The Discourse of Digital Deceptions and ‘419’ Emails

This study applies a computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) to the study of discourse structures and functions of ‘419’ emails – the Nigerian term for online/financial fraud. The hoax mails are in the form of online lottery winning announcements, and email ‘business proposals’ involving money transfers/claims of dormant bank accounts overseas. Data comprise 68 email samples collected from the researcher’s inboxes and colleagues’ and students’ mail boxes between January 2008 and March 2009 in Ota, Nigeria. The study reveals that the writers of the mails apply discourse/pragmatic strategies such as socio-cultural greeting formulas,self-identification, reassurance/confidence building, narrativity and action prompting strategies to sustain the interest of the receivers. The study also shows that this genre of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become a regular part of our Internet experience, and is not likely to be extinct in the near future as previous studies of email hoaxes have predicted. It is believed that as the global economy witnesses a recession, chances are that more creative and complex ways of combating the situation will arise. Economic hardship has been blamed for fraud/online scams, inadvertently prompting youths to engage in various anti-social activities. K E Y W O R D S : computer-media communication, deceptions, discourse, email, ‘419’, fraud, hoax

Discursive Practice and the Nigerian Identity in Personal Emails

As communication by the electronic mail spreads and becomes increasingly common, more and more people are taking the advantage of its flexibility and simplicity for communicating social identity and cultural matters. This chapter, focuses on how Nigerian users of the electronic mails, apply the medium for expressing their identity through discursive means. Data comprises 150 personal emails written and sent between 2002 and 2009 in Lagos and Ota regions of Nigeria by individual email writers, comprising youths and adults from a university community and the Nigerian civil service. Applying socio-linguistic approach and computer-mediated discourse analysis, the study shows that the most common discursive means of expressing the Nigerian identity are greeting forms and modes of address; religious discursive practices and assertions of native personal names. The data also show evidences of Nigerian English in the email messages

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

New Kids on the Net. Deutschsprachige Philosophie elektronisch\ud

Mailing lists tend to be shaped by core groups of dedicated participants, developing their interests and opinions in front of a predominantly receptive audience of subscribers. A new kind of communicative praxis is established on top of some guidelines on how computers should exchange data: participation in quasi-instantaneous, globally distributed, non-hierarchical discursive interchange. Computer networks, as is well known, are not confined by any historical or geographical borders. As a consequence, the cultural impact of the technical devices seems to affect arbitrary collections of users availing themselves of the necessary equipment and know-how. One of the most dazzling experiences of communication on the net, it has correctly been pointed\ud out, is its global egalitarianism. While it is true that large parts of the planet are still excluded and the predominance of the English language imposes important\ud constraints on the participants, it is difficult to avoid an initial euphoria, a cosmopolitan state of mind, as one becomes familiar with a machinery that can support spatially unlimited cooperation between equals with a minimum of\ud administrative overhead

STUDENT’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS DICTIONARY AND ITS USAGE : A Case of Study for English Department Students Diponegoro University

In learning a foreign language, dictionary is one of learning aids to assist students in making decision about making sense of words in usage –in the target language. This research is conducted to discover how English Department students in Universitas Diponegoro perceive dictionary and use it to assist meaning discovery. The data in this paper is obtained from returned questionnaires previously distributed across four academic years in. The results show that dictionary is not the primary source of English vocabulary intake. Most dictionaries are bilingual (English-Indonesian or Indonesian-English), and may take the form of printed or electronic dictionary. We also discovered that the respondents tend to choose a dictionary based on the number of words listed. Further clarifications of the respondents’ answers indicate the preference of vocabulary intake, where dictionary is not a priority. Bilingual dictionaries are preferred as compared to monolingual ones with the assumption that they are easier to understand. Although the definition of word is still very loose, students seem to be more attracted to dictionaries, which claim to have vast number of entries. For practical purposes, portable dictionary or application dictionary is more preferred as they support mobility. From the results, we may conclude that dictionaries are used by the respondents with restriction in meaning discovery. We suggest that they take it to the next level, where existing linguistic features from dictionaries might also be used to assist writing

Bilingual newsgroups in Catalonia: a challenge for machine translation

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of a corpus of messages written in Catalan and Spanish, which come from several informal newsgroups on the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia; henceforth, UOC) Virtual Campus. The surrounding environment is one of extensive bilingualism and contact between Spanish and Catalan. The study was carried out as part of the INTERLINGUA project conducted by the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3). Its main goal is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the e-mail register in the newsgroups in order to assess their implications for the creation of an online machine translation environment. The results shed empirical light on the relevance of characteristics of the e-mail register, the impact of language contact and interference, and their implications for the use of machine translation for CMC data in order to facilitate cross-linguistic communication on the Internet

Visualising Discourse Structure in Interactive Documents

In this paper we introduce a method for generating interactive documents which exploits the visual features of hypertext to represent discourse structure. We explore the consistent and principled use of graphics and animation to support navigation and comprehension of non-linear text, where textual discourse markers do not always work effectively

THE KEYBOARD WARRIORS: EXPRESSING HATRED AND JUDGEMENT ON “ANOTHER” WOMAN THROUGH HATERS’ INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT

Nowadays, many celebrities use Instagram to connect with their fans. Unfortunately, for some celebrities, their popularity may not necessarily mean that they are liked by the public. The keyboard warriors, i.e. haters can freely hit the keyboard and leave hate comments as cyber communication does not require face-to-face interactions. Some of them even go so far by creating haters’ accounts of certain public figures, as can be found on @mulanjameelaqueen, created by the haters of Mulan Jameela, an Indonesian singer known for her affairs and unregistered marriage with her friend’s husband. This paper explores how being “another” woman is perceived in Indonesia. Mateo and Yus’ (2013) pragmatic taxonomy of insults was used as the framework of analysis. The data were taken from the captions and the comments of 10 of the most commented posts of @mulanjameelaqueen. They were processed by using AntConc to obtain the most frequently used words and their collocations, and the word clusters. The results show that the most commonly used lexicons to refer to Mulan are: cireng ‘traditional snack’, lonte ‘whore’, Jamilonte or Mulonte (coined from Mulan Jameela and lonte ‘prostitute’), and iblis ‘devil’. The malicious comments are mostly related to Mulan’s physical appearance, death threat to Mulan, divorce, and nikah siri ‘unregistered marriage’. The comments may also reflect most of the haters’ (mostly females) negative perception and judgement on unregistered marriage, divorced female, and “another” woman