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Erschienen in:
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2010 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

Are Instant Messages Speech?

verfasst von : Naomi S. Baron

Erschienen in: International Handbook of Internet Research

Verlag: Springer Netherlands

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Abstract

Instant messaging (IM) is commonly viewed as a “spoken” medium, in light of its reputation for informality, non-standard spelling and punctuation, and use of lexical shortenings and emoticons. However, the actual nature of IM is an empirical issue that bears linguistic analysis.
To understand the linguistic character of IM, this article begins by considering differences between face-to-face speech and conventional writing. Because gender can affect language usage, we also review relevant gender-specific literature, both for speech and writing, as well as existing studies on the linguistic makeup of computer-mediated communication.
Our empirical study is based upon a collection of college student IM conversations gathered by the author and her students. We analyze these data with respect to message length issues, use of lexical contractions (e.g., don’t for do not), as well as chunking of IM turns into multiple transmissions that are sent seriatim. Our findings are compared with Chafe’s notion of an “intonation unit,” used for describing spoken discourse. Taken as a whole, the IM conversations were more akin to face-to-face speech than to conventional writing. However, when data were analyzed by gender, male IM more closely resembled speech, while female IM conversations conformed more to written norms.

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Nächstes Kapitel From MUDs to MMORPGs: The History of Virtual Worlds
Fußnoten
1
Portions of the analysis is this article appear in Baron (2004, 2008a, In Press).
 
2
I am grateful to Lauren Squires, Sara Tench, and Marshall Thompson for assistance in designing the study and gathering IM conversations and to Lauren Squires and Juliette Sligar for help in analyzing the data.
 
3
This list draws upon my own previous work (Baron, 2000, 2003), along with studies by Chafe and Danielewicz (1987) and Crystal (2001).
 
4
See Baron (2008a) for discussion of the linguistic nature of CMC, along with implications for traditional written language.
 
5
Research by Sacks and Schegloff (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff & Sacks, 1973) laid the groundwork for contemporary conversational analysis.
 
6
The fit between Chafe’s notion of a (spoken) intonation unit and transmission units in IM is not precise. In IM, distinct transmissions are easy to count: You can always tell when the sender hits “Enter.” With speech, dividing up a conversational turn into intonation units leaves more room for ambiguity. Nonetheless, Chafe’s intonation units give us a place to start in analyzing IM as spoken or written language.
 
7
Student names in examples throughout the article are pseudonyms.
 
8
Our original study design was scaled back due to slippage in subject participation. However, many of our results have been corroborated by other investigators’ research (e.g., Squires, 2007; Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008).
 A total of 16 females and 6 males participated in the conversations. In the female sample, the same student experimenters engaged in conversations with multiple interlocutors. In the male sample, more than one conversation between the same interlocutor pair was sometimes included in the sample.
 
9
The line is sometimes difficult to draw. For instance, b/c for because was included as a CMC abbreviation, whereas prob for problem or convo for conversation was not.
 
10
Excluded were acronyms such as US = United States or TA = teaching assistant.
 
11
For statistical details on the analysis of IM conversations described in this article, see Baron (2004, in press).
 
12
For the full coding scheme see Baron (in press).
 
13
While contractions appeared in the corpus, there were fewer than anticipated.
 
14
Some CMC abbreviations and acronyms appeared in the corpus, though fewer than anticipated.
 
15
Emoticons are sometimes used in lieu of (spoken) prosodic or kinesic cues available in face-to-face communication.
 
16
Speech is often characterized by run-on sentences whose components are chained together with coordinating conjunctions. Whole sentences in formal writing generally do not begin with conjunctions.
 
17
However, as with CMC abbreviations and acronyms, there were relatively few emoticons in the data.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Are Instant Messages Speech?
verfasst von
Naomi S. Baron
Copyright-Jahr
2010
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
Buch
International Handbook of Internet Research

Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-9788-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-4020-9789-8

Copyright-Jahr: 2010

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_1