language other than English, the system-generated messages that announce users who are entering or leaving a channel are automatically cast in English (Siebenhaar 2005, 2006). While they contribute to the multilingual make-up of channels, these automated messages are not part of participants’ code choices and therefore need to be excluded from CS analysis (as Siebenhaar explicitly does). In a similar vein, we may ask whether the lists of comments that respond to a “spectacle” or “prompt” in Web 2.0 environments (a blog post, photo, video, song, etc.) qualify as instances of CS. Comments may in principle be posted in any language, and even though the language of the “prompt” will often make a particular language relevant, it is not uncommon to find comments in different languages. However, whether these individual code choices by different commenters are sequentially related to each other needs to be demon-

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strated rather than assumed a priori. My observations suggest that comments often respond to the “prompt” rather than to other posts, and while they all contribute to the multilingual character of a chain of comments, they are not forcibly instances of CS (although they can draw on CS, of course, in their own internal organisation). In conclusion, even though all CS entails a juxtaposition of linguistic codes, as Gumperz’ seminal definition puts it (see section 1), there is good reason to adapt a restrictive view of what juxtapositions will constitute CS in CMD. Multilingual CMD environments are shaped at different levels by contrastive language choices which are motivated and meaningful, but for these contrasts to qualify as CS, evidence is required that they are in some way dialogically interrelated by responding to previous, and contextualizing subsequent, contributions.

4.

Code-switching across CMC modes

While limited in number, studies of CS in CMC have examined a range of media modes and sociolinguistic settings, using a range of different methods in the process. Table 1 provides an overview of the research summarized in this chapter. Its main categories – mode, participation framework, languages involved, social settings, and methods – orient both to the distinction between medium and situation factors in Herring’s (2007) CMD classification scheme and to respective distinctions in studies of code-switching in writing (Callahan 2004). The dimension of synchronicity (synchronous and asynchronous modes) is not listed separately, as it is a stable feature of each mode, but it is discussed in detail in the next section. As regards CMC modes, most literature considers traditional, pre-web modes of interpersonal CMC (IRC, email, mailing lists, Usenet groups) and only a few web-based modes (discussion forums). This results in a focus on more languageheavy modes, whereas multimodally-intensive modes such as media sharing sites and profile pages are hardly examined. As a consequence, the tantalising question of how to deal with CS when modes other than written text are heavily involved in the production of meaning has not been dealt with systematically.7 Nonetheless, this coverage still allows us to conclude that code-switching may in principle occur in any CMD mode, be it unidirectional or interactive, synchronous or asynchronous, dyadic or public, private or professional. The category of participation framework asks what roles of participation are made possible by and conventionalised in the usage of a given CMD mode. Participation structure is a situation factor in Herring’s (2007) classification scheme. However, it is in part a medium factor as well, since different CMC modes facilitate different participation frameworks. Instead of the usual labeling in terms of number of participants – one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many – I prefer the terms “private” and “public”, the former corresponding to dyadic exchanges or those among a limited number of known participants, while the latter refers to

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communication in a public CMD environment such as a channel or forum, which by definition includes unknown participants. I address the consequences of this distinction for bilingual discourse below (section 5.2). Table 1.

Classification of selected research publications on code-switching in CMC (Publications listed by mode and chronologically within each mode. Modes: s=synchronous, a=asynchronous. Methods: QN=quantitative, QL=qualitative.)

Authors

CMC Modes

Participation

Languages

Participants, Social setting

Methods

Paolillo 1996, 2001, 2011

IRC (s) Usenet (a)

Public

English/Hindi English/Punjabi

Ethnic minority

QN, QL

Androutsopoulos and IRC (s) Hinnenkamp 2001

Public

German/Greek Turkish/German

Ethnic minority

QL

Tsaliki 2003

IRC (s)

Public

Greek/English

Ethnic minority

QL

Androutsopoulos and Ziegler 2004

IRC (s)

Public

standard German/ dialect

Citychat

QN, QL

Siebenhaar 2005, 2006, 2008

IRC, Web chats (s)

Public

Swiss German dialects/standard German

Youth culture, Flirt communities

QN, QL

Hinnenkamp 2008

IRC (s)

Public

Turkish/German

Ethnic minority

QL

Georgakopoulou 1997, 2004

Email (a)

Private

Greek (L1)/ English

Friends group

QL

Hinrichs 2006

Email, Forums (a)

Private Public

Jamaican Creole (L1)/English

Univ students Jam. diaspora

QN, QL

Warschauer et al. 2007

Email (a)

Private

English/Egyptian Arabic (L1)

Young professionals

QN

Lee 2007

Email (a), ICQ (s)

Private

Cantonese (L1)/ English

Cantonese university students

QN

Goldbarg 2009

Email (a)

Private

Spanish (L1)/ English

Graduate students

QN

Tsiplakou 2009

Email (a)

Private

Greek (L1)/English/ Fellow academics French/Greek Cypriot dialect

QN, QL

Deumert and Masinyana 2008

SMS (a)

Private

isiXhosa (L1)/ English

Young adults

QN, QL

McClure 2001

Mailing lists (a)

Public

English/Assyrian

Ethnic minority

Sebba 2003

Bulletin board (a)

Public

English (L1)/stylized Pop culture, Creole Comedy fans

QL

Androutsopoulos 2004

Forums, Guestbooks (a)

Public

German (L1)/ English

Music youth culture

QL

Sperlich 2005

Forums (a)

Public

Niuean (L1)/ English

Local community, Diaspora

QN, QL

Androutsopoulos Forums (a) 2006a, 2006b, 2007b

Public

German/Greek, Persian, Hindi, Arabic

Ethnic minority

QN, QL

Leppänen 2007; Leppänen et al. 2009

Public

Finnish (L1)/ English

Youth cultures, music, fan fiction, sports

QL

Forums, Blogs (a)

QL

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The third column lists the languages that are (most) relevant to each study.8 A number of sociolinguistic constellations are evident here, between majority and minority (heritage, immigrant, community) language, between national language and English, between a Creole and its lexifier (Hinrichs 2006), standard and dialect, and standard and stylized vernacular speech (e.g., “Ali G language”, Sebba 2003). Code-switching between varieties of one language is reported from the Greek- and German-speaking areas and studied along the same functional lines as bilingual CS. For the sake of overview, this table downplays the few documented instances of “polylingual languaging” (Hinnenkamp 2008; Jørgensen 2008; Tsiplakou 2009), which involves the (playful) use of bits and pieces from different languages, language varieties, or styles (see sections 6, 7). The user groups and social settings that are examined in each study are categorised in the fourth column. The label “ethnic minority” brings together situations in which an immigrant or diasporic group uses a minority and a majority language. Other labels foreground online practices by young people, youth culture groups, or local communities, in which relations between national language and English, or standard and dialect, have been examined. Other documented cases involve multilingual academics or professionals, small language communities (Sperlich 2005), and a message board devoted to a Creole-speaking comedian (Sebba 2003). The overview does not mean to suggest rigid constraints between language pairs and social settings. Some language pairs (especially those involving English) are instantiated in different social settings, with distinct CS patterns in each case. For example, English/Creole CS shows different patterns in emails among Jamaican students and on forums by diasporic Jamaicans (Hinrichs 2006). Likewise, CS between national language and English CS is markedly different in youth-culture contexts and among elite bilingual expatriates (see section 5). The rightmost column features a broad distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. The “qualitative” label comprises methods from conversation, discourse, narrative, or style analysis, which have been used for the study of both conversational and non-conversational CMD. Such research often involves elements of online ethnography, whereby researchers work with data from social networks they themselves belong to (as with Georgakopoulou 1997 and Tsiplakou 2009), and focuses on functions rather than structures of CS. “Quantitative” encompasses quantifications based on questionnaire data (Goldbarg 2009; Tsiplakou 2009) or coding of textual data (as with Paolillo 2001; Siebenhaar 2008). What is remarkable is the frequency of mixed method approaches, which combine a “bird’s eye view” of the distribution of languages over a large data set with a detailed view of local processes of switching and mixing. Siebenhaar (2008) adds an intermediate level, “windowed or moving average analysis”, in which quantification zooms in to slices of time or channel activity as opposed to whole channel comparisons. Leppänen and Peuronen (2012) argue that the transfer of frameworks developed for the study of spoken language and interac-

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tion to the study of written multilingual CMC is not adequately problematised. They also point out that when studying edited genres such as blog posts and fan fiction, methods other than conversation-analytic ones, such as narrative analysis or stylistics, are required.

5.

Code-switching in technological and social context

5.1.

Effects of synchronicity

We may now ask which of the categories reviewed in the previous section have been developed into testable hypotheses. In principle, CS is subject to the entire range of interrelations between medium and situation factors that “have been observed to condition variation in computer-mediated discourse” (Herring 2007: n.p.). In the literature, however, there is only one robust hypothesis that is specifically formulated with a view on CS. It was formulated by John Paolillo (2011), who, in a study of English/Punjabi in IRC and Usenet, found that IRC data contain creative conversational CS, whereas Usenet data are limited to formulaic codeswitching (such as quoting poetry and using routine phrases). Paolillo’s generalisation is that synchronous modes of CMD will contain more conversational CS than asynchronous ones, other things being equal. Besides its quantitative sense, “more” can be understood in a qualitative sense, meaning a broader range of usage patterns or a richer repertoire of pragmatic functions of CS. Paolillo’s prediction is independently confirmed by Lee (2007: 203–204), who finds code mixing to be much more common in ICQ data than in emails by the same users. She attributes this to both synchronicity and formality, because the emails she studied include institutional exchanges, whereas her ICQ data are predominantly social interaction. The synchronicity hypothesis is no doubt a strong one with respect to mediumspecific differences across CMC modes. Synchronous CMC enables exchanges that unfold over several turns, with rapid transitions and relatively short turns, thereby resembling social interaction. In asynchronous modes, individual contributions and transition gaps between each contribution tend to be longer, creating more distance to prototypical interaction. This rationale ties in well with the assumption that synchronous CMC modes are “closer” to spoken language than synchronous ones (e.g., Dorleijn and Nortier 2009: 130). However, it may be difficult to isolate medium factors from social and situational ones empirically. Lee’s (2007) case study, in which synchronous and asynchronous data from the same individuals are compared, is a particularly fortunate one, but in public CMC environments such as chat channels and newsgroups, discourse is shaped by the technological properties of CMC synchronicity as much as by social and pragmatic factors such as individual linguistic repertoires, specific interpersonal relationships, interactional activities, and so on.

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Moreover, Paolillo’s hypothesis does not rule out CS in non-conversational CMC modes. The articulation of CS and mode described by Paolillo for U.S.-based Hindi and Punjabi communities, such that creative CS holds true for the synchronous mode and fixed CS for the asynchronous mode, does not necessarily hold true for other sociolinguistic settings. Some of the best examples of the creativity and playfulness of code-switching online come from asynchronous (but private), rather than synchronous, public modes (see Georgakopoulou 1997; Sebba 2003; Tsiplakou 2009). Hinrichs (2006) argues that the planned character of (asynchronous) CMC invites rhetorical uses of CS such as double-voicing and stylization. In that sense, asynchronous (public or dyadic) modes are interesting sites of CS online, precisely because they differ from the conditions of interpersonal interaction. Therefore, the synchronicity hypothesis should not lead us to assume that asynchronous modes lag behind synchronous ones in all aspects of CS. It seems more productive to theorise each mode as affording different opportunities for bilingual discourse. While synchronous modes enable mediated interaction to unfold in sequentially-related turns which can be sustained for considerable time, thereby replicating conversational CS to the largest extent possible, asynchronous modes offer options of planning and quoting, by which distinct patterns of CS are made possible. I return to these issues in the concluding sections of this chapter (see sections 6 and 7). 5.2.

Effects of public and private CMD

Some of the best examples of bilingual online creativity come from asynchronous, private exchanges, such as emails among friends and colleagues. By contrast, most available research is on public CMC modes such as forums and chat channels, whose participation framework is at odds with the typical situational conditions of private, conversational CS. Public discourse by definition entails an audience that is, at least in part, unknown to the speaker. In media discourse studies, this is captured in the notion of overhearers (Hutchby 2006), which corresponds to the category of “lurkers” in Internet culture. Overhearers are legitimate, ratified participants who are neither known to the speaker nor actively involved in an exchange, but whose presence may nonetheless have an effect on a speaker’s audience design (Bell 1984) – that is, the way language choices are tailored to parts of the audience. All public conversational CMD includes overhearers by definition, and even though contributions in public CMC environments are typically directed to specific addressees who have a primary impact on language style, they are always co-directed to overhearers. At the same time, CS presupposes a bi- or multilingual audience that is able to understand the codes at hand and to draw inferences from the way speakers juxtapose and alternate between these codes. This inferential capacity of participants is precisely a base condition of much conversational CS.

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However, such a bottom line cannot be taken for granted in public CMD. There is evidence to suggest that public CMD spaces create favourable conditions for the “functional marginalization” (Paolillo 1996) of minority and heritage languages on the Internet. Digital networks that explicitly focus on a shared ethnolinguistic identity may in fact be used by ethnolinguistically heterogeneous individuals, leading to an orientation to the majority language as a common denominator. The reasons for such heterogeneity may be diverse: The ethnic communities that use CMD spaces are often undergoing intergenerational language shift, some of their members may not be fluent in the heritage language anymore, or users may be ethnically mixed, including members of the ethnic majority group. In such cases, the communicative aim of reaching as many audience members as possible may override the preference for the heritage language, and at the same time the wish to index ethnolinguistic identity may lead to patterns of formulaic and emblematic codeswitching from the dominant, majority language into the heritage language, as described by Paolillo and Androutsopoulos, among others. However, it seems important not to generalise this finding, as chat channels with a predominant use of migrant/ethnic languages have been studied as well (e.g., Androutsopoulos and Hinnenkamp 2001; Hinnenkamp 2008; Tsaliki 2003). By contrast, private CMD provides different conditions for recipient design (to use a term from conversation analysis), as participants can rely on a much greater inferential potential; i.e., they can count on their code-choices and switches being understood by virtue of common background knowledge and common practices. Speakers have more leeway to explore playfully the associative potential of language, dialects, and styles in their shared repertoire (Tsiplakou 2009). 5.3.

Research on different social settings

Common sites for CS online are public CMD spaces by and for immigrant, diaspora, and ethnic minority groups, in which CS between the minority (migrant, community) and the respective majority language has been identified as the main pattern of bilingual discourse. Studies of this type of CS are often linked to an interest in language maintenance, and CMC has been associated with hopes and expectations of maintenance as much as with anxieties of loss and acceleration of ongoing processes of linguistic and cultural shift (Sperlich 2005). Another user population that has attracted research attention is young people and their local or “glocal” language practices associated with music and media culture. In the literature reviewed here, such groups are located in Egypt, Finland, Germany, and South Africa, and one of their conspicuous language practices in various CMC modes is CS between the respective national language and English. Diverse as they may be, these studies suggest patterns of “minimal bilingualism” (Androutsopoulos 2007b), in which sets of English chunks and formulaic routines (including greetings and farewells, interjections and discourse organisers, re-

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quests, slogans, etc.) are inserted into the base national or majority language. Their choice is often indexical to the groups’ lifestyle orientations, including stylized representations of vernacular “Englishes” (Androutsopoulos 2004, 2007b). Research from Finland offers evidence for an even broader range of online bilingual practices involving English in Finnish youth cultures (Leppänen 2007; Leppänen et al. 2009). One such practice is alternational CS in fan fiction (i.e., stories written by fans about popular fiction characters or settings), whereby Finnish and English are used for narrative and reported speech, respectively, so that neither constitutes the predominant language of discourse. In another digital genre, diary weblogs, English is the matrix language into which Finnish cultural keywords and expressions are inserted. In all these cases, there is no evidence that this usage mirrors corresponding bilingual styles in face-to-face communication. Rather, it is CMD that enables these bilingual practices in the first place. In addition to these Finnish cases, there is some evidence of CMD from what one might call elite bilinguals (i.e., academics, white-collar professionals) with an L1 other than English, whose private email communication shows complex patterns of switching and mixing (Georgakopoulou 1997; Tsiplakou 2009, both on L1 speakers of Greek). The social conditions of CS online may of course be more complex that that. For instance, the members of fan communities within one nation-state are often of ethnically diverse origins, and the cultural practices they orient to may originate beyond the English-speaking world. One anecdotal example is the web forum of a local network of salsa fans in northern Germany (based on unpublished material), which includes native speakers of German, Spanish, and various other migrant languages. Regardless of their origin, forum members orient to Spanish as a symbol of their common cultural practice, and the usage of Spanish in this forum is often formulaic, resembling the patterns of minimal bilingualism that are often identified with English. Spanish is also used among Spanish-speaking participants, and so are migrant languages (Turkish, Polish) among their respective speakers. The outcome is a complex polylingual space, in which the majority language, the language linked to the particular cultural practice, and immigrant languages all find their place. 5.4.

Effect of social variables

The qualitative orientation of much research reviewed here means that the situated expression of social identities through CS (see section 6) has attracted more attention than the testing of hypotheses based on large corpora. It is therefore not surprising that the effect of different social variables on CS online has not been systematically examined. However, a few sources of evidence are available. In his work on Swiss-German chats, Siebenhaar (2005, 2006) identifies the combined effect of age group and channel range on dialect/standard switching. Swiss teenagers

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prefer local IRC rooms and use their dialect as the default code, whereas middleaged users prefer a cross-regional flirt chat, in which they use a considerable amount of standard German as well. Paolillo (2001) and Ziegler (2005) provide evidence for the impact of institutional roles within Internet culture on CS. Paolillo finds that operators of the IRC channel #india switch less into Hindi than peripheral users. As Paolillo points out, an identity-based hypothesis would predict the opposite, i.e., that core members of the IRC network use the heritage language to a higher degree. Ziegler (2005) finds that in the local IRC channel of a German city, #mannheim, channel operators use higher amounts of the local city dialect, thus CS from and to standard German, than ordinary chatters. Paolillo offers a pragmatic explanation of his finding based on an attention-based hypothesis: U.S.-born IRC users of Indian descent display ethnic affiliation by other means than heritage language, and it is peripheral (rather than core) members of the chat community who code-switch in order to attract attention. Tsiplakou (2009) presents findings from a questionnaire study that aimed at identifying variables predicting the degree of CS in email (between Greek and English, among native Greeks), one such variable being the use of English at home.

6.

Code-switching patterns

CS in CMC is not confined to just a few typical patterns of usage. In terms of structure, reported patterns of usage range from a few formulaic switches to dense, multilingual code-mixing and “polylingual languaging” (sections 6, 7). A restriction to formulaic CS has been reported for public CMD in some ethnic communities (see work by Paolillo and Androutsopoulos), for English/Jamaican Creole in personal emails (Hinrichs 2006), and for national language/English in youth-cultural contexts (see section 5.3). Bilingual code-mixing has been reported for a number of languages and modes, including personal emails among fellow academics in Cyprus (Tsiplakou 2009), chatting among youth of Turkish descent in Germany (Hinnenkamp 2008), and “mixed messages characterized by EnglishisiXhosa code-mixing and code-switching” in texting among South African youths (Deumert and Masinyana 2008: 137). Deumert and Masinyana (2008) claim that these linguistically mixed messages mirror code-mixing as the unmarked choice in the spoken vernacular usage of these youths. The percentage of mixed text messages in their data is 23 % (in a corpus of 312 messages), and they are further differentiated by communicative purpose. Code-mixing occurs in text messages on social arrangements and information exchange, but less so in romantic messages. In terms of discourse functions, the literature drawing on widely accepted classifications of conversational CS (see section 2) has produced evidence for a number of discourse functions of CS in CMC.9 These include:

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a) switching for formulaic discourse purposes, including greetings, farewells, and good wishes; b) switching in order to perform culturally-specific genres such as poetry or joketelling; c) switching to convey reported speech (as opposed to the writer’s own speech); d) switching with repetition of an utterance for emphatic purposes; e) switching to index one particular addressee, to respond to language choices by preceding contributions, or to challenge other participants’ language choices; f) switching to contextualize a shift of topic or perspective, to distinguish between facts and opinion, information and affect, and so on; g) switching to mark what is being said as jocular or serious, and to mitigate potential face-threatening acts, for example through humorous CS in a dispreferred response or a request; h) switching to or from the interlocutor’s code to index consent or dissent, agreement and conflict, alignment and distancing, and so on. Some of these functions – especially (a) and (b) – have been found to favor a sustained use of minority or migrant languages, while for others, the pragmatic effect is created through the situated contrast between the codes involved (Hinrichs 2006 provides an extensive discussion of this distinction). While the comparability of CS in CMC with general discourse functions of conversational CS is thus in principle firmly established across languages, modes, and social settings, individual manifestations of CS in CMD data may be difficult to categorize, and switching and mixing may co-occur in the discourse of one user or community. A few examples from my own research on predominantly Germanspeaking diasporic forums are presented below to illustrate these points (Androutsopoulos 2006a, b, 2007a). The following three examples come from an Indian, Persian, and Greek web discussion forum, respectively, and exemplify three variants of CS within a post:10 (1) Excerpt from the Indian forum, theinder.net (base language is German, English italicized) im westen ist es auch tradition jungfräulich in die ehe zu treten!!! das tun auch einige (bsp. spanierinnen, italienerinnen, etc.)! wieso wird immer der westen für alles verantwortlich gemacht??? is there no gravity in indian brains? [‘in the west, no sex before marriage is also a tradition!!! And some stick to it as well (e.g., Spaniards, Italians etc.)! Why is the West always being blamed for everything??? is there no gravity in indian brains?’] (2) Excerpt from the Iranian forum, iran-now.de (base language is Persian, German italicized) Bare B. juuuuuuuuun, kamelan hagh dari. in marda ham khasisan, ham bimazan wa ham gedan!!! Genau das dachte ich mir auch, chon iran-klick waghat

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klick mikhado sonst nix, aber neeeeeeeeeeeee A. agha kann uns ja net ghalbesh az ma beporseh. ghorbuuuuuuuuuuuune harfat khanumi. P. e immer noch ghamginiani [‘That’s true, dear B, you’re absolutely right. These men are stingy, boring, and quite the poor creatures!!! That’s exactly what I thought, because on iran-klick you just need to click, nothing else, but nooo Mister A. just can’t ask in advance. I love you for your words, my dear. P is still sad’] (3) Excerpt from the Greek forum, greex.net (base language is Greek, German italicized) edo iparxi pollous ellines apo tin makedonia epidis i wirtschaftliche lage tous den einai kali … palia i makedoni itane plousioi … eftiaxnan gounes ktlp ala tora pige i wirtschaft me tis gounes den bach runter [‘there are many greeks from macedonia here but their financial situation is not good … macedonians were rich in the past, they were trading with furs, but now the fur business is going down the drain’] In these and other forums examined in that study, ethnic minority languages mainly occur in isolated, insertional switches. In Excerpt 1, taken from a discussion thread on premarital sex, the concluding switch into English serves to accentuate the writer’s critical conclusion and sets it off from the preceding argumentation. This type of bilingual discourse is quite common in these forums, and several types of discourse functions listed above are instantiated in this insertional manner. In Excerpt 2, the first instance of German can be analysed as a switch that marks a change of perspective from the previous evaluation of “these men” to the writer’s own views – “That’s exactly what I thought”. However, this line of interpretation becomes increasingly difficult as the post unfolds, and no contextualizing function can be identified for the penultimate adverbial phrase in German, which is more typical for code-mixing. In Excerpt (3), whose base language is Greek, the three German phrases (financial situation, business, down the drain) have neither any obvious discourse function nor do they serve a referential necessity. In both cases, a Greek equivalent would presumably have been readily available, and the writer seems to select German lexical items and idioms for reasons of habit or convenience. The last instance of German in this excerpt is an idiom (den Bach runtergehen ‘go down the drain’), and the writer expresses the finite verb in Greek and the idiomatic phrase in German. In Auer’s discourse-functional framework (see section 2), such cases are also typically classified as code-mixing. Working with classifications of discourse functions provides an initial overview of patterns of CS in a CMC environment and a useful point of entry for exploratory research. Cumulatively, analyses along these lines offer valuable evidence for the regularity and conventionality of CS online, as well as for its functional similarity to CS in other discourse environments, and thereby contribute to

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its normalization. However, too heavy a reliance on classifications also entails the risk of reducing analysis to a simple “category check”, which disconnects CS from the conversational activity in which it is embedded and may result in a decontextualized listing of CS instances. That danger can be reduced by ethnographic knowledge of the population and digital platform under study and by detailed sequential analyses that take into account “the place within the interactional episode in which languages alternate” (Auer 1998b: 3), the way switches align to previous code choices of other speakers, and the way they index participants’ background knowledge. More specifically, the functional analysis of CS in CMC needs to transcend the level of single turns or posts and examine the sequential organisation of codeswitching within threads of dialogically related posts or messages. CS is embedded in the “polylogues” (Marcoccia 2004) that unfold on spaces of public, asynchronous, thematically focused discourse, and makes use of the specific affordances provided by these spaces (see also discussion in Georgakopoulou 1997; Siebenhaar 2006). In the case of the Germany-based diaspora forums, switches within a post are a resource for responding to different addressees and engaging with different strands of a discussion thread. Users sometimes start in one language, quote from previous posts which are cast in a different language, respond to that quote in its language choice, and then return to their original code choice (Androutsopoulos 2006a, b, 2007a). In addition, a pragmatically informed micro-analysis of CS in CMC will aim to examine “how, within frameworks of generic assumptions and expectations, speech communities draw upon their linguistic resources in order to maximize the effectiveness and functionality of their communication” (Georgakopoulou (1997: 160). In such an analysis it is possible to identify how different codes in a group’s usage take on pragmatic functions and identity values, which cannot be assumed a priori based on the wider cultural associations of these languages. The use of linguistic heterogeneity to index social identities is a key issue in much of the work reviewed here. Some researchers draw on Gumperz’ distinction between “we-code” and “they-code”, which was originally equated with minority and mainstream language, respectively. This works well when a few salient instances of a code are used as a means to signal the ethnic identity associated with that code, and such “we-code” signals reported repeatedly include greetings, openings, closing, slogans, and the like (Androutsopoulos 2006a; Hinrichs 2006; Paolillo 1996). This approach is complemented by a more fluid and dynamic understanding of language/identity relations, in which “we”/“they” contrasts are locally constructed in discourse. In diaspora forum discussions, for example, the “we-code” is not always the minority language, and the “they-code” is not always the mainstream language. Writers may switch into their heritage language to index traditionalist views they distance themselves from, or, in another case, switch into the majority language to emphasize their own multicultural outlook (see Androutsopoulos 2006a; Hinrichs 2006).

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Working within a constructivist language and identities framework, Tsiplakou (2009) examines how email writers draw on Greek, English, and further linguistic resources (French, Cypriot Greek dialect, stylized sociolects of Greek) in order to act out “localized performativities”, i.e., contextually constructed social identities, which participants playfully claim for themselves, stylize, or parody. Hinrichs (2006) identifies three types of identity-related alternation between Standard English and Creole in private emails among Jamaican students: use of Creole for selfidentification and message framing (e.g., greetings, farewells, terms of addressing); use of CS to organize different narrative activities and to set apart “we” and “they” perspectives; and double-voicing, with Creole being employed in the creation of stereotypical local speech styles. In the last pattern, writers exploit the “potential of Patois to make salient certain cultural values and personae” (2006: 134) such as the “country bumpkin” persona, which writers playfully or ironically associate themselves with in specific thematic contexts and speech acts, for instance to mitigate boasting. As Hinrichs (2006: 134) suggests, these latter expressions of identity-related CS are “especially at home with the written medium” because they “involve the highest degree of planned, rhetorical use” of Creole.

7.

Computer-mediated discourse as a new domain of multilingual code-switching

Based on the preceding discussion, we are now in a position to assess the relation of CS in CMC to spoken conversational CS and written CS. The reviewed literature does not offer a generally agreed-upon position on this, and its suggestions mirror to some extent the wider discussion on spoken and written aspects of language on the Internet. While CS in CMC obviously qualifies as written in terms of the written representation of linguistic signs, it also bears resemblance to spoken conversational CS, most obviously in terms of its dialogic context and its discourse functions (see section 6). From the perspective of contemporary language-focused CMC scholarship, however, both a dichotomy of that sort and the homogenisation of various CMD genres and practices as “language on the Internet” seem rather crude. CMC is generally viewed as a heterogeneous domain of discourse, in which traditional dichotomies between written and spoken, private and public, immediate and mediated discourse, are blurred. Theorizing CS in CMC needs to take the specific pragmatic and social conditions of written language use in digital media more systematically into account. Writing in networked digital media is different from other types of written discourse in a number of ways: It is dialogical, i.e., oriented to particular addressees, and often embedded in multiparty conversational sequences; it also is often vernacular, i.e., located outside of educational, professional, and other institutions; and it is often simultaneously used together with other semiotic resources. Taking

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these properties of digital writing into account when studying CS in CMC will contribute to a deconstruction of spoken/written dichotomies and to a move beyond the assumption that only spoken conversational CS constitutes “authentic” CS and therefore sets the benchmark against which CS in CMC ought to be assessed. Such expectations are familiar from other domains of written CS, notably in fiction, where CS “authenticity” is assessed in terms of fictional settings, characters, and the thematic content of a novel (Callahan 2004: 99–111). These criteria no doubt operate, albeit implicitly, when researchers assess the ethnic or diasporic “authenticity” of a web forum or chat channel. Notions of authenticity are also reproduced within CMC, for example in the assumption that only synchronous CMC modes will host “real” CS (see sections 3, 5). An alternative and, I would suggest, more productive approach would be to ask how CS is used as a pragmatic resource under the specific conditions of CMD, and how specific conditions of written online discourse can give rise to distinct CS practices. Two relevant points are touched upon here: planning and the semiotics of writing itself. Planning focuses on the difference between the immediate production of speech in a spoken conversational setting and the gaps between production and reception that are inherent in CMC, especially its asynchronous modes. The availability of planning time and the lack of visual cues are at the core of the assumption that CMC is characterised by code-centered contextualization cues (Georgakopoulou 1997, 2003). However, the assumption that a “higher level of consciousness […] seems inevitable in producing written CS” (Dorleijn and Nortier 2009: 131) should not be generalised prematurely. It is well known that CMD is sometimes produced quickly and spontaneously, while in other cases it may involve extensive drafting and rewording. It is therefore more useful to expect different levels or degrees of conscious organisation of bilingual discourse, depending on mode and circumstances. Moreover, it seems necessary to distinguish between various potential consequences of planning for CS. One of these, as already noted (section 6), relates to the composition of contributions within multiparty conversational exchanges. Asynchronous modes, especially, enable writers to deploy strategies of participation in which a single post may compile responses to a number of previous posts; in multilingual contexts, writers may thereby use post-internal CS as a resource for distinguishing between addressees or perspectives. What is particular to CS in this regard is its strategic deployment in a context of discourse organisation that is uniquely digital. A second and less well understood impact of planning is on the potential avoidance of or preference for certain types of switching or mixing. While examples like (3) may reflect the mixed language style that has been reported as typical for the speech of immigrant background youth (e.g., Hinnenkamp 2008), language mixing is relatively rare across the forums of that study. I suggested (Androutsopoulos 2007a: 347–348) that this may be due to the combined impact of the conditions of

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publicness and asynchronicity: The metalinguistic awareness involved in planning and editing posts may inhibit the spontaneous, unconscious process of code-mixing, and the public character (and ethnolinguistic heterogeneity) of these forums is at odds with the situational conditions that favour the occurrence of code-mixing. In this case, the conscious production of discourse seems to result to a higher degree of formality, in that language contact patterns that are at home in vernacular, intimate settings are avoided. However, the opposite tendency is also documented. That is, the planning opportunities afforded by asynchronous CMC may enable participants to use language mixing in creative and sometimes masterful ways that might not have occurred in speech. A few case studies offer evidence for this tendency, in part drawing on the notion of “polylingual languaging” (a playful use of all linguistic resources available to speakers/writers in a given context, regardless of degrees of linguistic competence or ethnolinguistic affiliation; Jørgensen 2008). One example comes from a discussion thread on language and ethnicity from a German-based Greek forum (Androutsopoulos 2006b), where a poster argues that Germany-born Greeks would permanently mix languages in both countries. A short response to this – Korrekt. richtisch stin teleia gebracht (‘Correct. Got right to the point’) – starts in German, switches intrasententially to Greek for one phrase (‘to the point’) and concludes in German. The phrase switched into Greek is idiomatic in German, although not in Greek, and the resulting mix sounds pragmatically odd when taken literally. However, this mix encapsulates the “essence” of the preceding discussion, i.e., the group’s mixture of identities and languages, and even though the phrase itself would be a rather odd and unexpected instance of mixing in speech, its symbolic meaning can readily be understood by its audience and ties in well with everyday and academic interpretations of mixed talk as a symbol of hybrid identities (Hinnenkamp 2008). This and other research (notably Hinnenkamp 2008; Tsiplakou 2009) suggests that even though their pragmatic force depends on shared knowledge and pragmatic conventions, some instances of code-mixing in CMD go beyond a simple reflection of spoken conversational patterns (Tsiplakou offers evidence from spoken conversation to support this point). What the language mixing instances reported in these studies share are their implicitly or explicitly metalinguistic character and their occurrence in discourse that focuses on key identity issues of a group or community. Viewed this way, some code-mixing in CMC is pragmatically effective precisely because it diverges from colloquial bilingual usage to “iconise” beliefs or values shared by the participants. However, it is very difficult to say whether the distinctive feel of these mixing instances is due to their particular syntactic structure or rather to their rhetorical tailoring of code-mixing to the gist of a given discourse episode. A second point that merits more attention in future research is the relevance of the mode-specific resources of writing (i.e., orthography, spelling variation, and

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even script choice) in the production of CS in CMC. Again, different aspects need to be distinguished preliminarily. One is the impact of standardised orthographies on the selection of base language in CMD. Hinrichs (2006) reports that unlike everyday communication in Jamaica, where Creole is the default medium of communication, its lack of a standardised orthography makes it less suitable to that purpose in CMD, so that the Jamaican students and expatriates in his study subjects basically draw on English, occasionally switching to Creole. However, in other settings, writers may stick to their vernacular in CMD despite its lack of a standardised orthography, for example in German-speaking Switzerland (Siebenhaar 2005, 2006), where the online spelling of local dialects tends to reflect vernacular pronunciation more accurately than traditional dialect spelling does. A further issue, again following up on the notion of code-centered contextualisation cues, is the role of spelling in signalling CS. It is obvious that CS in CMD is produced by representing in writing another language (or dialect), but what is less obvious is that this can be done based on different orthographic conventions. The switch from one language to another usually co-occurs with, and is indexed by, a switch between the respective orthographies, albeit not necessarily so. Representing one language in the orthography of another may sometimes be a matter of necessity, but it may also be a more or less conscious choice and thereby a source of pragmatic meaning in its own right. There is also evidence that spelling may be exploited in its own right, with CMD writers drawing on the contrast with normative orthography to create pragmatic meaning. A striking example is the deliberate “mixing of alphabetic conventions” reported for German-Turkish chatters who create mixed-language conversations as “German words and even phrases get a kind of Turkish wrapping”, which consists of Turkish orthography (Hinnenkamp 2008: 262, 266). Spelling Deutsch (in correct German orthography) as Doyc (based on Turkish orthography) is, as the context makes clear, not a typo or spelling mistake but a conscious blend of language and orthography designed to elicit pragmatic meaning, which ties in with the debate on language and ethnic boundaries that dominates that chat session. Likewise, although at a different level of written structure, there is evidence of purposeful “script switching” between native and Roman script in the Romanised transliteration of different languages on the Internet (see chapters in Danet and Herring 2007a). Such evidence, I argue, suggests that the study of CS in CMC primarily in terms of its apparent “authenticity” or correspondence to spoken conversational CS may be limiting, and that important insights will be gained by theorising the written digital mode not as a limitation but as a new set of conditions for the deployment of multilingual resources in discourse.

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Outlook and directions for future research

Research has only just started tackling the massive bilingualism and multilingualism that occurs as global multilingual populations increasingly gain access to digital communications media. Much remains to be done in documenting different sites and types of CS online, and systematic comparisons among modes, language, and settings are needed. Most lacking are, first, studies of private, dyadic data; second, cross-media and cross-mode comparisons of CS usage based on the same writer(s); third, multimodal data from social networking and media-sharing websites; and fourth, case studies of multilingual CMD in transnational work teams. In terms of method, research is moving away from static classifications and towards ethnographically and pragmatically informed analyses of the local interactional purposes that CS serves in its generic and sequential context. However, mixedmethods combinations of qualitative and quantitative techniques, e.g., by means of questionnaires or language choice analyses, are bound to remain productive and insightful. One limitation of current research is the restriction to single modes, which are analytically examined in isolation. Motivated by practical necessities as that may be, it creates an isolationism that runs counter to actual computer-mediated practices, which are spread across modes and platforms in combinations and routines that are not yet well understood. There is reason to assume that CS patterns will often cut across modes, and understanding such code/mode repertoires will deepen the understanding of the specific properties of CS online. Two issues that cut across the sections of this chapter are how to theorise the relationship between medium and social/situation factors, on the one hand, and between online written and offline spoken CS, on the other. Even though it might seem customary to think of CS on the Internet in terms of its “authenticity” or correspondence to an assumed spoken conversational blueprint in the usage of an individual or community, I have argued that CMD is unscripted, dynamically unfolding communication in its own right. Taking this into account would cast doubt on both the necessity and the means of establishing such authenticity. This chapter has presented a number of cases where bilingual practices are not verbatim reproductions of face-to-face interaction patterns but, judging from ethnographic and linguistic evidence, specific to CMD. I therefore suggest that rather than examining CS online in terms of its authenticity or equivalence to offline speech, a more productive question to pursue is how CS is used as a resource, under the specific conditions of communication offered by digital media.

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Notes 1. Only two volumes to date include more than one contribution dealing, at least in part, with CS (Danet and Herring 2007a and a 2006 special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics 10[4]), while in other recent books the topic is either entirely absent or marginal (e.g., Baron 2008; Crystal 2006; Rowe and Wyss 2009). 2. The languages of publication covered are English and German. Literature in other languages can be traced through the reference list. Literature coverage is through June 2010. 3. The latter is used by Androutsopoulos and Hinnenkamp (2001), Androutsopoulos and Ziegler (2004), Androutsopoulos (2006a, 2007a), Hinnenkamp (2008), Hinrichs (2006), Leppänen (2007), Siebenhaar (2005, 2006), and Tsiplakou (2009). 4. Auer points out that “a speaker may simply want to avoid the language in which he or she feels insecure and speak the one in which he or she has greater competence. Yet preference-related switching may also be due to a deliberate decision based on political considerations” (1995: 125). 5. Following Herring (2004), I use computer-mediated discourse (CMD) to indicate a narrower focus on the use of semiotic resources, whereas CMC denotes a broader view on communication processes facilitated by digital technologies. 6. In earlier work (Androutsopoulos 2006a), I located CS within a quadripartite matrix of multilingualism on ethnic portals. Its main site is regular user-contributed discourse, especially in forums and occasionally in journalists’ edited content as well. This is distinguished from user and site-specific emblems, such as names, mottos, and slogans. These distinctions are taken up and recontextualised in the present discussion. 7. This mirrors the limitations of research on multilingualism in CMC in general (see Danet and Herring 2007b: 24). 8. The label “L1” (first language) was only added if clearly stated in the research, usually based on controlled socio-demographic data. Other studies either do not control for this factor or they study public CMD settings where assigning an L1 is not straightforward. 9. All of the following studies include discussions of these: Androutsopoulos (2006a, 2007a), Androutsopoulos and Hinnenkamp (2001), Dorleijn and Nortier (2009), Georgakopoulou (1997), Hinrichs (2006), Kadende-Kaiser (2000), McClure (2001), Paolillo (1996, 2011), Sebba (2003), Sperlich (2005), and Tsiplakou (2009). 10. The examples are anonymised, and presentation follows Androutsopoulos (2006a, b).

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2004 Non-native English and sub-cultural identities in media discourse. In: Helge Sandøy (ed.), Den fleirspråklege utfordringa/The Multilingual Challenge, 83–98. Oslo: Novus. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2006a Multilingualism, diaspora, and the Internet: Codes and identities on Germanbased diaspora websites. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 524–551.

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Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2006b Mehrsprachigkeit im deutschen Internet: Sprachwahl und Sprachwechsel in Ethno-Portalen. [Multilingualism on the German Internet: Language choice and code-switching on ethnic portals.] In: Peter Schlobinski (ed.), Von *hdl* bis *cul8r*. Sprache und Kommunikation in den Neuen Medien [From *hdl* to *cul8r*. Language and communication in New Media], 172–196. Thema Deutsch, Band 7. Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2007a Language choice and code-switching in German-based diasporic web forums. In: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring (eds.), 340–361. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2007b Bilingualism in the mass media and on the Internet. In: Monica Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach, 207–230. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2011 From variation to heteroglossia in the study of computer-mediated discourse. In: Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek (eds.), Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, 277–298. New York: Oxford University Press. Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Volker Hinnenkamp 2001 Code-Switching in der bilingualen Chat-Kommunikation: ein explorativer Blick auf #hellas und #turks. [Code-switching in bilingual chat communication: an exploratory analysis of #hellas and #turks.] In: Michael Beißwenger (ed.), Chat-Kommunikation, 367–402. Stuttgart: Ibidem. Androutsopoulos, Jannis and Evelyn Ziegler 2004 Exploring language variation on the Internet: Regional speech in a chat community. In: Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Lena Bergström, Gerd Eklund, Staffan Fridell, Lise H. Hansen, Angela Karstadt, Bengt Nordberg, Eva Sundgren, and Mats Thelander (eds.), Language Variation in Europe, 99–111. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. Auer, Peter 1995 The pragmatics of code-switching: A sequential approach. In: Lesley Milroy and Pieter Muysken (eds.), One Speaker, Two Languages, 115–135. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Auer, Peter (ed.) 1998a Code-Switching in Conversation. London: Routledge. Auer, Peter 1998b Introduction: Bilingual conversation revisited. In: Peter Auer (ed.), 1–24. Auer, Peter 1999 From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. International Journal of Bilingualism 3(4): 309–332. Auer, Peter 2000 Why should we and how can we determine the “base language” of a bilingual conversation? Estudios de Sociolingüística 1(1): 129–144. Baron, Naomi S. 2008 Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Beißwenger, Michael 2008 Situated chat analysis as a window to the user’s perspective: Aspects of temporal and sequential organization. Language@Internet 5, article 6. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1532/ Bell, Allan 1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 145–204. Callahan, Laura 2004 Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written Corpus. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Crystal, David 2006 Language and the Internet, 2nd Ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press Danet, Brenda and Susan C. Herring (eds.) 2007a The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online. New York: Oxford University Press. Danet, Brenda and Susan C. Herring 2007b Introduction: Welcome to the multilingual Internet. In: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring (eds.), 3–38. Deumert, Ana and Oscar Masinyana Sibabalwe 2008 Mobile language choices – The use of English and isiXhosa in text messages (SMS): Evidence from a bilingual South African sample. English World-Wide 29(2): 117–147. Dorleijn, Margreet and Jacomine Nortier 2009 Code-switching and the internet. In: Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida J. Toribio (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, 127–141. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ferrara, Kathleen, Hans Brunner, and Greg Whittemore 1991 Interactive written discourse as an emergent register. Written Communication 8(1): 8–34. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 1997 Self-presentation and interactional alignments in e-mail discourse: The styleand code switches of Greek messages. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 7(2): 141–164. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 2003 Computer-mediated communication. In: Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics (2001 Installment), 1–20. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 2004 To tell or not to tell? Email stories between on- and off-line interactions. Language@Internet 1, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2004/36 Goldbarg, Rosalyn Negrón 2009 Spanish-English codeswitching in email communication. Language@Internet 6, article 3. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2009/2139 Gumperz, John J. 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Heller, Monica and Carol W. Pfaff 1996 Code-switching. In: Hans Goebl, Peter H. Nelde, Zdenek Stary, Wolfgang Wölck (eds.), Kontaktlinguistik/Contact linguistics, Vol. 1, 594–609. (HSK 12.1.) Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Herring, Susan C. (ed.) 1996 Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Herring, Susan C. 1999 Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/herring.html Herring, Susan C. 2001 Computer-mediated discourse. In: Deborah Schiffrin, Heidi Hamilton, and Deborah Tannen (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 612–634. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Herring, Susan C. 2004 Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior. In: Sasha A. Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. Gray (eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, 338–376. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Herring, Susan C. 2007 A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@ Internet 4, article 1. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761/ Hinnenkamp, Volker 2008 Deutsch, Doyc or Doitsch? Chatters as languagers – The case of a German–Turkish chat room. International Journal of Multilingualism 5(3): 253– 275. Hinrichs, Lars 2006 Codeswitching on the Web. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hutchby, Ian 2006 Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcasting. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Jørgensen, Normann J. 2008 Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5(3): 161–176. Kadende-Kaiser, Rose M. 2000 Interpreting language and cultural discourse: Internet communication among Burundians in the diaspora. Africa Today 47(2): 121–148. Lee, Carmen K. M. 2007 Linguistic features of email and ICQ instant messaging in Hong Kong. In: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring (eds.), 184–208. Lee, Carmen and David Barton 2011 Constructing glocal identities through multilingual writing practices on flickr.com. International Multilingualism Research Journal 5(1): 39–59. Leppänen Sirpa 2007 Youth language in media contexts: Insights into the functions of English in Finland. World Englishes 26(2): 149–169.

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Leppänen, Sirpa and Saija Peuronen 2012 Multilingualism on the Internet. In: Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge, and Angela Creese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 384–402. London: Routledge. Leppänen, Sirpa, Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, Arja Piirainen-Marsh, Tarja Nikula, and Saija Peuronen 2009 Young people’s translocal new media uses: A multiperspective analysis of language choice and heteroglossia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14(4): 1080–1107. Marcoccia, Michel 2004 On-line polylogue: Conversation structure and participation framework in Internet newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 115–145. McClure, Erica 2001 Oral and written Assyrian-English codeswitching. In: Rodolfo Jacobson (ed.), Codeswitching Worldwide II, 157–191. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Myers-Scotton, Carol 1993 Social Motivation for Code-Switching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Myers-Scotton, Carol 1998 A theoretical introduction to the markedness model. In: Carol Myers-Scotton (ed.), Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties, 18–38. New York: Oxford University Press. Paolillo, John C. 1996 Language choice on soc.culture.punjab. Electronic Journal of Communication 6(3). http://www.cios.org/EJCPUBLIC/006/3/006312.HTML Paolillo, John C. 2001 Language variation on Internet Relay Chat: A social network approach. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(2): 180–213. Paolillo, John C. 2007 How much multilingualism? Language diversity on the Internet. In: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring (eds.), 408–430. Paolillo, John C. 2011 “Conversational” codeswitching on Usenet and Internet Relay Chat. Language@ Internet 8, article 3. http//www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2011/Paolillo Rowe, Charley and Eva L. Wyss (eds.) 2009 Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions. Cresskill/NJ: Hampton Press. Sebba, Mark 2003 “Will the real impersonator please stand up?” Language and identity in the Ali G websites. Arbeiten aus Anglistik and Amerikanistik 28(2): 279–304. Sebba, Mark and Tony Wootton 1998 We, they and identity: Sequential vs. identity-related explanation in codeswitching. In: Peter Auer (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation, 262–289. London: Routledge. Siebenhaar, Beat 2005 Varietätenwahl und Code Switching in Deutschschweizer Chatkanälen. [Variety choice and code-switching in Swiss German chat channels.] Networx 43. http://www.mediensprache.net/de/websprache/networx/docs/index.asp?id=43

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Siebenhaar, Beat 2006 Code choice and code-switching in Swiss-German Internet Relay Chat rooms. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 481–509. Siebenhaar, Beat 2008 Quantitative approaches to linguistic variation in IRC: Implications for qualitative research. Language@Internet 5, article 4. http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1615/index_html/ Sperlich, Wolfgang B. 2005 Will cyberforums save endangered languages? A Niuean case study. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 172: 51–77. Tsaliki, Liza 2003 Globalization and hybridity: The construction of Greekness on the Internet. In: Karim H. Karim (ed.), The Media of Diaspora: Mapping the Globe, 162–176. London: Routledge. Tsiplakou, Stavroula 2009 Doing (bi)lingualism: Language alternation as performative construction of online identities. Pragmatics 19(3): 361–391. Warschauer, Mark, Ghada R. El Said, and Ayman Zohry 2007 Language choice online: Globalization and identity in Egypt. In: Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring (eds.), 303–318. Wright, Sue (ed.) 2004 Multilingualism on the Internet. Special issue, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 6(1). UNESCO Social and Human Sciences. http://www.unesco.org/shs/ijms Ziegler, Evelyn 2005 Die Bedeutung von Interaktionsstatus und Interaktionsmodus für die DialektStandard-Variation in der Chatkommunikation. [Relevance of interactional status and interactional mode for dialect/standard variation in chat communication.] In: Eckhardt Eggers, Jürgen Erich Schmidt, and Dieter Stellmacher (eds.), Neue Dialekte – moderne Dialektologie [New dialects – modern dialectology], 719–745. Stuttgart: Steiner.

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Narrative analysis and computer-mediated communication Alexandra Georgakopoulou

1.

Introduction

Studies concerned with the classification of computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC) have to date tended to concentrate on the identification and specification of genres, thus following developments in the available technologies and the emergence or popularity of CMC discourse activities: For instance, an earlier focus on email and newsgroups was succeeded by attention to e-chat and, more recently, weblogs (Herring 2004). This line of inquiry has shown that the types of discourse engaged in through CMC are by no means homogeneous or singularly definable entities. Instead, they present considerable textual and contextual variability, as well as hybridity, creatively adapting and re-casting elements of genres from old media or face-to-face environments (Androutsopoulos 2006). This has partly to do with the ways in which CMC users in their communication both circumvent medium constraints and maximize affordances (see, e.g., Danet 2001). Furthermore, the plurality of genres and styles in CMC is by now well recognized, and various studies have explored their interrelations with their local (mediated, situational) and broader (sociocultural) contexts of occurrence (e.g., Baym 2000; Cherny 1999; Danet 2001; Georgakopoulou 1997; articles in Danet and Herring 2003). Although this line of inquiry has come a long way in documenting how CMC genres are associated with different possibilities and affordances for the support of a wide range of discourse activities, an emphasis is missing on what for many scholars is a special or archetypal genre (e.g., Swales 1990), namely narrative. At a time, with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, when personal stories abound in CMC, from status updates on Facebook to re-tweets (i.e., sharing interesting tweets) on Twitter, there is much need and scope for taking a narrative-analytic approach to CMC. Such an approach should scrutinize the different types of stories engendered or prohibited in different environments and online communities and the ways in which they are “told” (produced) and received or engaged with, as well as how they are shaped by properties of the medium. In sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and discourse analytic research on face-to-face communication, conversational stories have been studied and analysed extensively in the last four decades, particularly since the publication of Labov’s influential model of narrative structure (1972; also Labov and Waletzky 1967), which is discussed below. Alongside this line of inquiry, the study of what kinds of stories in-

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dividuals relate about their past and how they relate them, when prompted to do so in research interviews, has been a favoured preoccupation and focus of identity analysis in the social sciences (e.g., Riessman 2008). Clearly, there is a discrepancy between narrative being of focal concern outside CMC research and being under-represented within it. In light of this, the discussion in this chapter will in part be programmatic, since this is an area with obvious gaps and avenues for further research. At the same time, my survey of existing studies of narrative in CMC will show that various connections are either made by the studies themselves or can be made with some of the latest tendencies of pragmatic and sociolinguistic research on narrative that adopt a social-interactional perspective. In this respect, I will discuss the recent move in narrative analysis towards an opening up of textual definitions of narrative to include stories that depart in varying degrees from the narrative canon (i.e., life stories or personal experience past events stories). I will show how studies of narrative in CMC are providing further evidence in favour of such a move. Moreover, I will argue that the storytelling forms and functions that are emerging through such studies as distinctive and characteristic of numerous CMC environments can and should inform a dialogue with studies of face-to-face storytelling.

2.

Narrative analysis within (socio)linguistics: Main approaches and current trends

Fascination with oral (vernacular, non-literary) narrative spans a wide range of social science disciplines – sociology, psychology, social anthropology, etc. – and is frequently referred to as the “narrative turn” (see articles in Bamberg 2006; Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001; Daiute and Lightfoot 2004; De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006). In these disciplines, narrative is seen as an archetypal, fundamental mode for making sense of the world and, as such, as a privileged structure, system, or mode for tapping into the teller’s social identities and sense of self. To talk about well-defined and delimited schools of narrative analysis necessitates a crude process of abstraction that does not do justice to the many different strands of existing work. Bearing this in mind, it is possible to identify two distinct ways of doing narrative analysis: one inspired by a conventional and largely canonical paradigm, the other based on a social-interactional view of narrative. The former is traceable to Labov’s foundational model of narrative analysis (Labov 1972; Labov and Waletzky 1967), but it is also informed by the narrative turn in the social sciences within which narrative is seen as a prime site for the exploration of people’s identities. The latter encompasses a view of narrative as talk-in-interaction and as social practice, identifying the analysis of interaction as a fundamental aspect of any study of narrative and the investigation of the intimate links of narrative-interactional processes with larger socio-cultural processes as a prerequisite

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for the study of narrative (for a detailed discussion, see De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2008a). In Labov and Waletzky’s model (1967), a narrative text was characterized in structural terms through the presence of temporal ordering between event clauses and through its organization into structural components (such as complicating action, evaluation, and resolution). The model was based on stories told in oral interviews and, in principle, was meant as a description of narratives of personal experience, rather than all types of narratives. That said, it has had a profound influence on narrative research and has paved the way for seeing narrative as a privileged site for the study of a wide range of aspects relevant to the study of language in society (see contributions in Bamberg 1997). As I have argued elsewhere (Georgakopoulou 2006a: 129–131), Labov’s structural definition of narrative resulted in a tendency to recognize as narratives only texts that appear to be well organized, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, that are teller-led and largely monologic, and that occur as responses to (an interviewer’s) questions. In addition, his focus on a story’s point and evaluation as the means by which a teller expresses the story’s tellability has inadvertently privileged the teller as the main producer of meaning. Despite the critique that Labov’s model has received over the years (see, e.g., the articles in Bamberg 1997), its long-lasting influence in the study of everyday, conversational narrative is undeniable. It is commonly the case that the initial exploration of a narrative data set will rest upon identifying the extent to which the data conform to or depart from the narrative structure identified by Labov. As will be discussed below, this has also been the case in existing studies of narrative genres in CMC. Yet it is also noteworthy that both recent studies of conversational storytelling and studies of narrative in CMC have provided ample evidence of an abundance of stories that do not actually conform to Labov’s model, in as much as they depart from the format of “an active teller, highly tellable account, relatively detached from surrounding talk and activity, linear temporal and causal organization, and certain, constant moral stance” (Ochs and Capps 2001: 20). Put differently, the stories that have been documented as typical of a variety of everyday conversational and – more recently – CMC contexts include “a gamut of under-represented and ‘a-typical’ narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell” (Georgakopoulou 2006a: 130). An organized move to put such “non-canonical” or “a-typical” stories on the map and make them a focal part of narrative analysis is exemplified by recent work on “small stories” (Bamberg 2004; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008; Georgakopoulou 2006a, b, 2007, 2008). Small stories research is in tune with other recent approaches to narrative both within sociolinguistics (e.g., Ochs and Capps 2001) and in narratology (e.g., Herman 2009). In these approaches, the widely-held-asprototypical definitional criteria of narrative, such as the sequencing of events, are seen as necessary but not as sufficient. Instead, what counts as a story is connected

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with what gets done on particular occasions and in particular settings and what the local understandings are regarding what a story is. Furthermore, there is room for flexibility and versatility within each definitional criterion of a story: For instance, the criterion of event sequencing has tended to privilege the temporal ordering of past rather than future or hypothetical events. Similarly, the idea that stories build worlds and that through their tellings the narrators communicate to their audience “what’s it like” to be part of those worlds (Herman 2009) has routinely prioritized the “world-disruption” qualities of stories. The assumption has been that, for stories to be worth telling, they need to relate extra-ordinary events that create some kind of trouble or complication in the initial state of affairs. This applies to Labov’s model, too. What small stories research has argued in relation to such definitional criteria is that they should be seen as context specific, and that the full continuum that each allows for should be explored in each case. For instance, world-making rather than world-disruption may be more important for some stories in certain contexts. In the same vein, there may be a distinct preference for the sequenced events of a story to be about the future and not about the past in certain contexts (Georgakopoulou 2007: ch. 2). This should not preclude the identification of such data as stories or their inclusion in a narrative analysis. A comparable case has been made by Ochs and Capps (2001), who, rather than identifying a set of distinctive features that always characterize narrative, stipulate dimensions (tellability, tellership, linearity, moral stance, etc.) that are relevant to a narrative, even if not elaborately manifest. Each dimension establishes a range of possibilities that may or may not be realized in a particular narrative. For example, tellership allows for one main teller but also for multiple co-tellers. Similarly, a story’s tellability may be high or low. Overall, social-interactional approaches to narrative, including small stories research, have shown the importance of attending to the context-specific aspects of narrative tellings so as to understand how narrative genres shape, as well as are being shaped by, the norms and social relations of the situational and socio-cultural contexts in which they occur.1 The last decade or so has also seen social-interactional approaches connect with social science research on narrative as a point of entry into the teller’s social identities (gender, ethnicity, age, etc.). This study of identities through emphasis on the communicative how of narrative tellings (e.g., De Fina 2003; De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006; Georgakopoulou 2007) has variously problematized, de-essentialized, or added nuance to the widely-held view that narrative is a privileged communication mode for making sense of the self. In section 3, I suggest that there is still much scope for a comparable shift in studies of narrative in CMC from narratives as texts/genres to narratives as social practices.

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Doing narrative analysis in CMC: An overview

3.1.

Fictional – digital – personal online stories: A gradual move

699

The focus so far in studies of narrative in CMC has been on what types of stories are told, how, and in which CMC environments. This has brought to the fore recurrent findings that allow us to identify certain narrative genres and certain communicative choices in them as being prototypically associated with CMC. There are links that can be made between such “ways of storytelling” (Georgakopoulou 2007) and certain possibilities that communication in the new media affords, as well as certain social practices with which they are characteristically associated, as I show below. The exploration of ways of storytelling in CMC contexts has prioritized “fictional”2 stories3 or “representations”; the turn to personal stories has only recently been made. This is more or less a reflection of the historical precedence of fictional storytelling (as in, e.g., computer games) in CMC, which has nonetheless been radically redefined with the recent explosion of personal storytelling, particularly in Web 2.0 environments. However, it is instructive to note a convergence of findings between work on fictional storytelling and work on personal storytelling in CMC. Literary or fictional storytelling has traditionally been the main object of inquiry of narratology, and it is thus no accident that the study of fictional, at times artistic, online stories created by experts and professionals (e.g., experimental electronic literature, video games) makes use of narratological approaches4 and, to a lesser extent, sociological ones (e.g., Bell 2010; Ciccorico 2007; Douglas 2000; Hayles 2008; Morris and Swiss 2009; Walker Rettberg 2008). One of the aims of this line of inquiry has been to examine narrative through a comparative lens across media, spurred by the recognition that “the comparative study of media as means of expression lags behind the study of media as channels of communication” (Ryan 2004a: 24). A central project within this “transmedial” narratology is to study how narrative gets transposed from one medium to another, what kinds of features are adapted or altered in this process, and how each medium encourages or prohibits specific ways of narration (Ryan 2004a: 35). Transmedial narratology also seeks to test the applicability of concepts and analytical modes that have been developed with regard to the study of narrative in one medium across media. Ryan rightly stresses that the examination of such questions should “avoid the temptation to attribute features and findings to the medium solely” (34). This danger of technological determinism has been widely discussed in studies of CMC in general (see, e.g., articles in Androutsopoulos 2006). Ryan also warns against the other extreme, that is, “media blindness”, which involves an indiscriminate transfer of concepts designed, for example, for the study of narrative in one medium to narratives of another medium. This concern, too, has been voiced in CMC, particularly with re-

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spect to the transfer of concepts from face-to-face interaction to online environments (see, e.g., Androutsopoulos, this volume; Georgakopoulou 2006c). Exactly what counts as a story, what the role of narrative in an online environment is, and what types of user involvement can be found in relation to narratives are main preoccupations within narratological approaches to narrative in CMC. The concept of “narrativity” as comprising everything that makes a text narrative (Fludernik 2009) is frequently used as a yardstick for classifying different texts as having low or high degrees of narrativity. The definitional criteria mentioned in section 2 above tend to be taken as the vital constituents of “narrativity”, in particular the temporal sequencing of events and the “experientiality” (idem) which involves a narrator communicating and in the process making sense of his or her point of view, emotions, thoughts, actions, and (re)actions vis-à-vis the reported events. These properties of narrativity were also attended to by Ryan (2004b) in a comparative study of interactive drama, hypertext, computer games, web cams, and text-based virtual realities (multi-user role-playing or adventure games). The role of narrative in these cases was found to range from central, to intermittent (e.g., in multi-user role-playing games where dramatic action and storytelling alternate with small talk), to instrumental (e.g., in other computer games). The role of the user also varied in terms of how much interactivity was allowed: In computer games, for instance, the users became an integral part of the fictional world as main characters. The role of enhanced interactivity in online storytelling is a consistent finding, going back to earlier studies of hypertext fiction (e.g., Landow 1997; Mitra 1999) and of multi-user domains (e.g., Kolko 1995); interactivity is seen as a medium affordance that has redefined the relationship between writers and readers by empowering the latter. This relationship, though, has mainly been looked at through the lens of literary theory, and there has been a tendency for abstract theorizing at the expense of empirical work on actual readers and how they relate to online stories (see Ensslin 2007 for a critique). Furthermore, the concept of narrative employed has been based on definitions of literary narrative and on rather strict, textual criteria that conform to those described in section 2 as canonical narrative. In contrast, in sociolinguistic research on storytelling in CMC, the definitions of narrative are much looser and more fluid, and in that sense they are in tune with the latest advances in social-interactional approaches to narrative, at times by explicitly drawing on them. Nonetheless, narratological and sociolinguistic approaches share the insight regarding the potential of online storytelling for enhanced interactivity and for multiple modes of user involvement that can decisively shape a story. Within the strand of research surveyed above, online personal stories by lay writers have been under-represented. A step towards this direction has been taken, however, by the study of the uses of digital tools to teach ordinary people to tell their stories (e.g., Lambert 2006; Lundby 2008), as well as of the uses of the stories themselves as, for example, teaching resources in online learning environments

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(e.g., Beck 2004; Ritchie and Peters 2001). The term that is mostly employed for such digitally produced stories is, not unexpectedly, “digital”. Studies of digital storytelling draw more or less explicitly on insights about the role of narrative emanating from social science research that is often called narrative inquiry. The main proponents of narrative inquiry have celebrated narrative as a mode of communication capable of empowering social actors (e.g., Polkinghorne 1988; Sarbin 1986). Lay people telling their stories to an attentive interviewer in interview contexts has been seen as a therapeutic exercise that emancipates ordinary people by letting their voices be heard. This line of inquiry has recently been criticized for overstating the significance of narrative and for stressing the representational aspects of narrative, taking what people tell about themselves at face value, as opposed to exploring how such aspects are shaped by contextual and interactional factors at work (see Atkinson and Delamont 2006). Nonetheless, narrative inquiry has been a very important qualitative research approach. Many of its epistemological assumptions can be seen as regards digital storytelling, too, particularly the belief in the emancipatory power of storytelling, which in the case of digital stories is argued to be taken to new heights with the possibilities that the media offer for the co-production and the wide distribution of stories (e.g., Bratteteig 2008). This latter point resonates across studies of narrative in CMC. Digital storytelling has figured in debates about media-led uses and new media participation (Hartley and MacWilliam 2009), the assumption being that it fundamentally collapses the distinction between professional and amateur forms of selfexpression of production, at the same time encouraging creativity through the blending of different semiotic systems. An important initiative on digital storytelling originated in the Center for Digital Storytelling in California, which in the last 15 years or so has digitized 12,000 stories (Lundby 2008). The volume by Harltey and MacWilliam (2009) documents many similar initiatives in various parts of the world, where researchers have encouraged and enabled lay people to produce their stories, however short or amateurishly done (e.g., with off-the-shelf equipment), and to make them available online. Studies of digital storytelling have by and large concentrated on stories that have been produced under the rubrics of cultural institutions rather than on spontaneous teller-initiated and -led storytelling, which has recently exploded in Web 2.0 environments such as YouTube. The inclusion of the whole range of self-representational media practices in the remit of studies of digital storytelling would shed further light on the democratization and empowerment potential of digital stories. More generally, studies of digital storytelling have hardly focused on how digital stories are actually told, what narrative genres they represent, how they differ from other narrative genres in other media, and what their main textual and interactional aspects are. By contrast, an emphasis on narratives in online environments as genres is emerging as the focus of sociolinguistic research.

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Narratives in CMC as ways of telling

Pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies of narrative in CMC have mainly been interested in exploring what kinds of stories are told and how. This identification of types of stories tends to be premised on the extent to which they exhibit certain structural components and the ways in which they realize them. For instance, the degree and types of evaluation in a story would be important in these approaches. According to this point of view, both the conventional paradigm of narrative analysis and the latest social-interactional approaches are relevant, inasmuch as the noted occurrence of non-canonical stories (as described by the conventional paradigm) in various CMC environments is in tune with the findings of the socialinteractional approaches. The focus has mainly been on personal stories by lay writers, which are becoming increasingly important in CMC as resources for self-styling and sustaining online communities.5 Although the existing studies present considerable variation in terms of their methodological and analytical frameworks, there are striking similarities in their findings. In particular, the examined narratives, rather than being single-authored, offer a distinctive potential for multiple authorship. This is facilitated by the possibilities for the wide circulation of a story across CMC sites and over time, what has been labelled a “distributed story” (Walker 2004). This shaping of a story by different tellers in different environments tends to militate against a conventional structuring with a beginning, middle, and an end, as for instance described by Labov. Instead, it frequently results in “fragmented” stories (e.g., Walker Rettberg 2008). At the same time, in many CMC environments it makes little sense to talk about the structure of a story in purely linguistic (verbal) terms without taking into account the multi-semioticity or multimodality that the medium offers for its role in the creation of story plots. A case in point is Hoffmann’s (2008) and Hoffmann’s and Eisenlauer’s (2010) studies of travel weblog entries, which show a preponderance of multi-linear, multimodal, collaboratively produced and distributed narratives. Their analysis stresses the point that CMC enables new forms of narrative interaction and authorship, ranging from the users as authors who select the telling and design of telling online and (re)shape it, to the users as “audience” who contribute to online evaluations, selecting the reading order and serializing their reading engagement with weblog narratives. As noted in section 3.1 above, this point has also been made in relation to fictional stories. As a result of medium-enabled features, Hoffmann and Eisenlauer also observed a certain fragmentation of themes and perspectives, a versatile access to the narration, a lack of closure, and a semiotic flexibility. At the same time, weblog narratives were not found to form a homogeneous entity but instead to vary in size, theme, authorship, and forms of interactivity. The idea that narrative tellings on the web can be transposed (e.g., posted) in new contexts, and that in that process new meanings can be produced, is emerging as a common theme (see also Walker

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2004). For these reasons, the unprecedented potential for co-construction, versatility, and intertextuality of narratives in online environments is frequently stated as one of the main findings of studies of narrative in CMC (see also earlier studies of the web and hypertext in general, e.g., Mitra 1999). The four features of multi-linearity, fragmentation, multimodality, and interactivity that Hoffmann and Eisenlauer identify as key in their data resonate with other studies of online storytelling. It is also noteworthy that Hoffmann and Eisenlauer’s starting point is Labov’s model of narrative analysis. Their analysis subsequently shows that Labov’s model, with its emphasis on a single teller, a beginning, middle, and end, and a linear development of the plot, cannot capture the multifarious ways in which stories are told, evolve, and are transported across sites in CMC. To take Labov as the starting point, without connecting with studies of conversational storytelling that have criticized Labov, is not uncommon in sociolinguistically-informed studies of narratives in CMC (e.g., Arendholz 2010; Heyd 2009; Jucker 2010).6 However, like the studies that have criticized Labov, the CMC studies also report the occurrence of stories that depart from Labov’s fullfledged narratives.7 An example of this is Heyd’s (2009) study of narratives in email hoaxes, defined as “a typical case of deceptive computer-mediated communication” (1) which consists of messages with false information that are disseminated electronically via the forwarding function of email programs. Heyd (163–184) argues that the degree of narrativity and the type of story are a function of the type of email hoax, with urban legends and charity email hoaxes displaying the strongest tendency towards fullfledged narratives. Heyd connects her findings with small story research as a frame of analytical reference. The context-specificity of the ways of storytelling in CMC is being increasingly documented and, as has been the case in offline environments, there is attested heterogeneity and versatility in what stories are told and how they are told, not only across CMC environments but also within the same environment. For instance, in the discussion forum of a body-building community, Page (2009) reports that different types of stories are intimately linked with their placement, i.e., where exactly in relation to a post they occurred, and their function, i.e., what purpose or social action they fulfilled. Specifically, stories told in response to a post were often stories of projected events, offering the original writer advice on how he or she should act in the future. In another study by the same author (2008) of narratives in weblogs of bloggers who had been diagnosed and were being treated for cancer, the different types of stories told were linked to the blogger’s gender. Similarly, in a study of email messages exchanged between diasporic Greek friends based in London (Georgakopoulou 2004), it was found that the types of stories told were connected with the participants’ intimate relationships and actual geographical proximity, which allowed for numerous offline interactions as well. Specifically, the stories established links between the current tellings on email and

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previous and future face-to-face interactions of the senders and receivers: For instance, certain stories that I called “stories-to-be-told” started out being narrated on email, but their full telling was deferred and promised for an occasion of face-toface interaction. What I called “breaking news” stories (see discussion below) reported events with immediacy, i.e., very recent events (e.g., “this morning”, “just now”), or as still unfolding, as the story was being constructed. Overall, the study proposed an account of these types of stories that hinged on the intersection between aspects of the mediated context at hand and the participants’ intimate relationships. In terms of the former, the tellers’ media-afforded ability to share events with their friends as they were happening to them, their addressees’ mediaafforded ability to provide feedback on those events very quickly, and the requirement (at least in the given group) to keep messages very brief were all relevant factors. In general, this line of inquiry into how ways of (story)telling in CMC contexts are shaped by the medium, on the one hand, and the storytellers’ social roles and relations, on the other, is still in its early stages. What existing studies have shown quite definitively is that the canonical narrative of (more or less distant) past events from the teller’s life is far from being the norm in CMC environments: See, for example, Baym (2000) in relation to the stories in a soap-opera newsgroup; Georgakopoulou (2004) in relation to the stories in private email messages; and Page (2009) in relation to status updates on Facebook. (A detailed discussion of Page’s studies of personal stories in blogs and Facebook updates can be found in her 2012 book, which was not published and thus not available to me when writing this chapter.) This shortening of the distance between the two worlds, that is, the narrating and the narrated world, is emerging as a distinctive feature not just in personal storytelling in CMC but also in personal stories facilitated by the new media. This is a finding worth assessing further in the context of new media affordances for storytelling. In much of the narrative theory developed so far, the deictic separation between the two worlds of telling and told, or the so-called double chronology (Chatman 1990), has been a feature of major importance for the creation of the tellers’ perspective or point of view, as well as for their ability to reflect on the narrated events (see Freeman 2010). It is therefore worth scrutinizing the implications of the frequency and salience of the “breaking news” type of story in online environments for these key features of the narrative canon. In particular, the following features of breaking news stories relate to media affordances: the speed with which a story can be shared with others; the potential for the “audiences” of the story to shape the continuation of the telling with their engagements; and, finally, the potential for distribution of the story. Let us consider these features in the following examples. The first example comes from a sequence of two Facebook status updates (SUs) and the comments they received. (Note that on Facebook, SUs and comments are followed by timestamps appended automatically by the system.)

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(1) Gertie Brown8 is feeling much better with a hole in her leg! August 27 at 12.19pm David Martin Got to ask … What! How big??! August 27 at 3.15pm Gertie Brown it was about 3 inches! looks like a bullet wound, now about 1 inch. August 27 at 3:18pm David Martin how? Why? Is JB shooting at you now?· August 27 at 3.22pm Gertie Brown Got in the way of a pigeon … August 27 at 3.26pm Gertie Brown is recovering from an unexpected operation as a result of a trip to A&E9 on monday night M August 25 at 7.45pm Charlotte Harris Oh my God! Are you ok? Not the ideal end to what I hope was otherwise a fabulous weekend and a lovely christening … Thank you again, xxx August 25 at 8.01pm ((Another 14 comments)) Gertie Brown Thanks everyone. Not much to worry about. It was a painful abscess which I thought would go away with some basic home treatment but by Monday it was unbearable and huge so had to go to A&E to have it removed – cross & painful but on the mend! Apparently they are quite normal?! August 26 at 9.03am ((Another 12 comments)) SUs are presented in reverse chronological order on Facebook, and as can be seen in the example above, this has implications for how breaking news stories evolve. The first breaking news posting from Gertie Brown on August 25 at 7.24 pm (“is recovering from an unexpected operation as a result of a trip to A&E on monday night M”) leads to more developed narrative making in her response to comments, posted the following day: “It was a painful abscess which I thought would go away with some basic home treatment but by Monday it was unbearable and huge so had to go to A&E to have it removed – cross & painful but on the mend! Apparently they are quite normal?!” This comment follows and is closely related to the 15 comments Gertie received from anxious friends who wanted to find out “what happened”, as illustrated by the comment from Charlotte Harris. Gertie acknowledges this interest in her comment and provides more story details in the way of sequenced events and her evaluation of them: “Thank you everybody. Not much to worry about.” A day later, on August 27, Gertie provides a further SU: “Gertie Brown is feeling much better with a hole in her leg!”

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Breaking news stories, as I found in my study of email messages (Georgakopoulou 2004), are routinely followed by further narrative making which takes the form of more elaborate and detailed tellings of the events and/or updates, such as the ones in the example above. In the email messages, more detailed tellings tended to be reserved for the participants’ face-to-face interactions; this had to do with the participants’ geographical proximity and frequency of offline interaction. More generally, the development of breaking news stories either in different environments of the same medium or in different media is a common occurrence. I return to this point below. To return to the example from Facebook above, what is interesting in the comment exchanges between Gertie and David is that a different storyline is opened from the one established thus far, a storyline that reconstructs the events, even if jokingly, in a different way, i.e., as the result of Gertie’s husband (JB), whose hobby is hunting, having accidentally shot her. One can hypothesize that when David read Gertie’s SU, he missed the previous storytelling “thread” about what had happened to her. Even if this were the case, it does not cancel out the fact that Gertie as the original teller made a choice to co-construct with David a new scenario of events. As different audiences tune in to a developing story at different times and points of development, their modes of engagement can be much more effective in shaping the telling than has been reported about stories involving past events in offline environments. In addition, the media facilitate the recontextualization of a story in different environments, as can be seen in example (2) below from the newspaper Mail Online, which like many newspapers nowadays features Twitter communication of celebrities: (2) He has three young daughters, so it’s no wonder Jamie Oliver10 couldn’t contain his joy when wife Jools had a baby boy last night. The 35-year-old chef tweeted about his joy following the birth and revealed they had decided to call their son Buddy Bear Maurice Oliver. He wrote: “It’s a baby boy guys!!! I’m shocked, we’re all very happy, mum was amazing and both are well and happy x4 kids!! what?!” Jamie then tweeted another picture of the tot, writing: “Mr Buddy Oliver … full name to come from mum … big love joxx” Comments Add to my stories Congrats! You will need all the help you can find for a lad! LOL I have 3 wonderful girls and one lad who is a handful! Good luck! – ws, north america and uk, 16/9/2010 15:41 Rating 1311 A son at last, congratulations. Now can Jools stop producing babies? She looks absolutely shattered poor thing. – Carol, Co.Durham, 16/9/2010 14:49 Rating 2

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Currently, celebrity tweets posted to Twitter are commonly recontextualized (e.g., re-tweeted) in both printed (e.g., newspaper columns, magazines) and online media. According to Bauman and Briggs (1990), any act of recontextualization inevitably produces new meanings. In the above example, Jamie Oliver’s breaking news story on Twitter about the birth of his son is both being introduced to potentially new audiences (who may have not followed Jamie Oliver’s tweets) and being provided an evaluation by the author of the online article that was absent from the original tweet: “He has three young daughters, so it’s no wonder Jamie Oliver couldn’t contain his joy when wife Jools had a baby boy last night”. The recontextualization does not end there. The comments-posting facility that online publications such as the Mail Online offer to readers can result in a wide range of audience responses, which add yet more evaluative perspectives on the recontextualized breaking news story. The two comments I have singled out above from a total of 316 posted comments bring in interpretative viewpoints that are nowhere to be found either in the original story or in the recontextualized one. The first indirectly undermines the evaluation of the article by suggesting that having a boy after three daughters may not be such unadulterated joy: “I have three wonderful girls and a lad who is a handful”. The second brings in the perspective of the “shattered mother” of four by making reference to Jools (Jamie Oliver’s wife). What is also notable about those modes of evaluation is that they are themselves rated by other readers: The comment, for instance, that switches the perspective to Jools, which in the context is introducing a new point for the story, gets a very low rating, suggesting that this point is not appreciated by other readers. The example above constitutes only one of the trajectories of the breaking news story in question: One can assume with relative certainty that both this article and the comments were transposed and distributed elsewhere (the “add to my stories” feature facilitates this), but also that the original tweet was recontextualized in other ways and elsewhere. In all such cases, the media serve as vehicles for distribution and recontextualization by regulating and enhancing the ongoing-ness of a story and by shaping the terms of telling and the possibilities for interactivity. It can be further assumed that readers ceasing to post comments on a story is instrumental in the story ceasing to be told and evaluated; also, that stories that attract interest, that are in traditional narrative analysis terms seen as “tellable”, get to be circulated more than less tellable ones. In addition, the fact that stories on Twitter are very brief, in keeping with the 140-character limit on tweets, both generates the need for further, more detailed storying in other environments and facilitates the transposition of tweets as quotable items in other contexts. In all cases, the storytelling that develops through different recontextualizations is one containing multiple voices and points of view. The above examples suggest the need for online narrative activities to be studied for the ways in which they relate to – e.g., become consequential for, impinge on, facilitate, enable or constrain, recontextualize and are recontextualized

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by – other ongoing, past, or anticipated, online or offline stories. An illustration of such an orientation comes from a sociolinguistic study of the classroom interactions of the 14-year-old students of a London comprehensive school (Georgakopoulou 2008).12 In this study I documented some of the interrelations between online and offline stories by exploring how media engagements provide the “stuff for stories”, that is, how they are locally reported and emplotted in everyday, face-toface environments. Specifically, I conducted a case study of the two female students who were found in a quantitative survey of nine focal participants (five male, four female) to be the most prolific in terms of new media engagements. Such engagements included actual uses of technologies (e.g., texting, talking on a mobile phone), performances of media events (e.g., singing), and reports of engagement (e.g., talk about a TV series that they had watched). I found that about 30 % of such engagements were in the form of stories. These stories were mostly reports of recent mediated interactions (e.g., on MSN, on Skype) of the participants with boys they were interested in, and they fitted the definition of breaking news (see above). The study in general and the focus on stories in particular showed the important role that the new media play in the ongoing narration of everyday life among young people in the UK. The stories of new media engagements were found to be an integral part of the participants’ joint construction of norms of conduct and of ongoing negotiations of the participants’ identities and peer-group relations. New media figured in their plot and tellings in any of the following ways: i) as social settings (sites) where moral transgression takes place, as for instance in cases of boys flouting the proscriptions and norms of conduct associated with MSN; ii) as resources for the collaborative development of a projective narrative, as when, for example, girls rehearsed together what to say to a boy on the phone or next time they went on webcam with him; iii) as clearly marked stages in the plot development of “stories-in-the-making”, as, for instance, in the case of text messages being read by the recipient to her friends as they were received and forming the basis of subsequent storytelling; iv) as evidentiary resources (with, e.g., text messages or forwarded messages used to corroborate narrative claims).

4.

Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed recently emerging research on narrative in pragmatic, discourse, and sociolinguistic studies of CMC. The aim has been to show how these studies have connected (or in some cases not) with narrative analysis that has concentrated on spoken conversational data. It was argued that both lines of inquiry share an increasing recognition of the frequency and significance of stories that are fragmented, distributed, co-constructed, and intertextually linked, and

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which in these respects depart from the canonical narratives that until recently monopolized scholarly attention. Both narratological studies of fictional stories and sociolinguistic studies of personal stories support this finding in a wide range of CMC environments. The extent to which such forms of narrative constitute new and/or exclusively media-shaped genres is, nonetheless, less well understood and agreed upon. Studies with an emphasis on processes of re-mediation tend to stress the importance of the hypertextual organisation and multimodality of the Internet for the ways in which narratives are shaped online,13 therefore suggesting more or less explicitly medium-shaped changes. Studies that draw on research in conversational (face-to-face) storytelling seem to be more attuned to narrative features such as interactivity, intertextuality, and fragmentation that have recently been attested in conversational storytelling, as well. The co-construction of stories and their ability to be transposed across time and place and recontextualized in the process, while at the same time acquiring new meanings in their new environments, is something that has been stressed by many a study in relation to conversational storytelling (e.g., Bauman and Briggs 1990). Yet, as the discussion of breaking news stories attempted to show, there seems to be a difference in the scale of distribution and recontextualization enabled by CMC. Also on a different scale is the potential for the involvement of diverse and in many cases “invisible” to the teller audiences in the shaping and (re)shaping of a story. On the basis of this, it can be argued that both the potential for a story’s recontextualization and the various modes of audience interaction with it are intimately linked with the new media-enabled potential and speed for telling the story in the first place, for continuing to develop it in the same or other environments, and for distributing it widely. To engage more fully with work on conversational storytelling – for instance, small stories research, which has attested to similar ways of storytelling – may be one way to push forward the agenda of articulating as fully as possible what is distinctive about online stories and how that draws on, departs from, or indeed remediates other forms and practices of storytelling in offline or other media environments. Further analyses should also connect with the proliferating work on CMC and identities (see, e.g., chapters in Danet and Herring 2007), as well as with the direction that the linguistically-informed study of contemporary digital textual practices is increasingly taking: This direction involves going beyond the exploration of linguistic features of different types of CMC and instead engaging systematically with their multi-authorship, translocality, and multimodality (e.g., Androutsopoulos 2010). Finally, unanswered questions still remain about the interrelationships between online and offline narrative activities, particularly with regard to how new media as historically and socioculturally shaped resources and tools enable and become oriented to in narrative activities offline.

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Acknowledgements This chapter has benefited greatly from the detailed comments and editorial care of Susan Herring, Tuija Virtanen, and Dieter Stein, to whom I express my gratitude.

Notes 1. For examples of early and defining work in this respect see Bauman (1986), M. H. Goodwin (1990), Hymes (1981), and Shuman (1986). 2. The term “virtual” narratives has also been used (Ryan 2004). 3. The terms “narrative” and “story” (storytelling) are used interchangeably in this chapter. This is not always the case in the literature on narrative, particularly in the narratological tradition. 4. This discussion cannot possibly do justice to the different schools of narratology as they have developed over the years nor to the decisive shift in the area from so-called classical to post-classical narratology (for an overview of the area, see Fludernik 2009). Suffice it to say that narratological studies of narrative in CMC are mostly situated in the post-classical narratology, which has increasingly attended to issues of context as well as opening up the definitions of narrative to include cases beyond literature (e.g., ranging from everyday storytelling to comics and “virtual” stories). 5. For instance, Sack (2003), although interested in story understanding rather than production, states that “many online social networks have their basis in the sharing of narratives”, “a non-trivial portion of social networks are based on discussions of widely circulated stories”, and “virtual, on-line communities are a result of net-mediated, storybased relations” (305). 6. Elsewhere (Georgakopoulou 2006b), I have noted a similar trend in studies that have sought to document the relationships of CMC with spoken and written discourse. I have specifically suggested that many of them failed to draw on and be informed by previous sociolinguistic studies of spoken and written discourse that had problematized the relationship between spoken and written language. 7. Although not related to personal storytelling, Jucker’s (2010) study of online live sports commentaries stressed the media-afforded (online television) possibility for synchronizing the telling time with the event time and for continuously updating the account results in distinct forms of storytelling that are based on enhanced interactivity. 8. All usernames and person and place names employed in the examples are pseudonyms. 9. A&E is an abbreviation for Accident & Emergency. 10. Jamie Oliver is an English celebrity chef. 11. The readers’ comments on Mail Online articles are rated by other readers positively or negatively, with the arrows F and G respectively. The number next to the category Rating refers to the total score of the ratings received. In this particular example, best-rated comments received overall ratings of approximately 1500. 12. The study was part of an ESRC Identities and Social Action funded project entitled “Urban Classroom Culture and Interaction” (www. identities.org.uk). The project team consisted of Ben Rampton (Director), Roxy Harris, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Constant Leung, Caroline Dover, and Lauren Small.

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13. For instance, Fetzer (2010) suggests that political websites fulfill the same persuasive function as that of comparable material in printed form (e.g., newspapers), but through the use of embedded and multimodal narratives in hypertextual links.

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Genre and computer-mediated communication Janet Giltrow

1.

Concepts of genre

Genre is an active term in several areas of language study: not only in pragmatics but also in corpus studies, in Critical Discourse Analysis, and in areas more pedagogically oriented, such as English for Special/Academic Purposes and Sydney School Systemic-Functional Linguistics. The term also figures importantly in literary studies, rhetoric, and information and organisational studies. The different methodologies and research objectives of these fields result in different conceptualisations of genre itself. Yet one might say that two principles are shared across notions of genre. First, genre is a typifying concept: Instances of utterance resemble one another and can be classified or recognised thereby. In literary studies, Cohen (1986) has said that genre is principally a classifying activity and sociohistorically contingent. Second, genre is a phenomenon at the interface of language and sociality. Even general classifications, such as “academic” or “literary”, point to speakers’ involvement in a social activity. Because the emphasis on and application of these principles are uneven in research practice, genre can have different profiles in different disciplines. Especially, the level at which genre is named can fluctuate. In some fields, such as Sydney School Systemic-Functional Linguistics, “narrative” or “recount” can be designated as a genre, whereas in others, such as recent literary theory, “village stories, 1820s-1850s” is presented as a genre (Moretti 2005). As this chapter will show, genre research in the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has tended to the lower levels. Fluctuations from higher to lower, and even very low, are still an issue for genre study, however, as Herring (2007) notes, making genre classification “imprecise”. Virtanen (2010) offers relief from this stubborn condition by proposing that discourse types and text types, on the one hand, and genres, on the other hand, are categories that address different language phenomena and should be distinguished. Discourse types (with focus on function) and text types (with focus on form) are cognitively heuristic: They are “templates” for production and cues for reception. The same has been said about genres. But text types and discourse types, while “dynamic” in their interplay, are relatively “abstract” and “prototypical”, according to Virtanen, whereas genres are concretely situated. The temptation might be to say that genre is simply lower on the scale of generality than type (discourse or text), but Virtanen is asking for a more fundamental re-thinking of this fluctuation – different dynamics and different cognitive manifestations, not simply more general

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vs. more specific. (See Heyd 2009 as discussed below for an application of comparable, albeit not identical, principles for managing levels of generality.) Inseparable from the level at which genre is named is the question of the closed or open set: Where genre has been named at a very high level, the set is closed, limited to a few timeless universals. When the level of naming is lower, the set opens to history – as the appearance, and then the disappearance, of the literary genre “village story” shows as a response to social, economic, and technological change. Change being a widely perceived feature of CMC, genre research in the pragmatics of the Internet has tended, in practice, to assume the open set. Harder to characterise is researchers’ attitude towards genre itself. Traditionally, and perhaps currently, genre has been regarded as what is conventional – even, as Puschmann states, referring to Swales (1990), what is “fixed” (Puschmann 2009: 81). In literary study, especially, there has been a tradition of imagining genre as what is to be defied or transcended, when aesthetic aspirations challenge convention. It is possible, however, to regard genre as what is ceaselessly differentiating, producing not sameness but the variety of “spheres of activity” (Bakhtin 1986): genre, that is, as “difference” (Giltrow 2010). Popular claims for CMC have often assumed its potential to break away from what is fixed and standard, to overturn even regularity itself, and to entertain the unheard-of. The research reported in this chapter, however, shows that CMC hosts the transfer, emergence, and transformation of genres – not their elimination. As most recent research in the pragmatics of the Internet has settled to low levels of generality in naming genre, and has both anticipated and recorded an open set, pragmatics research is most in keeping with rhetorical theorisations of genre, and these provide a background to this chapter’s review of research. Arguably, rhetorical study is the field that has in our time paid the most sustained attention to genre, developing from U.S. proposals for “situational rhetoric” in the 1970s (Bitzer 1968, 1980) and elaborated on many fronts since then. Rhetorical theories of genre bring strong claims for the priority of action over form: Genre is known principally not by regularities of form but by recurrence of action in response to socio-cultural situation. People speak in relatively similar ways not to replicate formal patterns but to participate in the spheres of activity observed by Bakhtin, these being local to people’s immediate experience. Accordingly, rhetorical conceptions of genre include the notions of exigence (first in Bitzer 1968, 1980) – people’s mutual recognition of a need or a reason for speaking in a certain way, here and now – and motive: Amongst those who recognise the exigence, some will be motivated to speak up. So, for example, many in a certain time and place may recognise the reasonableness of composing a political blog, while fewer will be motivated actually to do so. At another time and place, the exigence may be indiscernible to all: The utterance may seem a freakish outburst or a quaint archaism. Or it may simply have no counterpart. Rhetorical genre theory insists thereby on the phenomenological volatility of the open set, as well as its relative stability.

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Rhetorical theorists of genre have argued that genre is a fusion of form and situation (Campbell and Jamieson 1978; Miller 1984), language features being functionally responsive to features of situation. A strong version of this claim is that genre is not a linguistic import to a social situation, or a handy instrument for the accomplishment of goals, but a blend of language and situation: Genre is at once typical speech1 and recognised situation. For example, an emailed thank you for dinner-table hospitality is not an instance of the genre thank-you note unless there has been a dinner party, an accompanying degree of relationship between host and guest, and so on, all these conditions activating sensations of exigence and motive, mutually recognised by sender and recipient of the thank-you message. Close (but not identical) to rhetorical genre theory are Swales’ (1990) proposals for “genre analysis”. Whereas rhetorical theory has identified “social action” (Miller 1984) as the basis for genre status, Swales names communicative purpose as the principal criterion for “a collection of communicative events” to “[turn] into a genre” (47). But communicative purpose is not easy to isolate: It can be multiple; it can disappear altogether (46–47). Swales himself, with Askehave, has revisited the notion of communicative purpose (Askehave and Swales 2001), urging scepticism of the terms in which both analysts and genre-users identify it. To be sure, social action is like communicative purpose in being hard – or even harder – to pin down. But whereas communicative purpose might ask, of a political blogger, for example, “what is your purpose in saying this?” and hear “to inform”, “to debate”, “to express an opinion”, social action would ask, “what makes you want to inform, debate, express?” The answer would be less accessible, more tacitly embedded in situational exigence, less isolable than communicative purpose as an aspect of genre. In his earlier proposals in which he finds it possible to isolate purpose, Swales also finds it possible to separate form from motive. He defends this formalism on the basis of the success of international education: Students can practise “discourse conventions” without experiencing the motives which culturally sanction those conventions (or, in Swales’ terms, without being “assimilated”); discourse conventions can be employed purely in “an instrumental manner”, that is, without commitment to the sphere of activity in which the exigence is recognised (30–31). While these are both possibilities, as are deception and pretending, as discussed below, they may be peripheral rather than core to genre. Nevertheless, as we will see, Swales’ genre analysis offers important formal measures. Similarly, Herring’s (2007) proposal for classifying CMC genres offers means of analysing regularities of occurrence, means lacking in rhetorical theory. In Herring’s proposal, communicative purpose, rather than being genre-definitive, is one of a range of “situation factors”, joining, for example, participant characteristics, activity, and norms. Herring’s proposals advance analysis of CMC by methodically recognising technological features of situation (e.g., synchronicity, persistence of transcript, anonymity) as pragmatic conditions, thereby recognising technology

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itself as a social circumstance and identifying medial parameters which the research reported in this chapter shows to be constitutive of genres. At the same time, as Herring notes, the results of analysis still need to be reconciled with speakers’ consciousness of the categories discovered by analysis. The research reported below will show many ways in which speakers’ experience of genres – their sensation of exigence and motive – can be extrapolated from their observable language behaviours. Genre study of CMC may be particularly opportune. At this point in e-history, citizens of the Internet are still constructing the pragmatic dimensions of genres; adapting and instituting the conditions of proximity and distance, synchronicity and sequence, community solidarities and estrangements. Possibly these stillexposed efforts will retire as newness consolidates into custom. Or they may persist, owing to CMC’s technological profile. To a degree greater than other media, including broadcast media, computer media are open to technological design and re-design in response to techniques of use, and they call for the kind of faceted analysis Herring proposes. Genre study of CMC has also exposed an undefeatable sociality. Even as participants in CMC experience technical lags and accelerants, they call on rich social contexts both enduring and evolving, as the research reported below shows. Drawing on these dense contexts, communicative behaviours are typifiable and recognisable to the naked eye. Classification of these types shows not simply that people develop functional ways of speaking under newly enabled conditions, but that they construct mutual knowledge of these ways: They not only know and recognise a way of speaking but also know that others know this speechway. While classification – the professional follow-up on folk recognition – is not an end in itself, not the reason for genre, it is an instrument for tracing the sociality of linguistic consciousness. Section 2 selects research which, by investigating pragmatic features, discovers digital genres, indicating areas for future inquiry into the pragmatics of genre in CMC. Section 3 reports research for which CMC genre is itself the object of inquiry.

2.

Genre-related pragmatics

Clark and Brennan’s important article on “grounding” (1991) is an example of how concerns central to pragmatics point the way to future research in CMC genres. Email is one of several technologically definable contexts which compromise copresence (others being, for example, telephone, fax, voicemail, teleconferencing, and writing and print themselves) and which people have become used to. To ground an utterance in mutual knowledge, a speaker estimates the attention and consciousness of the addressee, who, in turn, “gives evidence” of the success (or

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failure) of those attempts. Whereas in face-to-face and telephonic conversation an immediate response from the addressee gives evidence of “listenership”, in email timing is not available as evidence of grounding (141). But people adopt “alternative techniques” (142). For example, in the absence of expectations of immediate feedback, emailers put more effort into each turn. We can expect that technologically-adaptive grounding techniques will be situation-sensitive – that is, genre-geared – in CMC. And, as Clark and Brennan observe, people do not just “send” a message: Anticipating its reception, they estimate recipients’ consciousness (147). Even dispatched into the putatively borderless expanses of the Internet, a message will be attended by such estimates. Still, the apparent borderlessness of the Internet arena attracts research attention. In an early study of email, Sproull and Kiesler (1986) were concerned with the technology’s “reducing [of] social context cues” (1492), a concern that abides to the present day. Researching the emailing of an organisation where the technology had been in use for 10 years at the time of the study, Sproull and Kiesler also take face-to-face communication as the baseline from which email departs. Yet, the absence of face-to-face cues is not a straight road to de-regulation. Sproull and Kiesler’s record of the many types of message sent via email (“documents, computer programs, personal notes, and official announcements”, 1494; a range of types from “cafeteria menu to corporate strategy documents to love notes”, 1497) shows that cues and regularities survive. Even in such early days, this thorough study turns up signs of the life of genre itself. In the eager exchange of messages, a door opens to an enhanced function for already recognisable message types: opportunity for “affable communication” (1511) in the workplace (cf. Heyd 2009, discussed below, for analysis of developments in this opportunity 20 years later). In exploiting opportunities for affability, people are developing extant genres, the prompts already seated in the genres now enhanced by technological changes. Sproull and Kiesler (1986) also find thoroughly new communicative behaviours: the construction of what they call “new information” – not a new fact, but a new activity and exigence that motivate people to dispatch ideas which otherwise would not have been realised or transmitted. We can see genre potential appearing above the horizon when, in one example, “suggestions for new ways to use a particular piece of software” (1509) are offered, or, in another example, “suggestions about how to add a new product feature” (1510) are requested. Responses to the request are plentiful, and in this responsiveness are early signs of the technology’s capacity to extend the sociability of the group – in this case, to 3,000 participants. Thus even while Sproull and Kiesler claim that social cues disappear from e-contexts, leaving “the message itself” as “one of the few available sources” of information about “social context” (1505), their own findings demonstrate that this is enough. Similarly, in “Interactional coherence in CMC” (1999), Herring finds that where technological features disappoint interactional expectations, they can

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trigger social ingenuity. Analysing the permutations of conversational dynamics in e-settings, Herring looks specifically at the relevance problems which arise due to the nature of message transmission. Responses to comments are delayed or interrupted; topics “decay” (10–11). But people adapt (14), not only to restore an offline standard, or merely to compensate. With the persistent textual record afforded by the otherwise problematic technology, the deep conversational norm of turn-taking is not simply compromised: It is displaced to new effect. For example, quoting can replicate the earlier turn (15); lists can maintain a “global topic” by means of threads and moderators’ interventions (16); people can take a “[playful]” approach to embedding (17). Quoting, threading, moderating, and play may each figure in the development of genres online, and figure differently in different genres. As will be seen below, embedding can be an efficiency in some online genres (Orlikowski and Yates 1994) and a disturbance in others (Graham 2007). And relevance problems can convert to useful vagueness in the “flirt letter” (Wyss 2008), technological features having different pragmatics in different genres.

3.

Pragmatic study of CMC genres

Early amongst researchers to look for genre in a technologically-mediated scene, Orlikowski and Yates published two studies (Orlikowski and Yates 1994; Yates and Orlikowski 1992) which remain touchstones for research in CMC. Their 1992 study observes that research in organisational communications tends to isolate media choice from context and to attribute to media “fixed” effects. They correct these tendencies by introducing rhetorical genre theory and thereby capturing socio-historical context. Yates and Orlikowski trace the business memorandum from the late 19th century to the present: They find it emerging from genres of external business correspondence in response to changes in business structure and management, and developing in response to technological change: telephone, typewriter, email. As the memo evolves, it sheds formal characteristics of external correspondence (e.g., elaborate politeness; salutation and complimentary close) and develops new ones (e.g., conciseness; subject line). This valuable study is particularly notable for exposing the error in considering email a genre: The long historical view shows clearly that new media are best seen as changes to socio-historical context, and that existing genres shape the uses of new media, even as new media bring about genre change. The long historical view also enables Yates and Orlikowski to outline levels of genre change in response to historical context, including its technological conditions: Genres emerge, or are maintained and/or modified, or decay. Turning from the long historical view to a shorter-term diachronic perspective, Orlikowski and Yates (1994) studied communication amongst computer-language designers developing a common programming language in the early 1980s. In

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achieving this end, the designers communicated by email over a two-and-a-halfyear period. To analyse their communication, Orlikowski and Yates classify message types (memo, dialogue, proposal, and ballot set) comprising a “genre repertoire” for this activity group and identify features (e.g., embedded messages, salutation or “sign-off”, subheadings [552]) of these types. Genre classification exposes the cycles of the group’s activities and organisational behaviour: Members take up different genres as the group engages in different stages of the project. Especially important for genre study is the view Orlikowski and Yates offer of the group as resourceful and self-regulating. The efficiency of the group’s use of new technology can be attributed to members’ professional solidarity: their deep, mutual experience of this sphere of activity; their shared sensations of exigence and motive. Technological affordances – such as the archiving capacity of the medium and the capacity to embed passages of prior messages in new messages – are readily absorbed and exploited, and result in a mix of established genres and adapted ones. That range of newness is the object of Crowston and Williams’ (2000) study of web pages, a study that continues to provide benchmarks for reckoning novelty to study of Internet communication. Following indications in Yates and Orlikowski (1992), Crowston and Williams analyse findings from their study of web pages as revealing a cline of newness from (1) extant genres reproduced on the web, a category which includes the use of web technologies to replicate non-digital forms (e.g., linking to produce multi-page documents); (2) adaptation of extant genres, where the technology changes the form of a genre or develops a new purpose for an existing form (e.g., a film review links to an order form); and (3) novel genres unique to the web environment, such as the home page or the “under-construction” web page. This category includes emergent genres which are “potentially new”, that is, eligible to become “accepted” by users of CMC. Crowston and Williams note that a new form is not a new genre – it awaits acceptance – and, further, that truly novel genres were rare in their study. Like Yates and Orlikowski, they locate technology as a modification of situation. Whereas Crowston and Williams look at genres at their online destination, Strobbe and Jacobs’ (2005:1) study of “the use of press releases on the Internet (also called e-releases)” follows one genre from print to the Internet. Their naming of the object of inquiry captures central questions about newness in the study of CMC genre: How do non-digital genres transfer to a digital environment? Are they “press releases on the Internet”, that is, the same genre except for being in the digital medium, and in Crowston and Williams’ terms “reproduced”? Or are they a new genre – “e-releases” – with new forms and/or functions, and in Crowston and Williams’ terms “adapted”? First, Strobbe and Jacobs are able to show in press releases a strong form/function profile – use of third-person forms and (pseudo-)quotation – engaging institutional purposes: the delivery of a “preformulation” to print and broadcast news producers, that is, a package tailored for sending in the jour-

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nalistic scene. They are then able to trace the mutation and also the persistence of the form/function profile as being in step with the mutation or persistence of what rhetorical genre theory would call the social action of the press release: the filtering of corporate or organisational messages through the news genres. In the press releases of two different distributors they find contrasting outcomes of the migration of the genre to an online environment. One agency issues press releases whose pragmatic profile keeps some preformulation features but also adds direct address to the reader, including imperatives, and emphasis by means of features such as all caps (2). More “selling” than “telling”, these releases also include links to corporate sites. In addition, they are archived and available to searches. In other words, they eliminate the “middleman” – the journalist – in their address to the public and function beyond being today’s or tomorrow’s news. The other agency, however, honouring its service to news institutions, issues releases in traditional preformulation packages. Strobbe and Jacobs interpret their findings as showing that one route for the migrating genre by-passes “the gate-keeping role traditionally played by journalists in handling paper press releases” (1), while another migration route conveys established practices to a “new location”: “[I]t seems as if for the time being online news remains – to some extent at least – tied in with traditional media” (2). As well as showing these different migration paths, their research also reveals what news genres do, whether online or offline: They mediate utterances of interested parties (companies, organisations) through the positions of other institutions (news producers). This is a social action of the news genres, one that comes to light by means of research in the pragmatics of CMC. With its historical perspective on a migrating genre, Wyss’s “From the bridal letter to online flirting: Changes in text type from the nineteenth century to the Internet” (2008) offers much to the study of CMC genres. Wyss notes that study of the pragmatics of historical text types requires the “reconstruction of the norms and rules of a sociohistorical context that is different from one’s own contemporary milieu” (226): in other words, the reconstitution of the exigence and motive which manifest in a genre. Wyss’s account of the 19th-century Brautbriefe (bridal letter) is exemplary for revealing the layered complexity of such motives, a complexity far beyond a compact communicative purpose. Composing the Brautbriefe, engaged couples “[performed] the bourgeois self” (230), stylistically demonstrating to one another their eligibility for matrimony. These demonstrations in turn were meaningful through their articulation with contemporary class-indexed concepts of gender and of language itself. Evidently concentrating many social energies, this high-performance genre also generated its own “meta-genre” (Giltrow 2002): advisories and rule-giving which coincided imperfectly with actual practice (a mismatch that could be compared with that which Herring 1996 finds in gender-stereotypical commentary and advisories on CMC). CMC is one amongst several technological amplifications of lovers’ communiqués. The postcard, the telephone, and the telegraph were others, and Wyss notes

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that the love letter was and is combined in its use with “other oral and written communication” (233). Whatever the combination, Wyss observes that writers of both the Brautbriefe and today’s electronic love letters get to know each other through their correspondence. Crucially, however, the two eras’ correspondents start out lacking knowledge of each other in different ways, the difference playing out along both social and technological dimensions. Whereas bridal-letter exchanges ratified the bourgeois identities of the correspondents, corroborating estimates by a circle of family and friends, the Internet confronts lovers with (once again) an “enormous and bewildering lack of context” (244): Who is out there? Accordingly, the “flirt email” develops, pragmatically “[vague]” to maintain a “non-committal” stance (244–245) while the correspondents conduct a reconnaissance of the “enormous” (de)context. Inheriting some forms from “the traditional Western discourse of love”, the flirt letter is in addition “cryptic”, suggesting that the relevance-weak patterns other researchers have found in CMC may have many functions and may be a resource for the development of Internet genres (see Herring’s chapter on relevance in this volume). As well, Wyss asks “whether a flirt letter can be called a love letter”: Is it a new genre or a variation on, or adaptation of, the old? Her own analysis of rhetorical situation sets a standard for thoroughness in developing measures for newness: Has the rhetorical situation changed? To what extent, along which dimension? Taking a cross-cultural (Turkish/British) perspective, Hatipo˘glu’s (2007) study of Calls for Papers shows that even seemingly modest differences in socio-technical aspects of the rhetorical situation can have measurable pragmatic effects in the politeness features he analyses. Graham (2007) also focuses on (im)politeness, but in a list situation where possible face threats are more severe than the risk of burdening recipients with uninteresting Calls for Papers. Graham’s research site is “ChurchList, an unmoderated, tightly-knit email discussion list which provides a forum for the discussion of issues affecting the Anglican Church” (745) – a context that is dense enough to engage participants not only in deep affinities but also in serious disagreements. Graham’s study takes us farther into the socio-communicative environment of lists than any other research discussed in this review, showing that at the heart of ChurchList’s engagement are genres and, in this case, one genre in particular: the request-for-prayer. List participants experience exigence, the feeling that a certain kind of utterance is called for, here and now. And they experience equally the exigence of the up-take (Freadman 2002): fitting, conscientious response. Extending the experience of exigence are politeness constraints, some of which are technologically conditioned (747): the requirement that the subject line should specify both the initiating genre and its up-take (this message is for those ready to respond to a prayer request sympathetically), thereby managing the audience fluidity of the e-list; and the sanction against “blatting” (copying a private message into a public arena), thereby mitigating the politeness hazards of Reported Speech in an online setting. Other politeness constraints are such as would be pres-

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ent in offline settings – the conscientiousness of, for example, expression of support rather than criticism in responding to a troubled co-religionist – and indicate the transfer of attitudes and interests to the online world. One might speculate as well that the online prayer request articulates with offline scenes of activity, such as prayer meetings and Bible-study sessions. Graham examines a ChurchList episode in which a speaker flouts these norms by criticising a supplicant, directing her response away from the supplicant by means of third-person pronouns and, in addition, copying private messages into her responses. Appearing under the original subject line, the norm-offending uptake shocks discussants whom the subject line has led to expect a sympathetic message. Graham speculates that the offending participant may be e-incompetent. A genre-theoretical explanation would suggest in addition that she does not experience the same exigence as the other participants. Moreover, Graham’s analysis of the flurry of meta-generic activity which follows the offending message – rebukes and attempts to restore the site’s cordiality – shows the capacity of a community to regard a genre as a pivot of its affinity. The meta-generic discussions implicitly restore the request/support pair and explicitly specify rules for subject lines. In her study of medical spam (offers of products promising, for example, weight loss, allergy relief, or improved sexual performance), Barron (2006) consults genre theory as practised in English for Special Purposes (citing, e.g., Swales 1990 and Bhatia 1993) and analyses “moves”: discursive sub-goals of a communicative purpose. Barron’s study is a major contribution in, first, comparing the pragmatic parameters of pre- or non-digital genres – direct mail, promotion letters – with those of their digital version, spam. While direct mail goes to a wide audience, spam recipients, owing to techniques for harvesting e-addresses, comprise an even wider audience, and one relatively less known to the senders. Barron’s analysis then exposes the feedback sequence of technological innovation and social/legal responses that has resulted in the spam genre. The audience extension enabled by address-harvesting has led to recipients’ dislike of these messages (evidently greater than their dislike of direct mail) and resentment of the cost of receiving them: in other words, to technologically-induced social responses. As the message type gets a bad reputation, worthy products desert it. Spam filters (a technological response) are developed, as are legal constraints (a social response). In turn, the genre adapts on both technological and social fronts: Anonymity devices are designed to evade prosecution; discursive features develop to camouflage the message type. The rapidity of this feedback/adaptation cycle may appear to be peculiar to CMC, but one might point to comparable episodes in pre-digital history, such as the swift legal-social responses to the spread of pornographic images on postcards in the early 20th century (Sigel 2000). While study of spam exposes the shady side of online life, Puschmann’s (2009) study of Wal-Mart’s corporate blogging investigates another subterfuge: the appropriation of the “positive associations” of personal blogging for corporate ends. As

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Puschmann points out, the “abusability” of blogging is evidence for the convergence of form and function (51): in other words, the existence of a genre. Formal features aggregate functionally in a scene of activity and become indications of that activity – in the case of personal blogging, conversational invitations to interaction and contact. The site “Life at Wal-Mart” replicates the technologically-formatted indications of blogging, but then “abuses” them in the service of a corporate social action: narrowly, dissemination of the message that Wal-Mart is a good employer; broadly, a response to a complex political, socio-rhetorical situation. While the technical (or “hard” [58]) forms signal “blog”, Puschmann’s investigation shows that other (or “soft”) forms are not in keeping with the patterns he establishes through corpus analysis of pragmatic features of blogs. Use of ‘you’, for example, is ambiguous in the 52 “Life at Wal-Mart” postings in ways in which it is not in the larger corpus of blogs Puschmann has studied; Wal-Mart postings also deviate from those in the larger corpus in favouring past tense forms of verbs. In addition, they neither quote other blogs nor provide links – but neither do the personal blogs in Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, and Wright’s sample (2005, discussed below) match the stereotype of the blog as a genre characterised by links. More telling for both the Wal-Mart case and for genre study, is the “astounding” (66) similarity of the Wal-Mart blogs. For Puschmann, the key point is that this similarity shows evidence of editorial oversight, which spoils what he takes to be characteristic about blogs, that is, that they are owned by their authors. For genre study, the bigger news may be that pronounced similarity actually makes instances suspect and suggests tampering rather than authenticity. Traditional views of genre emphasise sameness, and Puschmann himself regards genres as “fixed and unchanging” (81). But the false air of the “astounding” sameness of Wal-Mart blogs suggests instead that genres, in their real rather than Wal-Mart lives, are characterised by variability rather than uniformity (cf. Devitt 2009 for the view that genres are, above all, formally variable). Heyd’s (2009) study extends our vantage on genre’s masquerading capabilities by adding to faux blogs and evasive spam the “email hoax”. (See also Heyd’s chapter in this volume.) Neither her findings nor her theoretical proposals aim to expose deception or mimicry, however. Instead, Heyd is tackling the problem of newness in genres: If genres are what is accustomed and what activates languageusers’ expectations, how can brand-new genres be explained? (See Miller and Shepherd 2009 for a rhetorical approach to this question.) As Heyd points out, while people report experiencing newness in the Internet world, research on the whole has failed to turn up much that is thoroughly novel, finding instead antecedents for what is felt to be new, or finding that what is new is hybrid or “adapted” in Crowston and Williams’ (2000) term, rather than entirely new. To account for this mixed scene of continuity and break-away, at the same time theorising issues in function-vs.-form debates, Heyd proposes a model that places at a high level of generality “communicative functions”, which, she says, will be “few and funda-

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mental” and thus highly stable (240). Research which focuses on genre-as-function will therefore not be likely to find wholly new manifestations, and will tend to uncover likenesses. Difference will appear as the level of generality drops from these function-defined “super-genres” to their rhetorical instantiation, “branching” into situations where it is form which differentiates “sub-genres” from one another (240–241). Applying this model to the email hoax, Heyd demonstrates that email hoaxes are not, in fact, direct descendants of pre-digital con games and swindles. Their genealogy is instead traceable from the super-genre “officelore” through “digital folklore”: message types which keep open friendly lines of communication amongst workmates by circulating, for example, ludicrous photos, amusing lists, or political petitions. Providing a “ready-made” source of “tellable” material and “[reinforcing] digital social networks” (251–252), digital folklore shares communicative function with officelore, but in its execution of this function is distinguished by its use of technological affordances, such as address-storing, multipleaddressing capacities, and the forwarding function. It is also distinguished from officelore in being more meta-discursive (253). The generic distinction of digital folklore types is popularly attested, as Heyd notes, by websites devoted to collecting them (254). Heyd’s proposals are a notable contribution to genre theory and offer an opportunity to reconcile social action and communicative purpose: Social action may be the lower level of generality – structured, rhetorical, and open to the immediate experience of language users – whereas communicative function, at a higher but still socio-historical level of generality, may be more accessible to analysts than to language users. In Locher’s (2006) book-length study of online advice-giving by health services at a U.S. university (see also Locher’s chapter in this volume), antecedence is a less vexing issue than it is for the study of email hoaxes. The letters issued by “Lucy”, the persona of health educators who answer questions submitted electronically to a website, participate in “the well-established tradition of an advice column” (17) and other non-digital genres: The radio call-in show is a close relative; more distant is the nurse’s visit to the new mother. All these genres engage the pragmatic issues involved in mitigating or boosting the force of an expert’s intervention in the advisee’s affairs. Internet advice-giving also shares with radio call-in shows and print advice columns the border between private and public. Advice-requesters refer to intimate matters yet are addressed in a wide public arena, and responses are in each of these genres pragmatically geared not only to the advice seekers (and their face wants) but also to overhearers. Locher analyses pragmatic arrangements for overhearers as being aimed at providing them with useful information. On the whole, transfer of public advice-giving to the Internet seems to have been, in the case of the “Lucy” site, a stable one. The audience is digitally extended

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beyond the querying/advising pair, but it is not evident that the extension has a rhetorical effect different from that of print media, although comparative study based on Locher’s findings may reveal differences. In genres giving personal advice publicly, the crucial medial distinction is, once again, in the durability of the record. Lucy’s answers are archived, and information-seekers can search the archive instead of submitting a question or can be directed by Lucy, in the presence of overhearers, to search. In turn, while the record persists, it is also revisable. Lucy updates the archive to make the consultation process more efficient: pragmatically accessible and also refreshed with new medical research. Emigh and Herring (2005) also analyse a traditional print genre – the encyclopaedia entry – on its arrival at online destinations. They want to know what happens to the genre under different technologically-enabled conditions of production: on the one hand, longstanding practices of reference publishing – expert contributions solicited and standardised by editors – continued in the online version of the Columbia Encyclopedia; on the other hand, the two distinct collaborative online systems of Wikipedia and Everything2. While both Wikipedia and Everything2 are “democratic” in inviting anyone rather than only experts to contribute, the systems rely on different “quality” mechanisms: All Wikipedia users are potentially authors and can revise others’ entries, whereas Everything2 entries cannot be revised and depend instead on ratings to monitor quality. Following Biber (1988), Emigh and Herring analyse entries for formality (noun-formation suffixes) and informality (personal pronouns and contractions), these features having been “validated as [indicators] of genres”: Factor analysis has revealed “frequencies of linguistic features to empirically identify different genres – what [Biber] calls ‘registers’ – of discourse” (5). Revised and monitored by “good users” (2), the Wikipedia entries self-standardise towards the formality norms of the print encyclopaedia entry. In contrast, the Everything2 entries remain variable and less formal, while most informal are the “discussion” entries on Wikipedia. Emigh and Herring identify Everything2 as an example of what Crowston and Williams (2000) call an emergent genre: It is a “hybrid product of the Web” (9), a blend of the online genres “discussion” and “repository of knowledge”. Most compelling, however, for students of genre may be the standardisation effect on Wikipedia, an effect coincident with Wikipedia’s growing credibility. Asking why the Wikipedia entries end up being so like traditional encyclopaedia entries, despite the democracy of the authoring systems, Emigh and Herring write that users “appropriate norms and resources” from print traditions, and a small group of “good users” then enforces those norms (9). Rhetorical research would be interested in the motivations of the “good users” and also in the exigence experienced by all contributors to either Wikipedia or Everything2. The motives of Wikipedia and Everything2 contributors may differ, as may those of their readers, even as entries from both sites could be captured under the higher-level category “repository of knowledge”.

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If citizens of Internet domains were to seek material on a particular topic – let us say, Karl Marx (one of Emigh and Herring’s sample entries) – they would face a genre problem addressed by information-retrieval specialists: What kinds of material is the search going to turn up? Rants? Jokes? Public-affairs opinion? Encyclopaedia articles – and, if so, Wikipedia-type or Everything2-type? Like other information-retrieval specialists (e.g., Crowston and Williams 2000; Ferizis and Bailey 2006; Kwasnik, Crowston, Nilan, and Roussinov 2001; B. Stein 2010), Karlgren and Cutting (2005) aim to develop means of “[discriminating]” amongst genres, eventually providing users with a “cascade of filters” (5) which will identify the genre of Internet documents. The filters separate form from content or topic (from Karl Marx, in our example), and isolate the most computable features in Biber’s (1988) cluster analyses. Having disavowed form as prime indicator of genre, rhetorical theorists of genre would be suspicious of a project reverting to formal markers, and Karlgren and Cutting concede that they are “not trying to determine how genres differ but which parameters” – amongst the 20 they test – “are reliable in identifying genre” (4). Their mixed results may await improvement in computability of more nuanced features (1), or genre’s phenomenology as social action rather than formal features may defeat all but the broadest identifications. In the meantime, other research besides Emigh and Herring’s suggests that corpus analysis of formal features can coax out nuanced portraits of genres’ social action. Puschmann’s (2010) study of corporate blogs (as distinct from the false blog of “Life at Wal-Mart” discussed above) produces such portraits by concentrating on interpersonal pronouns: first- and second-person singular and plural. Recognising that there are many types of blogs, Puschmann also identifies interactional features he believes to be typical of blogging. Radiating from a stable deictic centre which hosts the “egocentric” prominence of bloggers themselves (20), these features include opportunity for feedback and “individuality”, and contrast with genres more removed from the paradigm of conversation. Traceable in the relative frequency of interpersonal pronouns, this interactional nexus is appropriated by corporate interests in order to “personalize” their communications to clients, shareholders, recruits, or broader publics. Puschmann’s study goes farther, however, than simply exposing corporations’ exploiting of interactional resources by showing the frequency of interpersonal pronouns. In analysis and examples of the scope of the pronouns’ speaker-representation and audience address, Puschmann demonstrates not only the characteristic persuasive stance of the corporate blog but also the range of variability in that stance: Each interpersonal pronoun combination of dimensions of self, addressee, and other shapes a different kind of interactional scene, attitude, identification. Such a range suggests once again that the context of CMC is, rather than impoverished, rich in its access to complex rhetorical situations.

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Prospects for study of genre in CMC

The research reviewed in this chapter suggests that pragmatic methodology has much to offer the study of genre. Once data sets are defined sufficiently to recover a scene of social action – flirtatious overtures, for example, or offers of medical products or medical advice, or announcements of conferences, to name just a few of the actions studied – the analysis of features illuminates not only linguistic manifestations but the social situations themselves. We have seen that systematic study of, for example, pronouns or (im)politeness or relevance warrants can expose local characteristics of the socio-rhetorical situation. In addition, results of pragmatic study challenge the notion that genre is what is the same, what is formally fixed or even rigid, and what is rule-governed, at best instrumental, at worst imposing and exacting of conformity. With its capacity to expose the coordinates of language-users’ social positions and inclinations, pragmatic study can establish genre as what is versatile and variable, functional because flexible, and subjective rather than instrumental. In addition to being productive for genre theory generally, pragmatic study of CMC genres also uncovers conditions unique to episodes of technological change. At first, these were characterised as depleting context: jarring departures from copresence. But research soon showed users rapidly adapting to technological conditions and reconstituting social context. Technological design, however, still occupies research attention (for a range of genre-theoretically informed comments on design issues see, for example, Agre 1998; Beghtol 2000; Hendry and Carlyle 2006; D. Stein 2006; Toms 2001; Watters and Shepherd 1997) and complicates CMC genre study. To what extent can software designers be considered co-participants in the life of a genre – ghost-writers or silent partners? What is the significance for genre of a pragmatic regularity that is technologically formatted rather than locally originating? How do these formatted regularities play into participants’ experience of exigence and motive? By providing a clearer view of the sociality of the technology itself, Herring’s (2007) scheme for classification can help to address such questions and to further the work of Askehave and Nielsen (2005) and others who disentangle “hard” from “soft” dimensions of CMC. Drawing on rhetorical theory and also proposing an “ecology” for CMC, Erickson (2000), for example, finds that on the experimental “Babble” chat system, conversation reaches genre status, thanks to users’ learning the system’s capacity. Long separated in research practice, conversation (“proto-genre”, in Swales’ [1990] term, “primary” genre in Bakhtin’s [1986]) and genre may draw closer in CMC owing to the mutual shaping of technologies and their uses. Genre is a means by which language users know one another, finding familiarity even amongst strangers but also sensing tremors to common ground when facing the unexpected or unrecognisable. As new technologies have expanded audiences incalculably and unpredictably, they have introduced unknown speakers

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and listeners with unknown motives, bringing about a subduction of rhetorical situation and sharp sensations of newness. At the same time, designers’ assumptions about motives for communication may not align immediately with language users’ experience – incurring, again, a feeling that something has changed, some foreign element has intruded. Both conditions – the inscrutable audience and the misalignment of design and motive – appear to be transitional, however, as the case of relatively early (2003) weblogs, studied by Herring et al. (2005), suggests. Describing blogging technology as having “bridged” a gap between the multimedia arena of relatively static HTML (hypertext markup language) websites and the interactivity of other CMC, Herring et al. also find (a) that the type to which most blogs belong is a descendant of a very old genre, the hand-written diary, now publicised by new technology; and (b) that the uses of the “socio-technical format” of the blog are so diverse as to make it “no longer meaningful to speak of weblogs as a single genre” (164). This is a complex picture. While language users introduce old forms to new ground, their diverse uses of the new technology also sub-divide the new ground into socio-rhetorical localities from which arise the differentiations that are genres themselves. The technology can still name broad domains of use, as when Myers (2010) writes on The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis while finding manifold differentiations in the discourse. Alongside this broad naming, however, the process of technical innovation and adoption is evident in a typical series of classifications: First, communicative activity is named for the technology itself (e.g., email), then as a sub-type (e.g., political email message), then as a full-fledged genre (e.g., e-petition). While the cline of newness proposed by Crowston and Williams (2000) is confirmed by research, it also needs to be reconciled with the process revealed in the classification series. At what stage in the process of technological adoption has the analyst taken the snapshot that exposes a reproduced genre, or an adapted or emergent one? Pragmatics research pursuing newness and isolating the criteria for emergent status may not only shed light on computer-mediated life but also revive early debates in rhetorical genre study about antecedence. For example, when Herring et al. show that blogs, “rather than deriving from a single source” (2005: 160), derive from many, we can anticipate that the outcome of the multiple input will also be multiple: local differentiations processed through one technological junction. Are such congregations and dispersals peculiar to digital genres? Equally, we could ask of Herring et al.’s finding regarding the blog as occupying a “bridging” position whether such genre-productive positions can be found in the non-digital world, or whether the sedimentations of traditional speechways have closed all the gaps. So far, the reckoning of newness has tended to be one-way: Do CMC genres differ from or replicate offline genres? Awaiting pragmatic study is the possibility that there is transfer in the other direction, a flow-back from online to offline

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genres. Equally compelling would be study which thoroughly tests claims for radical newness against historical episodes. I have mentioned the advent of the postcard – a technological, social, and legal breakthrough in its time – as a comparison. There will be others, and Wyss’s study of love letters across two centuries should be inspiration to look for them (see also Burgess 2009 comparing the commentaries surrounding late-18th-century print technologies with those accompanying late-20th-century CMC). Where genre is regarded not as protocol-conforming fixities but as versatile bundles of interactive attitude and orientation, genre study is an effective way of investigating the newness of CMC. Classification measures the extent and quality of newness, while analysis of social action reveals users’ experience of exigence, including their social motives for taking up new technologies and their mutual recognition of these motives.

Note 1. I use “speech” in this chapter to refer to any verbal communication.

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About the authors

Diane Allton lectured in communications and cultural theory at Coventry University, UK, where she developed an interest in online communications. With Sandra Harrison, she has published on transgressions, miscommunication, and politeness in email discussions. She has also researched online health support groups for the International Regulatory Cooperation for Herbal Medicines (IRCH), in collaboration with Stanford University. She currently works as a learning and development consultant for an international lifesaving charity. Jannis Androutsopoulos is Professor of German and Media Linguistics at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His research interests are in sociolinguistics and media discourse studies. He has written extensively on linguistic variability and style, multilingualism and code-switching, and media discourse and diversity. He is co-editor of Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power (de Gruyter 2012) and editor of Language and Society in Cinematic Discourse (special issue of Multilingua 31:2, 2012). He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Language@Internet, Pragmatics, Discourse Context & Media, and the International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching. Naomi S. Baron is Professor of Linguistics and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning at American University in Washington, DC. She is the author of seven books; Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford University Press) won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008. Baron’s research interests include the effects of technology on spoken and written language, the impact of electronically-mediated communication on individuals and on social interaction, and implications of digital media for education. She is presently studying differences between the ways people read onscreen versus in hard copy and the resulting changes in what it means to read. Markus Bieswanger is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. In addition to computer-mediated communication, his research interests include sociolinguistics and varieties of English, pragmatics, contact linguistics, and applied linguistics. His recent articles on computer-mediated communication include “Gendered language use in computer-mediated communication: Typography in text messaging” (2010), “Patterns and variation in the language use in English-based online discussion forums” (2011, with Frauke

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Intemann) and “The sociolinguistics of texting: Methodological considerations and empirical results” (2011) (for full bibliographical information, see the reference section of chapter 19 of this volume). He serves as a member of the editorial board of the journal Language@Internet. Brenda Danet (deceased) did her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago, USA, but spent most of her professional life in Israel. She was a professor at Hebrew University, where she was appointed Danny Arnold Chair of Communications in 1998. Following her retirement in 2000, she migrated back to the United States, where she became a Research Affiliate in Anthropology at Yale. Her most recent scholarship focused on language, culture, and communication on the Internet. Her publications on CMC include CyberPlay: Communicating Online (Berg 2001) and an edited volume (with Susan Herring) on The Multilingual Internet: Language, Communication, and Culture Online (Oxford 2007). Christa Dürscheid is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Her main research interests are theories of grammar, computermediated communication, sociolinguistics, and didactics of language. She is the author (with Franc Wagner and Sarah Brommer) of Wie Jugendliche schreiben: Schreibkompetenz und neue Medien (de Gruyter 2010) and numerous articles on language use in the new media. From 2006 to 2010 she conducted the research project “The influence of the new media on the competence of writing”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). From 2008 to 2012 she led (together with Andreas Jucker) the research project “Private and public communication in the new media” (funded by the SNF). Since 2011, she has been a member of the SNF project “Morphological and syntactic variation in SMS communication”. Alan Firth is Senior Lecturer and Post-Graduate Degree Programme Director at the School of Education, Communication, and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK, and Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at the School of European Languages, King Abdulaziz University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He carries out research on human interaction, more specifically interaction transacted through talk. He has a particular interest in second language learning, multilingualism, English as a lingua franca, and the notion of “competence,” and he has published extensively in these areas. He is currently working with Johannes Wagner on a monograph on Second Languages in the Wild, to be published by Routledge in 2013. Carmen Frehner is a secondary school teacher in Zürich, Switzerland. She studied English and German in Zürich and Aberdeen, Scotland and received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Zürich. Her research interests lie in the

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field of computer-mediated communication, and she is the author of Email – SMS – MMS. The Linguistic Creativity of Asynchronous Discourse in the New Media Age (Peter Lang 2008). Angela Cora Garcia is Associate Professor of Sociology with a secondary appointment in the Department of Global Studies at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. Her research interests include conversation analytic studies of mediation, emergency telephone calls, and computer-mediated communication, as well as ethnographic research on the sociology of leisure and on animals in society. Her recent publications include papers on the application of conversation analysis to medical issues involving communication problems, how gender is involved in negotiations in mediation sessions, how mediators give advice to disputants, and how disputants construct strong opening statements in mediation sessions. Alexandra Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics at King’s College London, UK. She has published extensively on everyday life storytelling (both face-to-face and in new/social media) and the construction of identities, with a focus on youth and gender identities. Her latest book (co-authored with Anna De Fina) is Analyzing Narrative: Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives (Cambridge University Press 2011). Martin Gill is Associate Professor in the department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, where he teaches sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and cultural studies. His current research is concerned with questions of authenticity/authentication, language, and nativeness. His recent publications include “Authenticity” in Jef Verschueren and Jan-Ola Östman (eds.), Pragmatics in Practice (John Benjamins 2011), and “Nativeness, authority, authenticity: The construction of belonging and exclusion in debates about English language proficiency and immigration in Britain” in Carol Percy and Mary Ann Davidson (eds.), The Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms (Multilingual Matters 2012). Janet Giltrow is Professor in the Department of English and, since 2007, Associate Dean of Arts at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Taking rhetorical and linguistic approaches to discourse studies, she has published extensively on literary and non-literary stylistics; genre theory; ideologies of language; and academic writing, including two textbooks: Academic Writing: Writing and Reading in the Disciplines, 3rd ed. (Broadview Press 2001) and Academic Writing: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Broadview Press 2010). She co-edited (with Dieter Stein) Genres in the Internet (John Benjamins 2009).

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About the authors

Amy Gonzales is Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. She received her Ph.D. in Communication from Cornell in 2010. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty at Indiana University. Her research examines the effects that digital communication technologies have on individual identity, social support, health, and well-being, especially for people from disadvantaged communities. Helmut Gruber is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna, Austria. He has published in various fields of Applied Linguistics such as Critical Discourse Analysis, media studies, political discourse analysis, conflict communication, and computer-mediated communication, with a focus on investigating the impact and use of electronic communication in scholarly activities. He is co-editor of Pragmatics, the quarterly journal of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), and a member of IPrA’s advisory board. Jeff Hancock is Associate Professor in the Departments of Communication and Information Science, where he is co-Chair, and the co-Director of Cognitive Science at Cornell University, USA. His research is concerned with the psychological and interpersonal dynamics of social media, with a particular emphasis on language use and deception. His research on lying online has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense, and it has been featured frequently in the media, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and BBC. He is the Associate Editor of the journal Discourse Processes. Sandra Harrison worked at Coventry University, UK, until her retirement in 2012. Most of her research has focused on online interaction. Her Ph.D. examined interactions in email discussion forums, using discourse analysis and conversation analysis to investigate the suitability of these methods for the analysis of online discussion data. Her subsequent research has analyzed communication problems online, turn-taking, repair strategies and apologies in online forums, and showing empathy and advice-giving in online arthritis workshops. Susan C. Herring is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. Her research applies linguistic methods of analysis to computer-mediated communication, with a focus on structural, pragmatic, interactional, and social phenomena, especially as regards gender issues and multilingual and multimodal communication. Her publications include ComputerMediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (John Benjamins 1996) and The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online (Oxford 2007, co-edited with Brenda Danet). She is a past editor of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and the current editor

About the authors

743

of Language@Internet. She is presently preparing a multi-volume edited collection on Internet Linguistics, to be published by Routledge. Theresa Heyd is Researcher in English Linguistics at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany. She studied literary translation and received her Ph.D. in English Linguistics (2007) from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. She was a postdoctoral lecturer at the University of Texas and a German Research Foundation (DFG) scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA. Her research focuses on mediated discourse of all kinds, with an emphasis on the pragmatics and sociolinguistics of computer-mediated communication; she is currently conducting a corpus study on the emergence of digital vernaculars. She has published in the fields of CMC (Email Hoaxes, John Benjamins 2008), sociolinguistics, narrativity, and literary pragmatics. Amelie Hössjer is Associate Professor of media and communication studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. She received her Ph.D. in Scandinavian languages from the Department of Scandinavian languages at Uppsala University. Her major research interests are interactional questions in relation to computer-mediated communication. Jennifer Baker Jacobs became interested in computer-mediated communication while pursuing graduate studies at the University of Cincinnati, USA. Her research interests include sociolinguistics and conversation analytic studies of chat room interaction in the college classroom. Her work has been published in Research on Language and Social Interaction and Qualitative Sociology. Christopher Jenks is Associate Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. His current work is concerned with institutional discourse, computer-mediated communication, intercultural communication, and English as a lingua franca. He has published widely in international journals and is co-editor of an eight-book series on social interaction for Edinburgh University Press. His co-edited book Conceptualising Learning in Applied Linguistics (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) was a runner-up for the 2011 BAAL book prize. Rodney H. Jones is Associate Head of the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include computer-mediated discourse, health communication, and language and sexuality. He is co-author (with Christoph Hafner) of Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction (Routledge 2012) and author of Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective (Routledge 2013).

744

About the authors

Loukia Lindholm is a Ph.D. candidate in English Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. She is completing a doctoral dissertation on the form and function of narratives in online advice. Her research interests include narrative analysis, advice discourse, and online identity construction. Rich Ling is a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of Taken for Grantedness (MIT Press 2012), New Tech, New Ties (MIT Press 2008), and The Mobile Connection (Morgan Kaufmann 2004). In addition, he is a founding editor of the journal Mobile Media & Communication and an associate editor of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. His work has focused on the social consequences of mobile communication. Miriam A. Locher is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She researches interpersonal pragmatics, linguistic politeness, relational work, the exercise of power, disagreements, advice-giving (in health contexts), and computer-mediated communication. Her book publications include Power and Politeness in Action (Mouton 2004); Advice Online (John Benjamins 2006), which addresses advice-giving in an American Internet advice column; and Advice in Discourse (with Holger Limberg, 2012 John Benjamins). In addition, she co-edited the collections Impoliteness in Language (with Derek Bousfield, Mouton 2008), Standards and Norms of the English Language (with Jürg Strässler, Mouton 2008), and the Handbook of Interpersonal Pragmatics (with Sage L. Graham, Mouton 2010). Kris M. Markman is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Memphis, USA. Her research interests center on people’s everyday communicative and creative practices with and through new media. Her research on computermediated discourse focuses primarily on structural issues such as turn-taking, repair, and openings and closings. She has published in the Journal of Language & Social Psychology, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Business Communication. Sandi Michele de Oliveira is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where she heads the program in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. She has published widely in the area of address: theoretical perspectives, intercultural communication, politeness, sociolinguistic and socio-cognitive perspectives, processes of negotiation and renegotiation, and address use in CMC. She has conducted both real-time and apparent-time studies of address in Portuguese communities, spanning three decades. Other areas of research attention have included post-Brown and Levinson politeness theory, political discourse, and the (socio)linguistic construction of personal and social identity.

About the authors

745

John C. Paolillo is Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing and Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. His research focuses on social aspects of computer technology and its use, especially where quantitative and computational methods can help illuminate social processes. He is the author of Analyzing Linguistic Variation: Statistical Models and Methods (CSLI Publications 2002), and he has published articles and book chapters on Internet Relay Chat, social network analysis of computer-mediated communication, and quantitative analysis of linguistic variation. Michelle Poff completed her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Washington, USA, in 2010. Her specialty areas are environmental communication, political communication, and media studies, with a focus on language use. She is currently a lecturer in the English Language Program at University of Washington, but will soon be vacating that position to enter private practice as a communication consultant and writing coach. Cornelius Puschmann is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin’s School of Library and Information Science and a research associate at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in English Linguistics from the University of Düsseldorf, where he wrote a dissertation on corporate blogging. He studies computer-mediated communication and the Internet’s impact on society, especially on science and scholarship. His current project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), investigates the use of (micro)blogs in academia, combining qualitative social research with language analysis. His other interests include language-based approaches to CMC (stylistic analysis, pragmatics) and digital methods. James Simpson is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Leeds, UK, where he teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate TESOL programmes. In addition to the linguistic analysis of computer-mediated discourse, his research interests include language learning with new technology in the developing world and the teaching and learning of English in migration contexts. He is coauthor (with Melanie Cooke) of ESOL: A Critical Guide (Oxford University Press 2008) and editor of The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics (2011). Karianne Skovholt is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Vestfold University College in Horten, Norway. She teaches Norwegian language and edits books for teacher training education. Her research interests include written and spoken interaction, literacy and computer-mediated communication, conversation analysis, and discourse analysis. Her Ph.D. research was on email literacy in the workplace. Her current research focuses on the communicative functions of emoticons in workplace emails.

746

About the authors

Dieter Stein is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany. He has taught at the universities of Heidelberg, Gießen, and Düsseldorf. His main research interests and publications are in the fields of language change, interpretation and translation, language and law, and communication in the Internet. He founded several open access e-journals, including Language@Internet, and has served as editor-in-chief of the Linguistic Society of America’s eLanguage digital publication portal. Jan Svennevig is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research deals with bilingual interaction (“Reformulation of questions with candidate answers”, Journal of Bilingualism, to appear), conversational repair (“Preempting reference problems in conversation”, Language in Society 39, 2010) and meeting interaction (“The agenda as resource for topic introduction in workplace meetings”, Discourse Studies 14(1), 2012). Crispin Thurlow is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, USA, where he also holds adjunct appointments in Linguistics and Anthropology. His recent books include: Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media (Oxford 2011, co-edited with Kristine Mroczek) and Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility (Palgrave Macmillan 2010, with Adam Jaworski). He also co-authored (with Laura Lengel and Alive Tomic) the textbook Computer-Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet (Sage 2004). Tuija Virtanen is Professor of English Linguistics at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research interests focus on text and discourse linguistics, pragmatics, and English grammar. Her publications include investigations of the discourse functions of clause-initial adverbials in written English, studies of text types and genres, persuasion, and textual aspects of advanced learner English. She is presently working on grammatical, discursive, and pragmatic aspects of computermediated discourse. She serves as a member of the editorial board of Language@Internet and of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) Consultation Board. Asta Zelenkauskaite is Assistant Professor of Communication in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University, USA. She received her Ph.D. in Telecommunications from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2012. Her research foci include the impact of social media on interpersonal communicative practices, the role of social media in public discourse in technology-mediated environments, and its function as a backchannel in multimedia contexts. She has co-authored articles in the areas of computer-mediated communication and interactive multimedia participation.

Subject index

747

Subject index

A abbreviation 3, 20, 41–43, 61, 71, 92, 113 f., 123, 146, 149, 152, 155, 168 f., 172 f., 176, 178 f., 181, 191, 205 f., 264, 274, 279, 281, 283, 286, 306, 351, 446, 454 f., 464, 467, 469, 472–477, 479, 542, 622–623 address forms 8, 18, 291–307, 344, 548, 553–554, 567, 579–580, 616 addressee 49, 92, 247, 291, 293, 297–298, 302, 304, 306, 350, 392–393, 397, 399, 400–401, 600, 602, 606–607, 618, 624, 627–629, 654, 669, 677, 681, 683–685, 704, 720–721, 724, 730 addressivity 14, 17, 21, 94, 96, 254, 291, 293, 300, 302, 305 f., 392 f., 441, 524, 542 f., 545, 548, 556 f., 559 adjacency pair 65, 67, 75, 120, 263, 400, 500, 517 f., 526, 531, 545, 547, 560, 566, 575 f., 596, 599, 606 adolescents see teenagers advice 17 f., 46, 97, 339 ff., 403, 728 f., 731 – peer 18, 339, 341–343, 352 – professional 339, 342, 345, 348 advice column 18, 339, 342–346, 348 f., 351–357, 729 affordances, technological 7, 11–17, 58, 67 f., 72–75, 84, 175, 179, 217, 222 f., 226 f., 232, 235–237, 245, 264, 590, 723, 728, 732 age differences 74 f., 90–91, 102, 166, 175, 201, 207, 679, 680 AOL chat 16, 109, 114, 117, 125–127, 135 anonymity 17, 93, 101, 111, 175, 276, 344, 353, 370–372, 414, 419, 439, 443, 639, 653, 719, 726 apologies 18, 269, 272, 285, 315 ff., 424, 605, 614–615, 628–629, 641, 650–652 Arabic 62, 123, 167, 170 f., 340, 377, 470, 472, 643, 655, 674

ARPANET 56 f., 60, 387 artificial intelligence (AI) 251, 259 f., 265 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) 56, 60 f., 74, 76, 111, 531 Assyrian 674 asynchronous communication 14–16, 47 f., 55 ff., 135 f., 151 f., 202, 204, 262, 334, 341, 349, 366–368, 373 f., 389, 416, 474, 491, 539, 545, 590–592, 645, 653, 676 f. attachments, email 45 f., 590, 593, 599, 601 f., 606, 622, 625, 628 attention 7, 20, 36, 140, 195, 204, 246, 251, 255, 258, 262, 297, 315, 334, 413, 417, 438, 492–495, 499, 503 f., 509, 523, 525, 533, 540, 559, 616, 680, 701, 720 f. audience design 16, 90, 93–102, 342, 405, 424, 433, 677 f., 686 authentication 19, 284 f., 411 ff. authenticity 19, 284–287, 390, 412 ff., 685, 687 f., 727 automated language analysis 90 away messages see IM away messages B Bequian 565 blogs / blogging 4–14, 16, 24, 83 ff., 248, 269, 286, 667, 671 f., 674, 676, 679, 702–704, 718 f., 726 f., 730, 732 – topic-centric 16, 87, 98, 100–102 – author-centric 16, 87, 94, 98–102 – classification 14, 84 f., 87–91, 94–96, 98 f., 101 f., 695, 732 – typology 10, 89–91, 94, 730, 732 bots 116, 252, 259–252, 264 breaking news 704–709 brevity 17, 137, 164, 172–174, 176, 181, 201, 206, 326, 334, 440, 452, 476, 495, 647, 704, 707

748

Subject index

bridal letter 724 f. Bulletin Board System (BBS) 59–61, 76, 299 f., 467, 472, 474, 477 business communication 35 f., 44–49, 61–63, 85, 118, 137, 150, 165, 198, 220, 417, 589 f., 722 C chaining 21, 148, 628–631 change over time 98, 295 f., 306 chat 3 f., 8, 12 f., 16–17, 20 f., 50, 68, 109 ff., 117, 127, 136, 217, 220–222, 232 f., 235, 245 ff., 250, 269, 274, 276, 286, 298 f., 305, 438 f., 465 f., 472, 475, 489 ff., 515, 517–519, 521–523, 527–530, 539ff., 559, 565ff., 591, 594, 641 f., 670 f., 674, 676–680, 685 – history see history: chat – modes 12 f., 16 f., 25, 119, 121, 125 f., 134 ff. – rooms 3, 17, 20, 111–114, 117, 154, 217, 220–222, 224, 226 f., 232–236, 263 f., 367, 370–372, 377 f., 438 f., 477, 489 ff., 517, 523, 527, 539, 542 f., 545, 548, 556, 558 f., 565 ff., 641, 679 f. – technical features 21, 109–118, 125–127, 490, 541, 543 Chinese 4, 121 f., 138, 165, 168, 199, 301, 340, 377, 467, 470 f., 474, 674 chronemics 489, 491 f., 530, 590, 697 f. citations see quoting classification of CMC 3 f., 9 f., 14, 47 f., 68–70, 75, 85–91, 101 f., 168, 190, 235, 349, 425, 466 f., 544 f., 623, 648–650, 652 ff., 662 f., 673, 695, 719 f., 731–733 code-mixing 22, 641, 650, 654, 667, 670, 675 f., 679–682, 685 f. code-switching 3, 8, 14, 22, 110, 121 f., 165, 170, 180, 641, 650, 654, 667 ff. – conversational 668 f., 680 f., 684 f., 687 – non-conversational 668, 671, 677 cognition 9, 99, 245 ff., 295, 366, 372, 717 – constraints on 171, 245

coherence 3, 8, 12, 14, 16 f., 43, 50, 57, 59, 63–68, 75, 127, 169, 245, 247–249, 251, 255, 259, 261–264, 297, 372, 413, 430, 439, 441, 456, 489, 515–517, 539 ff., 591, 599, 721 cohesion 20, 248 f., 263, 516–518, 524, 534, 545, 547 f., 550, 555, 557 collaboration 12–15, 20, 138, 301 f., 424, 431 f., 520, 525–527, 529 f., 532 f., 605, 645, 702, 708 college class setting 301, 566 f., 569 communication mode see also mode 18, 47 f., 50, 55–58, 76, 118, 199, 404, 571, 622, 698 communicative form 57 f. communicative function 58, 83, 89, 174, 270, 441, 509, 519, 727 f. communicative purpose 7, 35, 38, 40 f., 48, 57, 61, 68 f., 73, 75, 84, 89, 98, 111, 124, 247, 411, 444, 469, 491, 500, 534, 680 f., 688, 703, 719, 723 f., 728 community, online 70–76, 84, 97, 114, 125 f., 151, 272, 282–284, 286, 304, 387, 390, 442, 434, 438 f., 450, 455 f., 509, 521 f., 527, 695, 702, 710 community of practice 21, 294, 301, 306 f., 617–626, 630 f., 640 f. computer-mediated discourse (CMD) 9, 38, 48, 55, 59 f., 62, 64, 67 f., 70–75, 439, 670–689 computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) 48, 71 conditional relevance 21, 65, 517 f., 596, 598, 600, 603–607 conflict 22, 71 f., 93 f., 96 f., 167, 439, 574, 607, 614, 629, 639 f., 642, 644–653, 681 connection / connected presence 17, 139, 151, 167, 194–196, 207, 499, 508 consonant spelling 42, 173, 475 contextualization cues 22, 279, 440, 489, 498, 669 f., 685 convergence 7, 9, 11 f., 127, 136, 164, 179, 727 conversation analysis (CA) 4, 6, 17, 64, 217 f., 291, 489, 515, 518, 540, 544, 565, 567–569, 589 f., 596, 675, 678

Subject index conversational floor 8, 20, 109, 202, 218, 221 f., 228–232, 254–256, 399, 515 ff., 552, 555, 559 conversational maxims see maxims conversational norms 18, 170, 292, 296, 299–301, 589, 596, 605, 722 conversational style 489, 498 f., 508 Cooperative Principle 19, 45, 246, 273, 372, 388, 398, 413, 437, 440 f., 455 cost 17, 44, 152, 191, 196 ff., 208, 220, 420, 422, 647, 726 creativity 11, 60, 67 f., 75, 138, 144, 154, 169, 171, 174, 199, 207, 260, 263, 279, 284, 445, 464, 467, 472–476, 639, 644, 670, 676 f., 686, 695, 701 Creole 674–675, 680, 684–687 Croatian 122–123, 125 cross-cultural 16, 18, 118, 139, 152 f., 166–170, 201, 208, 272, 302, 319, 413, 426, 489, 725 cues see reduced cues culture 9, 13, 21 f., 50, 60, 62, 69, 71, 113, 121, 124, 175, 180, 191, 195, 201, 207, 251, 264, 273, 286, 298, 340 f., 344, 350, 355, 377, 431, 615, 639, 641–643, 654, 674 f., 677–680 CUSeeMe 117 D Danish 165, 170, 291, 297, 444, 592 deception 17–19, 137, 142, 154, 363 ff., 387 ff., 393 f., 396, 398, 400 f., 403 ff., 411, 413, 419, 719, 727 deixis 5, 16, 23 f., 87 f., 91 f., 95, 99, 277, 424, 431, 704, 730 deletion, syntactic see ellipsis demographics, participant 38, 48, 88, 109, 166, 201, 204, 276, 350, 289, 466, 471, 643 digital folklore 387, 394, 398, 728 digital genres see genre digital literacy 390, 405, 528, 533 discourse analysis 4, 38, 43, 64, 70, 165, 172, 180, 391, 489, 515, 533, 567, 695, 717 discourse coherence see coherence discourse transformer 282, 284 f.

749

discursive features 59, 70, 72, 75, 178 f., 726 f. – of blogs 10, 84–86, 89, 101, 702–704, 726 f., 730 – of chat 112 f., 119–121, 222 ff., 250–255, 299 f., 487 ff., 517 ff., 539 ff., 591 – of discussion lists 59 f., 64–70, 75, 297, 322 f., 520 – of email 35 ff., 69 f., 297 f., 401–405, 589 ff., 675, 721, 723 – of instant messaging 141–150, 152, 171, 178 f., 474 – of texting 152, 165 f., 168–174, 176–179, 203 f., 467, 474 discussion, online 71, 76, 111, 275, 280, 301, 438, 443, 463, 466 f., 470 f. discussion forum, online 14, 72, 75, 249, 262, 280, 282, 301, 304, 341–343, 347, 356, 437–439, 441–443, 456, 463, 466 f., 470 f., 473, 561, 667, 670–675, 679, 681–683, 703 dispute see conflict disrupted adjacency 8, 64, 120, 245, 248–255, 262–264, 517 f., 530–533, 541 f., 559, 567, 591 distance 15, 46, 48, 56, 76, 97, 207, 590, 613 Dutch 299 E economy 42, 122, 306, 472, 476, 493, 495 ellipsis (syntactic) 42, 95 ellipses (repeated dots) 41, 477 email 9–11, 14–16, 18 f., 21, 24, 35 ff., 55 ff., 98, 124, 135 f., 139 f., 142, 148, 150–154, 163, 175, 178–180, 202, 217, 248, 269, 285, 297–299, 302, 315 ff., 341 f., 349, 353, 363–370, 372, 375 f., 378, 387 ff., 411 ff., 463, 466, 470 f., 474, 490–492, 523, 539, 544, 589 ff., 613 ff., 641, 643, 645, 648 f., 652, 667, 671, 673–677, 679 f., 684, 695, 703–706, 720–723, 725, 727 f., 732 email hoaxes 14, 19, 387 ff., 423, 703, 727 f. emblems 671 f., 678, 689

750

Subject index

emotes 18, 112 f., 116, 124, 269, 274–280, 283, 286 f. emoticons 3 f., 8, 20, 23, 41, 43–45, 60 f., 74, 92, 111, 124, 144, 146, 148–150, 152, 155, 166, 169, 173, 177, 205 f., 209, 220, 258, 279, 281 f., 284, 286, 299, 329, 351 f., 418, 464, 466 f., 469–471, 474, 478, 540, 614, 670 emphasis 43, 111, 122, 282, 424, 449 f., 464, 472–474, 477, 647, 669, 681, 683, 724 English, use of 4, 24, 37, 39, 61–63, 72, 114, 121–124, 165, 167, 169–171, 173, 181, 209, 222, 280, 286, 291 f., 297–299, 301 f., 306, 320, 340, 351 f., 355, 377, 394, 417, 429, 431, 465–468, 471–477, 522, 528, 531–533, 565, 569, 639, 641, 643–645, 651, 654, 670, 672, 674–676, 678–682, 684, 687, 689 e-style see also style 59 etiolation 272 f., 280, 284 f. expressive function 122, 124, 141–142, 177, 198, 404, 446, 456, 463, 473, 477, 614, 640, 642 F face 96 f., 175, 284, 291, 304, 316, 324, 331 f., 334, 340 f., 347 f., 352, 355 f., 397, 401, 403 f., 497, 614, 616–619, 627–629, 654, 669, 681, 725, 728 f. Facebook 13 f., 16, 48–50, 84, 102, 136, 150–152, 154–156, 179, 274, 695 Facebook status updates see status updates face-boosting act (FBA) 291, 304, 617 f., 621, 625, 627–631 faceted classification 9, 48, 70, 340, 349–351, 720 face-threatening act (FTA) 97, 284, 291, 316, 347 f., 352, 355 f., 403, 497, 616, 618, 627–629, 630 f., 681, 725 farewell formulas see leave-taking formulas feature-based deception theory 366–370 Finnish 122, 165 f., 170, 466 f., 592, 667, 670, 674, 678 f. first-pair part 541, 606 flirting 124, 260, 351, 674, 680, 722, 724 f., 731

flaming 14, 21, 72, 181, 303, 368, 416, 614, 639 ff. floor see conversational floor flow 20, 138, 197, 286, 508, 539 f., 565, 582, 617, 621, 625 f. folklore see digital folklore framing/frames of interaction 21, 415, 489, 582, 625, 627–631, 639, 684 free association 207, 249 French 4, 63, 122, 165–167, 169, 171, 209, 251, 254, 286, 291, 293, 302, 466–468, 472, 474 f., 674, 684 future predictions – for blogging 102 – for chat 127, 236, 263 f. – for discussion lists 73 – for email 36, 48 f. – for instant messaging 154 f. – for text messaging 207 G games, online 12 f., 76, 109, 112, 114, 117 f., 123, 125–128, 250, 274, 418 gay 20, 438 f., 491 gender 3, 16, 21 f., 60, 72, 74, 90 f., 94, 97, 102, 124 f., 136, 138, 141, 144, 148–150, 153 f., 165 f., 170, 172, 175, 198, 202, 204 f., 208 f., 276, 278, 286, 294, 300 f., 317, 322, 335, 350, 371 f., 375–377, 379, 416, 437–439, 443, 446, 449, 455, 466 f., 471, 475, 477, 519 f., 615 f., 623, 639, 641, 644, 653 f., 698, 703, 724 genre 3 f., 6, 9–11, 15–17, 19, 22 f., 57, 60, 68–70, 73, 75, 83–85, 89, 91, 94, 98, 102, 125, 128, 172, 175 f., 178, 269, 286, 387–392, 394, 396, 401 f., 404–406, 411–414, 421, 425, 464, 479, 509, 592–594, 607, 616, 618, 620, 622, 627, 640, 670 f., 676, 679, 681, 684, 695, 697–699, 701, 709, 717 ff. genre change 10 f., 718, 722 f. German 24, 37, 39 f., 42, 61, 63, 121, 165 f., 169–171, 269, 286, 291, 293, 300, 302 f., 306, 466–469, 474–476, 541, 565, 567, 674 f., 678–683, 686 f., 689 Google Wave 50 Greek 170, 181, 208, 467, 471, 477, 674 f., 679–682, 684, 686, 703

Subject index greetings / greeting formulas 18, 35, 44, 47, 61, 69, 119, 149, 168, 223–225, 227, 235, 253, 264, 292, 296–299, 306, 414, 424, 433, 540 f., 547–549, 579, 605, 614 f., 622, 625–627, 678, 681, 683 f. Gricean maxims see also maxims 39, 45, 137, 173, 249, 388, 440 f., 456, 476 grounding 7, 23 f., 74, 366, 720 f. groups 20 f., 55–58, 62 f., 70–76, 91, 102, 111, 114, 116, 118, 126, 151, 153, 166, 175, 202, 205, 207 f., 219, 228, 230–232, 251 f., 293 f., 298, 301–303, 317 f., 322, 324, 326 f., 334, 339, 341, 343, 348, 350, 352 f., 405, 438, 449–451, 454, 466 f., 471, 475, 508, 518, 520–523, 528, 556, 558–560, 590 f., 617 f., 620, 626, 631, 639, 641, 673, 675, 678 f., 683, 686, 704, 708, 721, 723, 729 GSM 193, 208 H half-duplex / one-way message transmission 38, 48, 50, 110, 112, 199, 515–517, 732 health websites 18, 342 f., 345, 348, 353, 355, 357 Hebrew 639–664 hierarchy, social 58, 71, 116, 118, 293, 426, 620 Hindi 121, 674, 677, 680 history – of blogging 83 f., 87 – of chat 110–112, 114 f. – of CMC research 3 f., 8, 37, 43 f., 59, 667 f. – of email 35 f. – of instant messaging 16, 135 f. – of mailing lists 56 – of text messaging 152, 156, 163 hoaxes see email hoaxes HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) 56, 58, 60–61, 64, 75, 76, 84, 418, 423, 643, 732 humor 44, 46, 142 f., 174, 249, 262, 264, 273, 295, 348, 351 f., 355, 389, 650, 681 Hungarian 391 hybridity 60, 70, 74, 178, 608, 686, 695, 727, 729

751

I identity 9, 18 f., 61, 63, 74, 93, 111, 115 f., 126, 172, 174, 224, 272, 284, 291, 294, 297, 299, 302 f., 305, 307, 333, 340, 345, 347 f., 353, 356 f., 370–372, 387, 389, 392, 400, 411 f., 415–419, 421–423, 425 f., 429 f., 433, 437–439, 441–443, 446–449, 455, 489, 506, 521, 527, 597, 617, 639, 643, 672, 678 f., 680, 683 f., 686, 696, 698, 708 f. ideology 23, 350, 356, 508 illocutionary force 8, 44, 270 f., 275, 285, 316, 319, 470, 478, 647, 651 IM see instant messaging image text 15 IM away messages 16, 136–138, 141–144, 151, 155, 474 implicature 4 f., 23, 137, 141, 246, 258, 260, 388, 400, 440, 496, 500, 509 impoliteness 21, 72, 139, 200, 293, 299, 302 f., 500, 592 f., 639 ff. incoherence see coherence indexicals 291, 295, 539 inexperienced users 45, 254 f., 390, 521 inferencing 23, 124, 245 ff., 263, 265, 300, 341, 415, 440, 450, 590, 600, 604, 606, 677–678 innovation 10 f., 15, 113, 169, 207, 274, 284, 491, 670, 726, 732 instant messaging 10, 16, 48–50, 97, 109 f., 117, 125 f., 128, 135 ff., 171 f., 175, 178 f., 199, 202, 209, 248 f., 262, 264, 279, 297, 364, 366 f., 372, 374, 378, 463, 470 f., 474 f., 477, 490 f., 502, 539, 541, 543, 568, 671 interaction 3, 6, 8, 10–12, 15–21, 38, 44, 46–48, 50, 57–60, 64–72, 74 f., 85, 97, 109–122, 125–127, 137–139, 141, 166–168, 174–178, 193–196, 198 f., 201 f., 207, 217–222, 224 f., 227 f., 232, 235 f., 249–251, 255, 258 f., 261, 263 f., 275, 278, 280, 282–286, 291 f., 294–296, 298, 302 f., 315, 322, 332, 339–341, 343, 349, 350 f., 353, 356 f., 363–365, 367, 370–372, 374, 376, 378, 400–402, 404, 406, 411–413, 415–419, 422, 431, 433, 437–439, 441, 449, 455–457, 463 f., 467, 474, 478, 489, 490–498, 500, 502 f.,

752

Subject index

505 f., 508 f., 515–517, 519–521, 523 f., 530 f., 539–544, 548, 556, 559 f., 565–569, 571, 573, 576, 578, 581–583, 589, 590–594, 596, 598, 599, 602–607, 613, 615–622, 625, 627, 629–631, 639, 641, 646, 652, 668–670, 676 f., 683, 688, 696, 698, 700–704, 706, 708 f., 721, 727, 730 interactional sociolinguistics 489 interaction management 16, 111, 114, 119–121, 127, 439, 500–502, 540 f. interactive written discourse 172, 670, 672 interactivity 12, 14, 22, 59, 68, 92, 109, 112, 117, 127, 164, 179, 315, 342 f., 355, 467, 473, 543, 589, 590 f., 620, 622, 625, 700, 702 f., 707, 709 f., 732 international contexts 16, 110, 121 f. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 12, 16 f., 24, 109 f., 115–127, 173, 245, 250–252, 254–258, 264, 269, 276–279, 286, 298 f., 303, 305, 371, 438, 442, 453, 457, 463 f., 466–468, 472, 477, 491, 515, 530, 540–542, 567, 594, 671–674, 676, 680 intertextuality 284, 703, 708 f. isiXhosa 161–170, 181, 467, 475, 674, 680 Italian 4, 63, 115, 122–124, 152 f., 165 f., 170, 201 f., 207–209, 466 f., 473, 475–477, 565 J Japanese 4, 13, 152 f., 165, 167, 170 f., 199–201, 207 f., 291, 299, 301, 305, 340, 343, 466 f., 470, 472, 477, 565, 567, 639 K Korean 152 f., 165, 167, 207, 301 f., 340 L language alternation see code-switching language change see also change over time 11, 37, 40 language choice / code choice 3, 15 f., 59, 62 f., 72, 74, 641, 671–673, 677 f., 681, 683, 688 language ideology see ideology language of distance see also distance 15, 46, 48, 56, 76, 97, 207, 590, 613 language of immediacy 15, 46–48

language play 3, 8, 18, 120, 172 f., 176 f., 179, 245, 247, 249 f., 256, 280–286, 445, 453, 456 f., 473 f., 476 f., 639 f., 650, 677, 722 language shift 62, 678 language use 3–8, 13, 38, 40 f., 43, 48, 59, 74 f., 91, 102, 113, 171, 173, 177, 209, 273, 280, 293, 352, 366, 372, 376, 441, 463–472, 474–476, 478, 539, 668, 684 languaging 675, 680, 686 leave-taking formulas 44, 298, 353, 678, 681 lexical repetition 249, 258, 263, 547 lexical shortening see abbreviation lingua franca 24, 62 f., 643 linearity 66 f., 248, 251, 292, 296, 304, 517, 697 f., 702 f. list culture 69–63 Listserv 16, 22, 55 f., 59, 62, 64, 68 f., 71, 74, 318, 639 ff. Listserv list see also mailing list 16, 56, 68 f., 74, 318, 639 ff. literacy see digital literacy Lithuanian 122 f., 125 LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) see text analysis software loosened relevance 8, 17, 245, 250, 252, 255 f., 258 f., 261–263, 539, 567 love letter 725, 733 lurking 73, 76, 98, 136, 142 f., 354, 441, 521, 677 lying see also deception 271, 273, 276, 363, 365–371, 374, 377 f., 388 f. M mailing list 16, 55 ff., 297, 673 f. Malay 165, 291, 298 markedness / marked usage 65 f., 280, 295, 301, 304, 331, 669 maxim of manner 39, 45 f., 173, 246, 372, 440, 442, 446 f., 452 f., 455–457, 476 maxim of quality 45, 142, 246, 372, 398–401, 440, 442–445, 447, 455, 649, 653 maxim of quantity 45, 440, 445 f., 455, 647 maxim of relation 4, 8, 10, 17 f., 45, 245–250, 252, 255 f., 258–265, 398, 449–452, 455, 539, 647

Subject index media co-activity see also multitasking 13 media richness 7, 364 f., 369 medical advice online 18, 339, 342 f., 345, 348, 355, 729, 731 medium effects see techological determinism medium factors 9, 18, 48, 61, 73, 75, 218, 262 f., 349, 351, 354, 463, 490, 516, 520, 522, 668, 673, 676, 688 meetings 12, 21, 220 f., 540, 543–545, 548–550, 553, 555, 559 f., 568, 606, 620, 726 memoranda 44, 722–723 message length 141, 165, 169, 172, 178 f., 204 f., 323, 326, 420, 495, 576, 580 meta-communication 60 f., 324, 346, 399, 403, 489 metadata 86, 88, 92 f., 102 meta-genre 724, 726 metalinguistic awareness 3, 8, 16, 121, 171, 686 metaphor 64, 116, 250, 283, 388, 444 f., 453, 456, 552, 645, 669 metapragmatic awareness 9, 15, 163, 173, 177, 180, 284, 286, 686 metatalk / metadiscourse 277, 324, 351, 531, 644 f., 728 metathesis 122, 147 microblogging 4, 13 f., 23, 84, 102, 179–180, 248 micro-coordination 194, 196, 198, 207 minimal bilingualism 678 f. mini-proposition 19, 437, 441, 447, 455 f. miscommunication 264, 318, 416, 489, 494, 524, 566, 578, 581 f., 614, 651, 654 MMS (multimedia message service) 164 mobile phone 5, 15, 17, 49, 135 f., 146, 150, 152–155, 164 f., 173 f., 177–179, 191 ff., 217, 219 f., 222, 224, 227, 342, 364, 367, 395, 463, 468, 613, 708 mobility 17, 49, 175 mock performative 18, 280–286 mode 3 f., 6 f., 9–12, 14–20, 22 f., 33, 35, 38, 44 f., 47–50, 55, 57 f., 60, 69, 70, 76, 85, 98, 101 f., 109 f., 112, 114, 118 f., 125–127, 149, 165, 178, 195, 199, 248, 250 f., 262, 264, 273–280, 282–286,

753

389 f., 404, 463–469, 471 f., 474, 477–479, 490, 516, 523, 534, 539, 571, 622, 624, 631, 645, 667, 672–674, 676–678, 680 f., 685–688, 698–701, 706 f., 709 mode-focused approach 465 f. moderator / administrator 56–58, 71, 111, 114, 116 f., 126 f., 601, 603, 621, 653, 722, 725 motivation 85, 87 f., 91, 93, 122, 138, 350, 364, 372, 378, 396 f., 399, 466, 473, 476, 478, 645, 673, 688, 718, 721, 729 MUDs and MOOs 9, 16 f., 24, 68, 112–114, 116–118, 123, 125, 128, 250 f., 254, 256, 260 f., 264, 269, 275–278, 367, 443, 515, 534 multilingual Internet 62 f., 72, 74, 118, 121, 639, 671–673, 676, 680, 684 f., 688 multilingualism 21, 62, 667, 670 f., 689 multimodality 14 f., 22 f., 75, 180, 191, 416, 447, 534, 673, 688, 702–703, 709, 711 multiparticipant / multiparty 8, 12, 17, 20, 50, 63–65, 74, 109–112, 115, 119 f., 154, 218, 221, 228–230, 232, 235 f., 245, 250 f., 262, 263 f., 332, 438, 490 f., 515 f., 518 f., 524, 567, 590, 670 f., 684 f. multiple authorship 13, 22, 702, 709 multitasking see also media co-activity 20, 117, 120–121, 138–140, 155, 302, 305, 495, 508, 522, 527, 579, 531 mutual monitoring 491 f., 729 MySpace 49 f. N n:n communication 16, 48, 55–58, 74, 76, 350, 673 narrative 6, 9–11, 22, 94, 100, 112, 149, 277 f., 343, 354, 390, 397, 417, 423, 425, 432, 600, 627, 640, 675 f., 679, 684, 695 ff. national language 63, 165, 170 f., 672, 675, 678–680 negotiation 10 f., 19, 23, 94, 96, 116 f., 126, 165, 191, 284, 286, 294–297, 299, 304 f., 307, 316, 340, 348, 350, 401, 412, 440 f., 456, 489, 490, 509, 540, 565, 567, 582, 641, 669, 708

754

Subject index

netiquette 39, 45, 61, 71, 300, 326, 333, 438 Netspeak 8, 20, 23, 36, 39, 41, 464 f., 476, 479 newbie see inexperienced user Newman-Pennebaker model 374 f., 378 new media 5, 11, 22, 40, 55, 57, 171 f., 178 f., 699, 701, 704, 708 f., 722 newsgroup 3, 48, 55–57, 61 f., 70, 72 f., 248, 348, 364, 367, 370, 372, 439, 471, 474, 592, 639, 671, 676, 695, 704 news office 613, 621 f., 625 f., 630, 632 nicknames, online 4, 19–20, 111, 116, 254, 280, 298–299, 318, 416, 437 ff., 492, 650, 652, 654, 672 Nigerian letters/email/scam 19, 387, 390, 393 f., 411–415, 417–422, 426, 428, 431–433 Niuean 674 noise see system noise non-responses 21, 541, 589 f., 593 f., 598, 600–602, 604–606 non-standard punctuation 14 f., 20, 41–43, 179, 199, 464, 467, 469, 472–474, 476 f. non-standard spelling 14, 20, 41, 122 f., 144, 168 f., 171, 173 f., 177, 199, 453, 464, 467–469, 472–474 non-verbal behavior / non-verbal cues 8, 19, 46, 61, 63, 111, 218, 220 f., 222–223, 228, 232, 279, 332, 372 f., 400, 413, 418, 433, 491, 493, 519, 523 f., 540, 593, 596, 614 norms see also conversational norms 8, 11, 16, 21, 40, 59, 62, 70–72, 74 f., 88, 99, 118, 125 f., 149, 167, 175, 217, 232, 236, 248, 252, 261, 263, 294, 296, 301, 303, 306 f., 334, 345, 350–352, 355 f., 412 f., 416 f., 428, 442, 454 f., 472, 508, 589, 590–592, 594, 596, 598, 605–607, 618, 640, 653, 698, 708, 719, 724, 726, 729 Norwegian 17, 21, 165 f., 169, 193–195, 201, 203–207, 209, 297, 467, 565, 589, 611, 615 O offences 18, 315, 318, 322–324, 326–329, 331, 334 f. offensive language see profanity

openings and closings 165, 205, 393, 404, 683 orality-literacy model 37, 40, 46, 58 orthography see also non-standard spelling 3, 11, 14, 16, 20, 37, 41 f., 92, 100, 122 f., 144, 146 f., 165, 168 f., 171–174, 177, 206, 275, 299, 318, 327, 417, 428, 453, 464, 467–469, 472–476, 595, 614, 686 f. P paralinguistic restitution 8, 111, 169, 173, 176, 181, 470, 472 pauses / pausing 145, 220, 223, 231 f., 234, 237, 489–490, 494, 496–500, 506, 544–547, 549, 551–556, 558, 569, 579 performative predications 274, 278–280, 283, 285–287 performatives 8, 17 f., 113, 249, 269–287, 339, 414 performativity 10, 18, 269 ff., 532 perlocutionary force 270–271, 275, 285, 389, 647 Persian 667, 674, 681 persistence of textual CMC 8, 58, 251, 307, 349, 351, 354, 559, 719, 722 personae, online 18 f., 284, 350, 438 f., 441 personal addressability 192 f. personality 22, 491, 494, 639, 654 person deixis 89, 91 f., 95, 99, 291, 424, 431, 730 phatic communion see also small talk 16, 99, 117, 168, 174, 196, 204, 250, 263, 351, 489, 613 ff. phonological approximation 168 f., 173, 176 f., 181, 472, 475 f. planning 22, 46, 72, 92, 99, 101, 118, 613, 622, 627, 647, 677, 684–686 play see language play Polish 679 politeness 3, 16, 18, 21, 23, 87, 96 f., 137, 140, 154, 292–296, 299–301, 303–307, 315–317, 333, 340, 389, 424, 440, 595, 599, 613–618, 621, 629–631, 640 f., 648, 654, 669, 722, 725 polychronicity 3, 20, 120, 229, 232, 263, 502–506, 522, 524

Subject index polylingual languaging see languaging polylogue 58, 73 f., 683 Portuguese 291 f., 300, 306, 641 power 20, 72, 116, 126 f., 292–294, 312, 316 f., 404, 423, 432, 493, 506, 508 f., 520, 597, 642, 701 pragmatic theory 4, 248, 387–389, 405, 589 pragmatics, core phenomena 4, 17 pragmatics, definition of 5 f., 55, 58 f. prescriptive / prescription 45, 88, 90, 100, 166, 170, 176, 440, 627 presence 17, 19, 97, 111, 116, 139, 151, 167, 175, 195, 220, 222, 224 f., 227 f., 235, 259, 291 f., 295, 297, 343, 366 f., 411, 416, 439, 491, 493–495, 499, 508, 540, 720, 729, 731 press release 622, 723 f. prestige 62–63, 405 presupposition 4 f., 23, 597 print journal 613, 619, 630 privacy 83, 115–117, 142, 151, 167 f., 302, 342, 438 profanity 114, 262, 356, 375, 640–642, 645, 654 pronouns 42 f., 59 f., 65 f., 72, 91, 95 f., 101, 170, 291–293, 297, 299 f., 303, 306, 326, 328 f., 331, 335, 373–377, 432, 555, 652, 726, 729–731 prosody, emulated 15, 42 f., 111, 149, 173, 176, 463, 472 f., 542 public 16, 50, 56, 58, 60–63, 74, 88, 98, 111, 115, 117–119, 124, 163 f., 167 f., 171, 175, 180, 199 f., 221, 251, 272, 280, 282, 295, 318, 331, 334, 342, 344, 350, 352, 371, 394, 438, 441, 467, 471, 492, 548, 559, 673 f., 676–678, 680, 683 f., 686, 689, 725, 728 Punjabi 62, 121, 264, 674, 676 f. Q quasi-synchronous 17, 21, 44, 50, 202, 249, 490, 515, 541 quoting 14, 41, 44 f., 66 f., 69, 74 f., 89 f., 97, 101, 327, 329, 349, 356, 626, 645, 655, 677, 683, 722, 727

755

R recontextualization 284 f., 689, 702, 706 f., 709 reduced cues 8, 64, 72, 111, 218, 220, 222–224, 226–228, 231 f., 235 f., 248, 286, 332, 371, 400, 412 f., 417, 419, 437, 463, 469, 472 f., 490 f., 493, 508, 517, 519, 539, 542, 614, 630, 670, 685, 721 register 16, 59–61, 63, 68, 74, 176, 415, 417, 423, 425, 470 relational work 21, 164 f., 174, 176–178, 294, 305, 340, 348, 393, 415, 432, 439, 455, 613, 617, 626 relevance 4, 6, 8, 10, 17 f., 45, 245 ff., 295 f., 322, 324, 334, 341, 347, 389, 398, 437, 440, 442, 449–452, 455 f., 539, 567, 603, 647, 649, 722, 725, 731 remediation / remedial activity see also apologies 17, 315, 329 f., 644, 646, 650–652 repair 14, 17, 21, 109, 122, 137, 144, 147, 154, 218, 232–237, 248, 275, 494, 524, 540 f., 550, 565 ff., 602, 604, 606, 651 repetition see also lexical repetition 8, 111, 124, 231, 233, 328, 417, 432, 555, 581, 647, 681 reprimands 645, 653 response norms 21, 589 ff. responses 21, 97, 232, 255 f., 259 f., 270, 275, 281, 284–286, 344, 352 f., 355, 390, 402, 448, 491, 495 f., 506, 519, 523, 543, 547, 550, 555, 567, 573, 576, 589 ff., 685, 721 f., 726, 728 rhetorical genre theory 718 f., 722, 724, 731 rhythm 20, 287, 489 ff., 593 role-playing 250, 350, 414, 700 roles see speaker roles rudeness see impoliteness Russian 63, 122 f., 643 S scholarly communication 56, 60, 62 script (computer program) 109, 113, 116 script (dramatic) 111, 256, 260, 269, 276–278, 281–286, 415, 432

756

Subject index

script (writing system) 20, 62 f., 74, 118, 122, 202, 208, 351, 464, 467, 469, 472–474, 643, 687 script-switching 687 second-pair part 249, 606 seduction, online see also flirting 260, 499, 509 self-description 449–450, 455 self-presentation 18 f., 61, 137, 151, 154, 346, 363, 372, 415–417, 419, 432, 439, 441, 456 sequential relatedness 246, 249, 262, 596, 672 sex 175, 253, 257 f., 260, 265, 341, 344 f., 347, 350 f., 353 f., 405 f., 438, 491, 493, 498 f., 508, 510, 682 shortening see abbreviation signature file 61, 142, 447, 456 sincerity 283, 315–317, 387, 389–390, 412 f., 423, 455 Skype 35, 117, 136, 152, 154, 217, 221, 708 Skypecast 221 f., 224–227, 230–232, 234–236 small stories 10, 14, 22, 697 f., 703, 709 small talk 7, 21, 174, 177, 613 ff., 700 smiley faces see emoticons SMS see text messaging social factors 14, 16, 22, 38, 48, 50, 74 f., 294, 349–350, 466, 639, 654, 668, 676 social-interactional approaches 696, 698, 700, 702 sociality 22, 168, 174–179, 717, 720 social networks 85, 122, 125–127, 154, 199, 318, 387, 392, 619, 675, 710, 728 social network sites 4, 13 f., 16, 23, 40, 48–50, 83 f., 102, 136, 150–152, 154, 156, 179 f., 264, 274, 390, 671, 688, 695, 704–707 sociocultural factors 22, 46, 50, 273, 639 f., 654, 695, 698 sociolinguistics 3–6, 8, 15, 24, 61, 149, 165, 286, 291–294, 299, 304, 466, 471, 489, 667–668, 675, 695–697, 700–703, 708–710 solidarity 21, 71, 174, 177, 179, 292–294, 303, 340, 357, 491, 617, 639 f., 720 spam 49, 370, 387, 389 f., 392 f., 411, 649, 726 f.

Spanish 4, 97, 114, 122, 291, 293, 343, 391, 466, 565, 674, 679 speaker roles 20–21, 71, 94–96, 114, 116–117, 281, 283, 293, 326, 344, 350, 377, 392, 413, 416, 432, 506, 516, 520 f., 527 f., 533–534, 542 f., 548 f., 552, 554 f., 559 f., 590, 592, 594, 597, 599–600, 604, 620, 652, 673, 680, 700, 704 speech acts 4 f., 17, 19, 21, 23, 64, 137 f., 141 f., 270–275, 293, 299, 339 f., 355, 364, 388 f., 391, 393 f., 401–404, 470, 474, 589, 591, 596 f., 601, 607 f., 616, 640, 644, 646, 684 speech versus writing 3, 8 f., 37, 99, 102, 145 f., 148 f., 178, 539 spelling see orthography spoken interaction 217–237, 541, 544, 615, 668, 670 standardness 11, 92, 100, 170–171, 176–177, 209, 351–352, 355, 418, 472, 718, 729 standards 56, 74, 76, 164, 172, 262, 291, 387, 687 status, social 101, 165, 292–293, 298, 300–302, 306–307, 316–317, 348, 350, 377, 413, 417, 423, 431, 527, 615 status updates 13 f., 49, 84, 136, 179, 274, 695, 704–706 stories / storytelling 695 ff. – digital 25, 679, 699–701, 704, 708 f. – fictional 22, 699, 702, 709 – life 696, 704 – personal experience 22, 695–700, 702, 704, 709 strategic self-presentation 372, 415 structural features of CMC 3, 8, 15, 20, 41–45, 58–61, 74, 84, 111–113, 116, 122–124, 146–148, 152, 165 f., 168–170, 173, 176, 205 f., 299, 463 ff. style 16, 36 f., 39, 40 f., 46 f., 59, 68, 74, 83–89, 90–95, 98–102, 143 f., 154, 166–168, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179 f., 191, 204, 284, 291, 297, 330, 354, 375–377, 379, 412 f., 416 f., 423, 428, 432 f., 470, 489, 491, 498 f., 502, 508, 520, 595, 615, 641–644, 647, 670, 675–679, 684 f., 695, 724

Subject index Swedish 21, 122, 152 f., 165, 168–170, 199–201, 207 f., 297, 302, 466–468, 592, 613–638 synchronous communication 8, 36, 48, 50, 109, 112, 119, 135 f., 154, 217 ff., 245, 250, 252, 259, 263, 274, 341, 433, 437, 515, 539, 673 f., 685 syntax 18, 42, 48, 166, 169 f., 199, 262, 274, 279, 346, 351, 375, 463, 516, 669, 686 system noise 252, 255, 258, 263 T technological determinism see technological factors technological factors 7–9, 11, 14, 22, 59–61, 63 f., 68, 71 f., 74 f., 113, 126 f., 262 f., 340, 343, 349, 356, 366, 463, 469, 475, 520, 534, 539, 553, 639, 653, 676 f., 719 teenagers 17, 49, 72, 88, 94, 102, 138, 144, 152, 166, 169, 170, 191, 194, 196–199, 201, 205–207, 344, 357, 592, 675, 679 f., 685 teen emancipation 196, 198 f. telegrams 43 f. telephony 17, 117, 119, 127, 164, 195, 199, 207, 217 temporal aspects see chronemics text analysis software 364, 373 text chat see chat texting see text messaging text messaging 4 f., 10 f., 16 f., 24, 39 f., 45, 135 f., 143, 148, 150, 152–155, 163 ff., 191–193, 196 f., 199–209, 220, 225, 264, 279, 306, 342, 363 f., 366, 372, 463, 465–468, 471, 473–477, 592, 618, 667, 671, 674, 680, 708 text type 37, 39 f., 47, 339, 344, 348–353, 622, 717, 724 Thai 124, 304, 543, 565, 641 third move 591, 607 thread 3, 15, 21, 43, 57, 119, 121, 170, 196, 218, 249, 251 f., 254, 280, 284, 300, 304, 353, 356, 441, 457, 502, 516, 518, 524, 544 f., 548–551, 556, 567, 589, 602, 607 f., 627, 643, 670–672, 682 f., 686, 706, 722

757

threading 14, 264, 544, 722 timing see also chronemics 20, 249, 317, 489 ff., 581, 721 topic 3, 6, 16, 20 f., 36, 43, 45, 56–58, 60, 62, 64, 67, 70–75, 84, 87–90, 94, 98–102, 111, 115, 121 f., 149, 165, 168, 170, 174, 201, 219, 225, 228–232, 234–236, 248, 250 f., 256 f., 283, 286, 304, 318, 326, 327, 330, 339, 342, 344 f., 350, 352, 354–357, 374, 376 f., 388, 401, 406, 437, 442, 449–450, 455–457, 489, 495, 500, 515–522, 526, 527, 530–534, 540–560, 567, 578, 627, 644, 645, 681, 722, 730 T pronoun 291–293, 299–300, 302–304, 306 transaction, communication as 164, 174, 422, 423 ff., 489, 599 transcription 21, 112, 177, 237, 264, 349, 490, 519, 544 f., 560–561, 569 f. transmedial narratology 699 trolling 371, 390, 392, 399, 405 trust 293, 330, 340, 348, 356, 363, 365, 367, 389 f., 411 f., 419, 424, 432, 450 Turkish 298, 674, 679 f., 687, 725 turn organization 20, 541–543, 560, 567, 669 turn-taking 3, 14, 17, 109, 114, 119 f., 127, 137, 139, 154, 165, 170, 176, 202, 218, 220, 228 f., 231 f., 235–237, 264, 517 f., 533 f., 542 f., 560, 566–568, 574, 578, 580, 590 f., 631, 670, 722 tweeting / retweeting 14, 180, 695, 706 f. Twitter see also microblogging 14, 35, 40, 48 f., 84, 102, 179–180, 695, 706 f. typing effort see economy typography 18, 117, 172, 280, 463, 467, 472–474, 568, 639, 647 U universalizing approach 465–466 UNIX write / talk 38, 57, 111, 135 urban legends 390, 397, 403, 703 Usenet 55–57, 60, 62, 71, 590, 592, 639, 673 f., 676 user adaptations 14, 17, 67, 120, 270, 495 user-generated content (UGC) 12, 87, 671 utterance breaks 136, 144–149

758

Subject index

V variation 3, 12, 17, 23, 111, 119, 122, 126 f., 144, 149, 166, 169, 172, 175–177, 275, 277, 286, 291, 294, 298, 302, 320, 322, 334, 356, 420, 432, 465–467, 471, 474, 476–478, 515, 607, 670, 676, 686, 725 VAX phone 112 video exchanges 15, 117, 126, 219 f. virtual community see community, online virtual teams 118, 543 ff. voice calls 5, 152 f., 193, 197–201, 204 V pronoun 291–293, 299, 300, 302–303, 306

W Web 2.0 4 f., 12 f., 14, 24, 217, 387, 390, 523, 672, 695, 699, 701 web chat see also chat 117, 122, 125, 567 web forums 49, 57, 76, 670 f. Welsh 181 Wikipedia 12 f., 24, 729 f. wikis 4, 13–15, 91, 523, 732 workplace 15, 21, 72, 138 f., 218–220, 258, 582 f., 589 f., 592 f., 597, 600, 606, 613, 615, 624, 631, 721 World Wide Web, history of 12 writing system see script Y YouTube 102, 701