Search

This article focuses on every day communication in New Media with special regards to private writing on Instant Messaging. After brief introductory thoughts about writings beyond the linguistic norm in New Media we compare the specific circumstances of "new" writing via internet and mobile phone with "traditional" offline writing that can be realized by the use of a computer, a type writer or by hand. How this new writing is judged by the public, whether it is considered to be "good" or "bad" and how experts position themselves in this discussion, is shown in section 3. Section 4 takes a look at which linguistic theories might apply to the analysis of typed dialogues in computer mediated communication. The main focus here is on the theory of Interactional Linguistics which formerly had been applied only to the analysis of oral communication. Finally, language critical and linguistic aspects of writing in the New Media are discussed in a brief synopsis.

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, we will begin by highlighting the importance of Koch and Oesterreicher's model in German linguistics and how the model is adopted in current research. Next, we will explain which competing media terms exist around the Koch and Oesterreicher approach and how the distinction between 'medium' and 'conception' is to be classified. We will then present some examples from computer mediated writing. The data indicates that the specificity of informal language use in private text messages cannot be explained by the transfer from one medium to the other; in fact, these texts have certain linguistic characteristics that cannot occur in oral interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper provides an overview of the functions of emojis in everyday written communication - either used to complement or to replace text. The first chapter presents the current research literature on this topic and addresses the differences between unicode emojis and the former ASCII-signs. Then we discuss a question hotly debated by the public: May emojis be considered the basis of a new universal language? After having shown on both the lexical and the grammatical level that this cannot be the case we move on to the question whether, within our alphabetic system of writing, emojis may be used as additional graphic signs. The last chapter offers some examples of WhatsApp messages containing emojis in the various functions discussed before (as allographs and ideograms, for instance). Furthermore, a frequency analysis based on the Swiss WhatsApp corpus shows the distribution of emojis in these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first two paragraphs deal with the question of how the term dialogue is to be understood and how the terms dialogue and monologue are related. Then arguments for and against the assumption that written communication is a kind of interaction are discussed. Paragraph 4 points out the typical features of written interaction, using the example of WhatsApp - an internet-based instant messaging service which can be installed on a smartphone. In this context the following questions are discussed: how are the characteristics of such dialogues to be described? What distinguishes them from spoken dialogues? And why - compared to text messaging via mobile phones - do they constitute a new kind of dialogue? Paragraph 5 deals with Linell's (1998) concept of dialogism and investigates in what ways this concept is applicable to written interaction. Finally it is shown that not only spoken but also written dialogues may be described in the context of interactional linguistics and other well established research contexts. However, new descriptive methods are needed to do justice to the specific features of written interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, we argue that the spatial environment of everyday interaction has to be understood as a social construct. Co-participants in an interaction make use of the spatial affordances of the interactional architecture around them, and at the same time they interactionally create and maintain spatial configurations. In that sense, they can be argued to be “doing space”. Concerning face-to-face interaction, we distinguish between heavily structured material settings that are custom-built for specific types of institutionalized interactions, such as lecture theatres, assembly halls or ticket offices; moderately structured settings, such as restaurants, staff rooms or museums; and weakly structured settings, such as public town squares or other settings which provide only minimal assumptions about the interactions that may take place there and their spatial configurations. We extend this analysis to different forms of interaction on interactive multimodal platforms (IMP), where the complexities increase with the different spatial levels of the physical computer screen, the many different spatial levels depicted there, and the increasing difficulties for the interactants to navigate and negotiate the different levels of doing space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Im Beitrag werden zunächst die Bezeichnungen konzeptionell mündlich, medial mündlich und gesprochensprachlich voneinander abgegrenzt und die sprachlichen Merkmale von solchen Texten beschrieben, die unter das Stichwort Parlando fallen und als Kennzeichen eines neuen, an der Mündlichkeit angelehnten Schreibstils gelten (vgl. Sieber, 1998). Dann steht die Frage im Mittelpunkt, ob es gerechtfertigt ist, die private, textbasierte Kommunikation in den neuen Medien (z.B. E-Mail, SMS, Chat) als verschriftete Mündlichkeit zu charakterisieren und sie in die Nähe von Gesprächen zu rücken. Dabei lege ich den Schwerpunkt auf die Betrachtung von SMS- und Chattexten. Anhand solcher Texte wird gezeigt, dass sich in der privaten Schreibpraxis zahlreiche sprachliche Merkmale finden, die in der Linguistik als konzeptionell mündlich bezeichnet werden, die aber keineswegs mit dem gleichgesetzt werden dürfen, was Peter Sieber mit Blick auf Maturarbeiten als Parlando-Stil charakterisiert. Die Betrachtungsebenen müssen also sorgfältig getrennt werden, und es sollte aus linguistischer Sicht nur dann von Mündlichkeit in den neuen Medien gesprochen werden, wenn damit tatsächlich Gesprochensprachliches gemeint ist (also z.B. Internet-Telefonate via Skype). In allen anderen Fällen, so werde ich in meinem Beitrag abschliessend darlegen, sollte nur von konzeptioneller Mündlichkeit, nicht aber von Mündlichkeit oder Parlando die Rede sein.

New forms of communication that have recently developed in the context of Web 2.0 make it necessary to reconsider some of the analytical tools of linguistic analysis. In the context of keyboard-to-screen communication (KSC), as we shall call it, a range of old dichotomies have become blurred or cease to be useful altogether, e. g. "asynchronous" versus "synchronous", "written" versus "spoken", "monologic" versus "dialogic", and in particular "text" versus "utterance". We propose alternative terminologies ("communicative act" and "communicative act sequence") that are more adequate to describe the new realities of online communication and can usefully be applied to such diverse entities as weblog entries, tweets, status updates on social network sites, comments on other postings and to sequences of such entities. Furthermore, in the context of social network sites, different forms of communication traditionally separated (i. e. blog, chat, email and so on) seem to converge. We illustrate and discuss these phenomena with data from Twitter and Facebook.

New forms of communication that have recently developed in the context of Web 2.0 make it necessary to reconsider some of the analytical tools of linguistic analysis. In the context of keyboard-to-screen communication (KSC), as we shall call it, a range of old dichotomies have become blurred or cease to be useful altogether, e. g. "asynchronous" versus "synchronous", "written" versus "spoken", "monologic" versus "dialogic", and in particular "text" versus "utterance". We propose alternative terminologies ("communicative act" and "communicative act sequence") that are more adequate to describe the new realities of online communication and can usefully be applied to such diverse entities as weblog entries, tweets, status updates on social network sites, comments on other postings and to sequences of such entities. Furthermore, in the context of social network sites, different forms of communication traditionally separated (i. e. blog, chat, email and so on) seem to converge. We illustrate and discuss these phenomena with data from Twitter and Facebook.

This paper discusses some methodological issues related to current research on SMS communication in Switzerland, an ambitious research project situated in the context of the international project sms4science. Thus far, the analyses of the Swiss data focus on numerous inner-linguistic features, variational aspects and language contact phenomena; each of which is of the utmost interest for multilingual Switzerland (cf. the five articles contained in this issue). In the following pages we first provide some background information about the project and the constitution of the Swiss SMS-corpus. We then present some methodological demands and problems, which are discussed on the basis of a dialogic sub-corpus. In the final paragraphs of this introductory article, we outline the state of affairs in the field of the linguistic study of SMS communication and highlight some research questions that would be of significant interest for the further analysis of the Swiss corpus.

This article focuses on every day communication in New Media with special regards to private writing on Instant Messaging. After brief introductory thoughts about writings beyond the linguistic norm in New Media we compare the specific circumstances of "new" writing via internet and mobile phone with "traditional" offline writing that can be realized by the use of a computer, a type writer or by hand. How this new writing is judged by the public, whether it is considered to be "good" or "bad" and how experts position themselves in this discussion, is shown in section 3. Section 4 takes a look at which linguistic theories might apply to the analysis of typed dialogues in computer mediated communication. The main focus here is on the theory of Interactional Linguistics which formerly had been applied only to the analysis of oral communication. Finally, language critical and linguistic aspects of writing in the New Media are discussed in a brief synopsis.

The aim of this paper is to draw the necessary terminological distinction between media, communication forms and communication genres, and to use this distinction to compare specific communication genres belonging to chat communication. After some preliminary remarks, the following two sections deal with the definition of media and communication forms and the most important characteristics of communication forms, which are illustrated with examples of chat communication. Section 4 introduces the concept of communication genre, and section 5 shows the way communication genres, especially the expert chat and the information chat, can be analyzed within this framework and why it is not possible to do it in the same way with emails and short text messages. In this context the distinction between communication genres and text genres will also be discussed.