ICT on the EL

ICT on the EL

1. What they say

   • "The internet enfranchises people who are not native speakers to use English in significant and meaningful ways," says Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington DC.
   • "On the internet, all that matters is that people can communicate - nobody has a right to tell them what the language should be," says Baron. "If you can talk Facebook into putting up pages, you have a language that has political and social standing even if it doesn't have much in the way of linguistic uniqueness."
   • Robert McCrum: Online writing is destroying purity of English
     • Steven Poole: There's just more writing at all levels of quality
   • Gawker editor Max Read: (Issued a stern memo to his writers against netspeak) "We want to sound like regular adult human beings, not BuzzFeed writers or Reddit commenters"
     • Stylistic status anxiety
       • Want to be taken seriously as a news organisation
   • Linguist Joan Beal: "The only books I can envisage written in text message shorthand would be aimed at the teenage market, if at all. For it would rather spoil the pleasure of reading, having to work out those abbreviations"
     • Need to work out abbreviations --> requires good command of language?
   • Davis and Brewer: "Electronic discourse is writing that very often reads as if it were being spoken"
   • David Sanderson:" You might include a smiley as a reminder of the ongoing context of the conversation, to indicate that your words don't stand on their own. A smiley can point out to the other participants of the conv. that they need to understand you and your personality in order to understand what you've said."
   • Crystal on language change online: "They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

2. Compared to speech/writing

   • "Internet language is identical to neither speech nor writing but selectively and adaptively displays properties of both. It is more of an aggregate of spoken and written features.
   • w/ speech
     • Lack simultaneous feedback
       • Need to be more concise/establish context, Use emoticons to show prosodic features, Be more polite (Clarification), Use memes to establish common bkgd knowledge, More fragmentary linguistic constructions (truncated sentences, to avoid lag time), more repetition/overlap/interruptions (lack of clarity)
     • Lack facial exp/gestures & conventions of body postured and distance
       • Impt in exp personal opinions/attitudes & moderating social r/s
         • Emoticons
           • Crystal: They are "crude attitudinal approximations"
     • Allows multiple conversations
       • Real-time multiparty settings are feasible and normal
         • Brevity/Concision/Economy of words --> shorter sentences, abbreviations, acronyms, punctuation, truncated words
         • Vagaries of turn-taking, more overlaps/interruptions
   • w/ writing
     • Hypertextuality
     • Varying permanence of text
       • Content can be continually adapted or removed
     • Multiple authorship

3. Communication

   • Constrains
     • Limited message size
     • Message lag/ lack of simultaneous feedback
   • Facilitates
     • Hypertext links
     • Emoticons
     • Multiple conversations and multiple authored text

4. Language change

   • Lexicon
     • Neologisms
       • Blogosphere, retweet, hashtag, netizen, netiquette
       • Wordplay: Blends (Twitterholic)
       • Morphology: using -z to replace -s to refer to pirated products eg. tunez, gamez
       • Compounding
         • Mouseclick, mousepad, mouseover
     • Lexically highly active and rapidly changing BUT the few thousand words are "hardly of great significance" and "there is no lexical grounds for saying ... that the Internet language has been a radical source of language change" (Crystal)
     • Semantic shift
       • "facepalm"
       • "headdesk"
       • "massive" used to mean having great mass but now just means anything big/huge
       • LOL: Laughing out loud --> signal of basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating sense of equality, conveying an attitude, is grammar.
       • Meat used to mean food, silly used to mean blessed
     • "selfie", "shelfie", "drelfie"
   • Orthography
     • Reduced system - omitted punctuation, avoiding capital letters, nonstandard spelling, acronyms, letter homophones, onomatopoeia, graphology (logograms)
       • Unrestrained use of dash, eliptical marks (...), comma provides rhythm or can be merely a pause
   • Grammar
     • Tend to be restricted to a group
       • Blogs --> syntatic patterns (reflecting thoughts, sequence of units of thought)
   • Felicity conditions/politeness principles
     • Maxim of quality, quantity, manner, relevance
   • Success of words
     • "Sharknado" - popular when movie was out but was coined 2 years before it
   • Rate of change dependent on how learned the word is?

5. Controversies

   • Loss/foster creativity?
   • Harmful?
   • Help/hindrance?
   • Hopeful?

6. Mediums

   • Instagram
     • Punctuation not always observed
     • Emoticons
     • Full sentences
     • Lacks linearity
     • Seeks sophistication? About friendship/living
   • Blog
     • Highly conversational, imaginary reader constructed
   • Tumblr
     • Linear, group conversation
     • Multimodal (gif/memes)
     • Highly interactive
     • Hashtags
       • Johnson (The Economist): A simple form of categorisation that became important as a form of social identifier
   • Group chats
     • Repetition
   • Forums
     • Internet memes