Communicating emotions online : the function of anonymity and gender

The electronic media directly or indirectly encourage their users to take an active role online. This, among others, finds its reflection on the users’ expression of opinions in public about various issues. The degree of freedom of expression and sharing the users’ opinions and emotions with others will depend on a number of factors, the major one, as it is assumed here, being the users’ degree of anonymity. An important role, as some previous studies have shown, is also to be assigned to the gender of the post authors. The following study will therefore attempt to investigate the issue of the frequency and the character of emotions expressed in the posts written in English, excerpted from three types of media: anonymous, represented by the International Movie Data Base; semi-anonymous, where both real names and invented ones may appear (film fan pages available on Facebook); to opinions expressed by Facebook friends in a more private online interaction. The objective will be to establish both the character and the rate of expressed emotions (positive or negative ones) and the degree of the users’ openness about their feelings, depending on the medium of expression and their gender, where disclosed

Politeness, gender, and English-medium Facebook communication

Computer Mediated Communication has made it possible for its users to interact freely with each other despite physical distance. Social networking sites, notably Facebook, particularly encourage informal contacts between their users, which are not infrequently maintained in English as a language of international communication. The purpose of Facebook-mediated interaction is to exchange information on a variety of subjects, but what appears to be its overriding aim is to sustain contacts and good relations with one’s friends and acquaintances, as well as enhance one’s own, usually positive, image. The phatic function of language appears therefore to be one of the chief traits of Facebook communication. The primary aim of the paper, inspired by my research of the use of English as the first, second and foreign language, represented in the study by numerically parallel groups of British, Indian, and Polish Facebook users (cf. Dąbrowska 2013) [1], is therefore to evaluate the character of the strategies of politeness recorded in the collected material. The study focuses on the identification of particular intentionally polite speech acts (cf. Watts 2003) [2] expressed in the posts generated by the three aforementioned groups of users, and their discussion within the framework of Brown and Levinson’s (1978/1987) [3] classical division into positive and negative politeness, their frequency as well as the form of the language shaped by conventions of online politeness. Moreover, the discussion examines examples of emotive language (cf. Janney and Arndt 2005) [4] which additionally broaden the scope as well as reinforce the strength of polite meanings. The analysis is carried out with respect to both the cultural and linguistic background of the authors of the posts and, primarily, the users’ gender, which, as will be demonstrated, proves to be the major factor influencing the frequencies of use of a variety of polite meanings, with women invariably taking the lead in this respect, regardless of their diverse cultural and linguistic background

Language economy in short text messages

The purpose of this paper is to investigate some of the formal characteristics of the genre of the short text message, with a special focus on the concept of language economy, which typically underlies the use of this mode of communication. The subject of analysis are text messages in two languages, English and Polish, which are compared in terms of the methods of text shortening used by the two language systems. The elements studied include word clippings, vowel deletion, word-letter substitution, word-number substitu­tion, spelling simplification, and pronoun deletion. The aim is to establish the preferred options in the two languages and identify reasons for such choices

Functions of code-switching in Polish and Hindi Facebook users’ posts

In the modern era the use of English has become very widespread, the language being used more and more by non-native speakers in a variety of contexts. The objective of the paper is to explore the use of the English language as a second and as a foreign language by bilingual Polish-English and Hindi-English speakers in the medium of Computer Mediated Communication, represented in the following study by the social network context, in order to demonstrate differences in the use of the language by the two groups, stemming from the status of English in the two respective circles, the Outer and the Expanding. The particular aspects of analysis include the frequency of the use of English, the length of the English posts and, notably, the phenomenon of code-switching, its typology and the functions which the respective languages typically perform in the switched elements

"Happy b’day bhaiya" : characteristics of Facebook Indian English

The purpose of the paper is to analyse linguistic practices of specifically one group of English Facebook users – the speakers of Indian English. As one of the most thoroughly studied members of the so-called New Englishes group, Indian English is believed to demonstrate a number of characteristic features resulting especially from the prolonged English-Hindi language and culture contact. Following a brief outline of the history and current position of English in India the paper examines in detail characteristic features of Indian English found in the Facebook material collected from fan pages and private messages: changes in spelling and pronunciation of English words, use of abbreviations, characteristic features of nativised Indian English grammar, language errors, as well as some typical sociolinguistic features of that variety of English, notably forms of address, culture-specific elements, and code-switching

Abbreviated English : a typical feature of online communication?

Since electronic communication became widespread, one of the typical features identified in e-language and commented on, also as an aspect of linguistic analyses, has been acronyms and abbreviated language of various kinds. It has been particularly visible in English, as this language, unlike many others, shows great flexibility with regard to such modifications, mainly due to homophony between numerous words and individual sounds as well as lack of inflectional endings, which otherwise would limit the abbreviation options. However, the current overview of a selection of social networking sites does not appear to demonstrate any striking presence of this marker of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The present analysis therefore attempts to investigate the contemporary status of online language abbreviations in English, with the aim of discovering the actual visibility and frequency of use of such items as well as identifying their most popular forms found online. In particular, the research focuses on three social networking sites, i.e. Facebook (private accounts and fanpages), YouTube, and Twitter, trying to establish which factors contribute to the preference for abbreviations: the limitation of the post length, the degree of informality and closeness to the post addressees or the anonymity of the post author. Additionally, the investigation also takes into account the nationality of the users, and notably the status of English as their first or second language, as well as their gender, on the assumption that these variables play a significant role in the selection of this aspect of online discourse