The aim of this literature review on chatroom conversation by Terrell Neuage at the University of South Australia is to critique the contributions to the fields of discourse analysis and electronic communication.

<<<-currently working on Thursday, March 15, 2001

Updated Thursday, March 15, 2001 note this is a work in progress

NOTE: TEXT IN ITALICS AND RED ARE SUPERVISORS’S COMMENTS WHICH WILL BE LEFT IN THIS VERSION OF THE ROUGH DRAFT LITERATURE REVIEW IN PROGRESS: TERRELL NEUAGE Ph.D thesis at the University of South Australia. Previous academic work - The Influence of the WWW upon literature

Updated Wednesday, 7 March 2001 Adelaide SA THIS PAGE IS AT: http://se.unisa.edu.au/lit.htm

LITERATURE REVIEW OF CHATROOM CONVERSATION

RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

RESEARCH HYPOTHESES:

INTRODUCTION

PROJECT MANAGEMENT MAPPING (transcription); NAVIGATION (hypertextuality)

· METHODOLOGIES

· A. ESTABLISHED THEORIES AND METHODS OF DIALOGUE ANALYSIS

o Conversational Analysis (CA)

o Speech Act (SA) theory

o Discourse Analysis (DA)

o Reading Theory (also - hypertextuality)

o Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)

§ Electronic Communicated Analysis

§ Computational Linguistics

§ Text and Corpus Analysis

o Semiotics

§ Pragmatics

o Linguistics (to establish a chatroom linguistics)

Linguistic schools of thought

o Prague School of linguistics

o Dependency grammar

o Tagmemics

o Stratification grammar

o Systemic linguistics

o Optimality Theory

· B. NEW FORMS OF DIALOGUE ANALYSIS

o FIELD LITERATURE

§ Current on-line research

§ ZINES

§ southernexpressway http://se.unisa.edu.au

§ Chatroom Analysis (MUDs: Instant Messengers: IRC:)

§ QUESTIONER/SURVEY http://se.unisa.edu.au/q.html (site not active)

· BIBLIOGRAPHY http://se.unisa.edu.au/b.htm

· GLOSSARY

· PROPOSAL ~THESIS ~ http://se.unisa.edu.au/p.htm

· THESIS HEADQUARTER http://se.unisa.edu.au/hq.htm

· ETHICS approval for chatroom research http://se.unisa.edu.au/e.htm

· chatroom http://se.unisa.edu.au/c.htm

NOTE: links below which are outside of the University of South Australia were active as of Saturday, 11 November 2000.

The anointed version (supervisor’s notes) of this is at: http://se.unisa.edu.au/lit2.html

Literature Review Abstract. The aim of this literature review is to critique the contributions to the fields of discourse analysis and electronic communication. This will develop a study of how the process of exchanging meaning is functionally motivated within electronic 'talk'. This literature review will aid in establishing the theoretical framework and methodological focus needed for an original contribution to dialogue on electronic talk as a system of social meaning-making within cyberculture. As well I hope to create a semiotic model for 'Natural Language' within the chatroom milieu. The majority of my literature review will be based on online essays or discussions. Not all articles/essays cited will be on line for future references. This is a problem with the way the Internet currently is. There have been discussions to archive everything on the Internet but no complete archive of everything on the Internet currently exists. To overcome this problem I will include the complete works cited as appendixes for the final thesis presentation if I have received permission from the author.

Research on-line is different from face to face research.

There is the question of whether cyberspace is even "real" and therefore worthy of study. To most participators chatrooms are real created space. People are able to express ideas, ask questions, and make arrangements to meet in the physical. There have been the same experiences gained within the chatroom environment as there would be if people were at a meeting, party or at any social gathering; “chatrooms are suitable places for developing the self socially, mentally and culturally, as well as shaping the character traits of the self.” (Teo Soo Yee in In Defence of Chatrooms) Virtual communities can be as important to those who visit the same chatrooms as any community in RL (Real Life) would be. There is an ever expanding amount of online essays which discuss virtual communities. Many of these essays will be cited in this literature review and as I find more they will be listed at:http://se.unisa.edu.au/vc~essays.html . As I am investigating linguistic patterns in chatroom ‘speech’ exchanges I am not overly concerned with who exchanges meaning , ie. what role the person is playing and whether it is ‘he or she’ ‘talking’ or a made up identity, but how meaning is exchanged.

Are chatrooms public or private?

In addition, there are questions of whether cyberculture, especially exchanges within chatrooms, are public or private. (Cybersociology ~ http://www.cybersociology.com/ ~ issue six: Research Methodology Online ~ http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/magazine/6/issue6.html) All exchanges within chatrooms accessible to the public are public. Any chatroom where the participator has to log on with screening criteria such as belong to a university or government body and thus needing an identifying code to participate is within a private chatroom and the dialogue would be confidential if required. As well as the behaviour of the participants, if known to one another would be different than a chatroom which is open to the public and participators make up usernames which does not reflect or identify themselves.

These areas of chatroom ‘space’ where talk is differentiated by anonymity (public), or the user is known (private) will be analysed for their grammar usage in the thesis of chatroom linguistics. There are also various ‘types’ of chatrooms and I will elaborate on this in another section. Overall, there are two main divisions of chatrooms: moderated and non-moderated. Moderated chatrooms can be subdivided into chatrooms where people submit questions and answers are provided. This is most common in cases where people who are publicly known are in the chatroom, ie. sports stars, politicians, experts on a particular topic. Moderated chatrooms are ‘controlled’ by a particular person who controls the movement of chat. For example, if there is inappropriate language which is considered offensive to others in the chatroom the participator infringing can be prevented from continuing in the chatroom. The chatrooms I will investigate are the open, non-moderated chatrooms as I believe these provide the opportunity for the flowing chat interaction I wish to analyse. It is these chatrooms which are closest to casual conversation.

The emergence of the term 'chat' to describe electronic communication text forms is one indication of its difference from existing talk modes. There is the sense that on-line conversation is not serious and therefore may not be worthy of an intensive linguistic study. The term, 'chat', however captures only some of the dimensions of this emergent communication form. chatrooms differ from TV or radio “chatshows” primarily due to the limit of words. In a chatroom, from several thousand lines of chat, I have found there is an average of five words for each turn taken. However, when conversation is ‘pieced’ together from ‘speakers’ a coherent conversation can be found. In other electronic chat modes such as radio and television talk shows more words are ‘spoken’ by each individual. The other major differences is the lack of control in most chatrooms of topic whereas in radio and television chats there is a moderator who keeps control of the topic.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS ~ as a starting point toward analysing a culture of electronic-talk:

· How is turn-taking negotiated within chatrooms? What does turn - taking reveal? Whereas in face-to-face conversation people can speak at the same time (talk over one another) in chatrooms only one voice is ‘heard’ (seen) at a time because of the scrolling effect of the computer screen. In a chatroom where there are more that two ‘voices’ there are two primary functions in turn-taking that need addressing. First, participants need to know when it is appropriate to ‘speak’ if he or she wishes to be heard and responded to. This is further broken down into two more functions of turn-taking. The ‘speaker’ is either addressing one particular participant in the chatroom or the ‘speaker’ is addressing the group. For example, by referring to something someone said in particular ie. ‘how’s 3 +3 = 11’ or ‘speaking’ to the group, ie. ‘whats Mets/Bull score’ the ‘speaker’ is identifying where he or she is placing ‘talk’. Second, whereas in casual conversation between people ‘there has to be a way of determining who the next speaker is to be’ Eggins & Slade p. 25) in chatrooms there is no protocol who the next speaker is. The next speaker is whomever hits their return key next. Turn-taking will be analysed and discussed throughout this work.

· With the taking away of many identifying cues of participants (gender, nationality, social and economical standing, age etc) are issues of gender, nationality, social and economical standing, age as prevalent as in face-to-face talk? Does the chatroom milieu provide a pure communication space? Where only words have meaning and the author’s significance is only the words produced.

· How is electronic chat reflective of current social discourse? I will examine whether eChat and in-person conversation are breaking down barriers between people of gender, nationality, social and economical standing, and age. Some studies have shown that barriers still exist and are created by the author themselves. For example it was found in one particular study that,

as the female users who wrote themselves into this virtual community, they did so in an imagined social space very much defined by their experiences in a patriarchal culture. As a result their discourse patterns were ‘gendered’, meaning that the female users were less participatory than their male counter parts, and often silent. (Dietrich, 1997: p. 181)

· Is meaning constructible within chatrooms? In this study I will examine whether eChat is a vehicle to assimilate and exchange information or are the words on the screen too random to produce a decipherable message?

RESEARCH HYPOTHESES:

The research project is built around the following hypotheses:

· That people create a different 'textual self' for each electronic environment they are in, and that we should not continue to regard all electronic textual practices as equal. I am referring to different chatroom environments and not the wide range of electronic dialogue tools available such as eMail, eGroups, newsgroups and one-on-one eChat areas such as Instant Messenger or ICQ. Some chatrooms invite participators to play a role such as in ‘Friendly Bondage Chat’ (http://www.bedroombondage.com/communication/chat/livechat.htm):

‘A person may claim to be a different gender, or might use two identities at the same time in one chatroom....It’s up to each individual to decide how they wish to represent themselves...’

Participators in a religious chatroom may choose to ‘speak’ differently than they would in the bondage chatroom or in a baseball chatroom or an academic or policy making or a crisis care chatroom. These are the various ‘textual selves’ I am exploring. In my research I will use a variety of chatroom to analyse how text is written.

· That conversation within chatrooms, without all the cues of previous forms of conversation (physical or phone meeting and dialogues) will change how we come to know others and new cues based on written conversation may become as important as the physical ones which we rely on now.

· That observational study of chatroom conversation can capture some of the adaptations of conversational behaviours from the way people identify themselves (log-on or screen names) and how they 'talk'. Primarily of interest will be whether the log-on or screen names will be associative with the content of the text. As this is a grey area from an ethics point of view, the identifying of the user, I may not be able to explore this as fully as I would want to.

· That this work will assist in an understanding of how, and why, chatrooms are an important area in which to create a new conversational research theory. This new eclectic approach to ‘chat’ will ‘borrow’ from existing theories of linguistics and Computer Mediated Communications as outlined in the beginning of this Literature Review.

introduction to this project

I am interested in the on-line interactive environment, its departure from the culture of a print milieu and its changes for both the reader and the writer. As on-line chatroom and discussion groups grow in popularity and importance and as these applications increase, so too will the analysing of these environments, in both depth and range.

My review of current literature has not found adequate print material directly on chatrooms to pre-dispose these formats within given theoretical positions, however this changes weekly as more people explore this topic. To establish means for rigorous analysis, I propose therefore to "export" my investigation into the established linguistic methodologies of work on discourse - and especially on conversation. There is a growing body of print material on hypertext, the Internet and the World-Wide-Web but there has been little work done on analysis of interactive on-line text, which is seemingly borderless, as it is in on-line dialogues. Therefore, my field literature as of mid-2000 borrows greatly in the first instance from previous research into MUDs, MOOs, ICQ, and the IRC generally, as I have found few research studies specifically on chatroom conversations from a linguistic view. In the second instance I will borrow from the already established fields of Conversational Analysis, Computer Mediated Communication and Discourse Analysis.

Edited to here as of Saturday, 11 November 2000

Anna Cicognani has built her Ph.D. around the design of text based virtual worlds (see Cicognani 1998b) and Dr. Sherry Turkle looks at computer "talk" from her clinical psychologist's perspective (1995). The field literature is growing, with several people a month e-mailing me that they are doing post-graduate study into computer-mediated communication. I will include, and hopefully network with these people to enrich this study. There are several unpublished theses and papers which explore on-line environments such as MUDs and MOOs and discussion groups, but these are mainly from a sociological or psychological perspective or in Cicognani's case, on the architecture of MUDs (1998). (Bechar-Israeli (1999), Camballo (1998), Cicognani (1996, 97, 98, 99), Cyberrdewd (1998), Hamman (1996, 97, 98, 99), Turkle (1996, 97, 98, 99), Paul ten Have (1999), Murphy & Collins (1999), There also on-line journals (zines) which contribute to cyberculture, such as cybersociology at http://www.cybersociology.com/. include a briedf note on the approach of each of these.

Webster Dictionary definitions of CHAT include:

CHAT ~ Informal conversation or talk in an easy familiar manner.

· Informal ~ Not of a formal, official, or stiffly conventional nature. Appropriate to everyday life or use;

· conversation ~ The interchange through speech of information, ideas, etc.; spoken communication

o speech ~ The act or faculty of speaking; Utterance

o Utter ~ To give audible expression to (something)

§ expression The act or an instance of transforming ideas into words; A manifestation of an emotion, feeling, etc., without words (For example in chat rooms 'emoticons' are used to illustrate emotions; smiling face, frown or symbols such as :) to say one is just kidding or is laughing)

o communication ~ The imparting or exchange of information, ideas, or feelings

· talk ~ to express one's thoughts, feelings, or desires by means of words; To communicate by other means: lovers talk with their eyes; To exchange ideas (NOTE: it is not until definition 10 that it uses 'to make sounds suggestive of talking')

· familiar ~ well known; Frequent or customary; Close, intimate.

This network of definitions captures the complexity of “natural conversation”, yet still misses many of the features of observable chatroom conversations. By comparative analyses, I hope to arrive at a workable definition for chatroom conversations. This will in turn enable me to establish categories of 'chat behaviour' and link them to existing linguistics and sociological techniques for analyzing conversation. I then hope to clarify which categories of Internet chat are excluded from or inadequately explained, in existing methods of analysis, using these in turn to evolve new ways of examining and explaining Internet chatroom behaviour.

From the outset, Internet chat eludes existing definitions. The representation of Internet "conversation" in written text immediately eliminates elements of such conventional understanding as those produced for dictionaries.

From the above words OK but WHY? in bold only the following can be keywords in defining chatroom conversation: informal, communication, talk, familiar.

As the dictionary defines the remaining words in their physical usage as speech, unclear these require re-definition to use them in their written form: conversation, speech, utterance, expression. These terms will be re-defined to suit written forms of what traditionally is oral expression.

A brief over-view of current Internet talk modes will assist in clarification of this dimension of the research problem.

THREE CURRENT FORMATS OF 'real-time' ON-LINE DIALOGUE

These are areas in which participants 'speak' and answer in the present, creating a sense of 'natural conversation'. Other areas of on-line dialogue, such as E-mails, listserves and discussion groups will not be investigated. explain why.

MUDs: Instant Messengers: IRC:

MUDs

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an out growth of MUDs ("Multiple-User Dimension" or "multi-user dungeons") as well as other constructs on the Internet, such as MOOs (MUD-Object-Oriented), MUSE (Multiple-User Dimension), and MUSH (the "H" stands for Hallucination). These programs matured in the early 1990s as role playing games. MUDers were mostly middle-class Western college students who used MUDs as places to play and escape; though some used MUDs to address personal difficulties. (Turkle, 1996, p. 54). They are currently used extensively in education. I will not directly research MUDs, except to note the intensity of their early "interactivity" sites, which may still have something to say of IRC relations. explain more fully (A Research-Oriented Link of MUD Resources Collection is available at: http://www.godlike.com/muds/mres/research.html).

Chatrooms, ICQ and IM especially are reader/writer driven interactive sites. One participant enters and writes text and another other person repsonds. Often there is the feeling that one is writing and reading at the same time. In chatrooms this can become chaotic. yes, but why? What differentiates "speakers" within chatrooms is their logon names. If there are several voices, none following any particular protocol, all "talking" at once, the question becomes, "what is being said?" and at the same time "what is being heard?" To date, no explicit protocols have emerged for managing the flows of talk, or even for identifying ( any possible emergence explain). I will develop a transcription methodology to examine online chat. develop this in more detail.

INSTANT MESSENGER

As well as chatrooms I am proposing to observe dialogue in America On-line's Instant Messenger (NOTE: there are now several other companies offering Instant Messenger services, such as Microsoft and Geocities). Here someone steers the conversation into a particular area of discussion, establishing, in CA terms, the "floor" or speaking space for a topic. Unlike chatrooms and discussion groups no one else can enter the dialogue. Here the "talk-text" dynamic comes especially close to that isolated in the "turn-taking" categories of Conversational Analysis, so that IM can operate as a foundational text for other Net forms. good point

In the film "You got mail", Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan dialogue through this particular environment. As I will point out in METHODOLOGY, I am interested in establishing at what point the dialogue between strangers or even acquaintances changes in the on-line environment. For example, in the movie 'You Got Mail' the dynamics between the two strangers change when one of the participants (Tom Hanks) writes, "we should meet". This is however a fictional dialogue - one which parallels a major "moral problem" discourse in relation to IRC and the constitution of electronic persona. The degree to which real IRC dialogue reproduces such moments of change, or reveals other strategies of affects, will be examined.

IRC

Internet Relay Chat (IRC ) provides a way of communicating in real time with people from all over the world. It consists of various separate networks (or "nets") of IRC servers, machines that allow users to connect to IRC. The largest nets are EFnet (the original IRC net, often having more than 32,000 people on-line at once). Once connected to an IRC server on an IRC network, one is able to join one or more "channels" and converse with others there.

On EFnet, there are more than 12,000 channels devoted to many different topics. Conversations may be public (where everyone in a channel can see what you type) or private (messages between only two people). Conversations rarely follow a sequential pattern - "speakers" following one after the other. There are often jumps to an earlier speaker, or someone beginning their own thread. This is the first departure point from 'casual conversation'. When there are many "voices" at once, conversation often becomes chaotic. The speech is then, seemingly inevitably, a "multilogue" or multi-directional system (Eggins & Slade 1997:p. 20), rather than the more conversationally organised "dialogue" we find in print text.

The origins of IRC in fantasy play, both in identity projection, competition and sub-cultural cohesiveness, may have consequences for the discourses and discursive relations of IRC culture. yes develop this

Internet conversation, whether in chatrooms, America Online's Instant messenger (IM), discussion groups, or even in role playing games such as MUDs and MOOS already involves two new paradigm shifts. To bring into being an "electronic interactive conversational analysis" requires a cross over between print and conversation-based analyses and theorisations. Firstly, there is the shift from print to computerization. you need hypertext in here somewhere - IRC is a sort of fltattened-out hypertext! Print relies on hierarchy and linearity. Computer interactivity can have several voices going at once or a "synchronous communication" (Murphy and Collins in Communication Conventions in Instructional Electronic Chats on-line at: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_murphy). A prime example is in chatrooms where there can be multiple conversations involving multiple subjects happening at the same time (Aokk, 1995; Siemieniuch & Sinclair, 1994). Discussion groups too operate around the concept of threads, where a topic takes on a life of its own, and even within the topic chosen there can be offshoots. Instant Messenger has only two voices at one time, but not necessarily following one another. People still "talk" at the same time. One does not always wait for a response. If two people are typing rapidly back and forth, they can return and respond to something which was said whilst the other was typing. (See examples four and five.) While print media works on a flow of conversation or writing directed to an organised progression, on-line conversations fragment into multi-directionality. This paragraph has too many good ideas! Develop each of them...

A second paradigm shift is taking place around the notion of "discourse", parallel to the shift from print to the Internet (see Landow 1992, pp. 1-11). Within the Internet interactive environment there are further developments taking place. Recently there has been a shift from e-maiI and discussion groups to chatrooms and "Instant messenger" ("IM"). E-mail and discussion groups are more or less a one-way road. spell it out in detail

Because of this developing diversity and its clear formation around both textual and conversational practices, this study will encompass several linguistic methods. The major methods used will be Conversational Analysis (CA), Speech Act Theory (SA) and Discourse Analysis (DA), but will include aspects of Reading Theory, Text and Corpus Analysis, Computer Mediated Communication theories (CMC), Linguistics and Pragmatics. Together these methods will provide sufficient range to enable me to develop a method for chatroom analysis, which will encompass more of its attributes than is possible within any one of the existing frames.

WILL ADD A SECTION ON MIXED METHODOLOGIES HERE (note - this is work in progress)

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ONLINE. ISSUE SIX OF CYBERSOCIOLOGY (http://www.cybersociology.com/) (06 August 1999) has nine articles on the topic of RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ONLINE.

What each offers to analysis of computer mediated conversation will be discussed below. In the meantime, it is important to consider how computer technologies have been altering conventional concepts of what "chat" is. For example, the non face-to-face dialogues and the immediacy of conversations have already re-defined communication.

CHANGING COMMUNICATIVE ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVES

From a conventional perspective, referring to this study in terms of 'conversation' is a misnomer, as what is currently considered conversation has a history as an interchange through speech. In the methodology section definitions from major speech theorists will be cited to establish how I will re-interpret conversation for use in this study.

This research will gather its data from conversation within the chatrooms of southernexpressway via the University of South Australia using the scribe software. http://www.webmaster.com/manual17/Scribe/intro.html The Scribe program saves all dialogue to a file accessible by me for this research.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT - METHODOLOGY (MAPPING & NAVIGATION)

MAPPING (and transcriptions)

The review of literature relevant to analysis of conversation within chatrooms will be divided into two sections: Section one will deal with established disciplines of talk and text analysis, while section two examines what I term "current field literature", or existing studies of Internet use, albeit not necessarily informed by language analysis. There will however be overlaps between established disciplines of analyses and current "field literature". For example, the theorist Jean Baudrillard is both a central theorist of computer mediated culture and is active on the Internet.

I have chosen to review the literature in already established disciplines of conversational analysis first. Thus the methodology from Conversational Analysis (CA); Speech Act Theory(SA); Discourse Analysis (DA); Reading Theory; Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and Electronic Communicated Analysis; Computational Linguistics; Text and Corpus Analysis; Pragmatics; Semiotics and Linguistics will be used to establish techniques of reading and speech within chatrooms. Then I will review the 'field literature' and apply the methodologies of the already established disciplines to its findings to establish a specific "chatroom analysis". Within my methodology I will research the elements of differences and similarities in conversation between Internet chat and face-to-face conversation. It is within these areas of difference that my study will add to the new growing body of computer mediated understanding related to social dialogue.

The methodology I propose to pursue for the textual analysis within this project is a mixture of several approaches to linguistic studies. As what I am proposing to do includes several fields of study, as shown below, I have to be clear at all times that what I am doing is at core a linguistic study. My approach to this study therefore, differs from a psychological or sociological approach to the use of language. The psychologist asks why we have conversation the way we do. Sociological conversation analysis asks us instead how we do the conversation. Linguists ask, "How is language structured to enable us to do conversation" (Eggins & Slade 1997, p.7). By extending this 3rd, linguistic approach into electronic interactions I can retain for my study a focus on evolving practices within a sphere still loosely considered textual rather than talk-based. In other words, I anticipate the possibility of being able to capture emergent conventional patterns of use within Internet chat behaviour, as my original contribution to this field of study.

How chatroom and Instant Messenger (IM) conversations become constructed will, I believe, lead outward from the existing regulatory systems of CA into an examination of how "speech" is differently developed within interactive multivoiced (Eggins & Slade; p.20) environments. I will include research into broader discussions of the "global and macroconstructive" elements, (Poole, 1999: p. 45) using the textual theorists Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and Julia Kristeva (1980) and their focus on "intertextuality", to investigate the layering of text on text for the production of new texts within established formats. I will also use the hypertextual theorists George Landow (1987, 88, 92, 94,97), and David Bolter (1998), to focus postmodern/poststructuralist theories onto electronic text cultures. This I consider a necessary corrective to tendencies existing within structural linguistic practice, seeking regulated and predictable behaviours "controlled" within language or text practice. Early observations of Internet talk/text behaviour suggests a less regulated, more multiple and diverse set of talk and text forms.

This literature review will be a section in the final thesis and will be presented in both a linear, hard-copy format and in an electronic, hypertextual form available on the Internet and on CD-ROM. In the print, linear format, the underlined and italicized words (blue if printed in colour) indicate links available in the hypertextual format. This literature review will be constantly reworked and added to throughout the life of this thesis. The hypertextual material will be available in its ever-changing forms on the Internet from this current URL. (The printed and the CD ROM finished thesis is expected to be presented to the research committee of the University of South Australia at the end of 2001.) The detail of the schedule for this work is in the already accepted proposal. (http://infotrain.magill.unisa.edu.au/students/9810252t/this2.html)

Following the completion of this project, southernexpressway will stay in existence, though no longer necessarily run by me, and will no doubt be used by other researchers for data gathering. If so, this literature review will continue indefinitely in its on-line format. , in its turn, an ongoing electronic interactive dialogue.

METHODOLOGIES

A. ESTABLISHED ANALYTICAL THEORIES

In order to establish a method of analysis of chatroom conversation I will examine the following already established forms of dialogue analysis. I will show why each theory is either useful or inadequate for this study. The main contributors and theorists in each field will be noted and their work cited in this section of the review of literature.

Major theoretical studies have examined conversation as interaction between participants with conversation understood as spoken communication. One primary characteristic of conversation is that it is fully interactive - at least two people must participate in it, and they exchange messages in a real-time basis. Participants take turns in exchanging these messages, so conversation is fundamentally a sequential note at once how that element is problematic on line activity (Nofsinger 1991: p.3). I am extending 'speech' to include on-line dialogue as it exists in chat rooms. On-line interactivity has similarities to speech in its notion of immediate turn taking and therefore differs from other written forms of electric or physical communication such as e-mails, letter writing etc. There is a sense of virtual speech and especially turn taking between participants. There are also significant differences, which this research aims to isolate, and analyse. For this purpose Sacks’ conversation analysis (CA) is especially useful.

CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS (CA)

Theorists/writers: Diana Slade and Suzanne Eggins (1997), Donald Allen and Rebecca Guy (1974), John Austin (1962), Erving Goffman (1959, 71, 74 81), Robert Nofsinger (1991), H Sacks (1974), E. Schegloff (1974), Deborah Tannen (1989).

Current Conversational Analysis (CA) builds on the earlier works of the American sociological movement of the 1970s, most notably that derived from the works of Harvey Sacks (1972), in collaborations with Emmanuel Schegloff (1974) and Gail Jefferson (1974) in their work in ethnomethodology (1972, 1974, 1984, 1992). Sacks's major studies into CA were in the early 1970s whilst teaching at the Linguistic Institute, University of Michigan.

Comment on the evolution of ethno methodology and what it does, then on CA.

Sacks, Jefferson and Schegloff's central concern was to determine how individuals experience, make sense of, and report their interactions. I will explore how Sacks's CA can detect change in the rules of engagement in chatrooms where conversation is moved from an oral environment to an on-line environment. I will discuss a series of methods to determine who is "leading" in the conversation in the methodology section below.

In CA, the data consists of tape recordings of natural conversation, and their associated transcriptions. These are then systematically analysed to determine what properties govern the way in which a conversation proceeds. The approach emphasizes the need for empirical, inductive work, and in this it is sometimes contrasted with 'discourse analysis', which has often been more concerned with formal methods of analysis, tease out the advantages of the CA strategy such as the nature of the rules governing the structure of texts (Eggins & Slade, 1997: p.56). My recordings of "natural conversation" within chatrooms will be through the saving of conversations in the program, Scribe, which I will then regard as conversational analysis does its transcripts, and study for patterns of turn-taking, speech patterns and conversational regulation.

Sociologist G. H Mead (1934) and philosophers John Austin (1962) and J. R. Searle (1969) carried out studies into verbal communication preceding the work of Sacks and his followers. (Their work will be expanded on in Speech Act Theory below). Whilst Mead looked at conversation from a sociological perspective (symbolic interaction theory), Austin and Searle (the performative or pragmatic and illocutionary element in meaning) drew attention to the many functions performed by utterances as part of interpersonal communication. By examining and adding these theories of functions with the theories below to a chatroom lexicology, I will establish further dimensions of an electronic theory of dialogue. Time now to stop saying that you will do, and do it?

I will use recent up-dated theorization by Suzanne Eggins and Diana Slade in their book Analysing Casual Conversation (1997) as a guide to analyzing chatroom and discussion group differences. They write on how 'conversation' consists of 'chat' and 'chunks'. The 'chat' segments are those where structure is managed 'locally', that is, turn by turn. The 'chunks' are those aspects of conversation which have a global, or macro-structure, where the structure beyond the exchange is more predictable. 'Chat' equals move by move unfolding of talk. 'Chunk' segments need an analysis which can capture the predictable macro or global structure'. (Eggins, Slade, 1997. p.230). Eggins and Slade carry on the work of the Conversational Analysis' (CA) theorist Howard Sacks (1974) but extend it into longer and more complex exchanges, with potential for electronic dialogue analysis.

Chatrooms with many interactants are multilogue (Eggins and Slade, p. 24) environments. Separating these voices as conversation will be a focus of this study, and something of a methodological challenge, involving the creation of new transcription protocols.

Allen and Guy (1974), writing on conversational analysis before it became an established theory, define the verbal act "as a word or group of words which functions as a separate element in the verbal stream" (Allen & Guy p. 162). Support as agreement or disagreement can vary in length from one to dozens of words. Within chatroom conversation fragmented conversation is the norm. Rarely are full sentences made, although it is arguable that complete thoughts are. This is in contrast to the behaviourists’ view that language and thoughts are identical. To behaviourists, there is no 'non-verbal thought', all thought is seen as determined only by the language used (Watson 1930, Sapir 1929, Whorf, 1940, 1956). This is one feature of my analysis which may emerge into primary significance later, as the empirical research continues. At the moment this sits alone in isolation! Can you link it into surrounding ideas?

My purpose is to describe in detail the conversational relation by isolating and measuring its primary components. Conversation process is rich in a variety of small behavioural elements which are readily recognised and recorded. These elements combine and recombine in certain well-ordered rhythms of action and expression. In the live two-person confrontation there results a more or less integrated web of communication which is the foundation of all social relations. (Guy & Allen p. 48-51). Chatrooms use many of these small behavioural elements, evolving techniques such as emoticons, abbreviations and pre-recorded sounds provided by the chatroom, such as whistles, horns, or laughter, for instance. The full web of exchange however remains unmapped at this time to my knowledge (14 October, 1999).

The problem of measurement description? anchored in a complex phenomenon is that it can contain thousands of discreet elements within a short time span. Allen and Guy have identified some twenty types of basic elements in the action matrix of two-person conversation. Many of these elements are not available to current chatroom speech, as they rely on physical cues for interpretation. In addition, social relations which can impose limits on conversation are not useful in chatroom analysis. In face-to-face conversation participants must be concerned about the impressions which they make on the others more detail (Goffman 1959:33). The absence of such regulatory features in electronic talk is marked by the emergence of the practice of "flaming", or intense escalations of abusive exchange (Deng, 1992; Turkle, 1996). Good argument – develop it!

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Two linguistic theories which concern the relationship between language and thought are 'mould theories' and 'cloak theories'. Mould theories represent language as 'a mould in terms of which thought categories are cast' (Bruner et al. 1956, p.11). why move to this now? An example of mould theory is The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Cloak theories represent the view that 'language is a cloak conforming to the customary categories of thought of its speakers' (ibid). (Daniel Chandler The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/whorg.html).

The American linguist Benjamin Whorf believed that speech is culture bound. He points out that words used are uniquely determined by specific cultures so that it is impossible to fully equate the thought processes of two persons from different cultures even though they appear to be saying the same thing (Whorf 1956: 221). Extending on the work of Edward Sapir (1929), Whorf developed the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis'. This hypothesis combines two principles. The first is linguistic determinism, which states that language determines the way we think. The second is linguistic relativity, which states that the distinctions encoded in one language are not found in any other language (Whorf 1956).

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there. On the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our mind. (Whorf, 1952, p.5)

Language thus becomes a "determining"; or at least a structuring, set of regulatory practices. As such, its systems must be observable in action, in order for it to operate consensually within given culture. Elements of the system can be deduced from any given speech exchange. Including in the case of my study, those of CMC “talk”

Many such elements have been analysed. For instance, "sequence probability" (Allen & Guy p. 79) refers to the likelihood that any given verbal act will not be followed by any just verbal act. For example, an assertion usually follows another assertion and not a question (Allen & Guy p. 189). In chatroom conversation the "voices" have to be separated by participant speakers in order to follow the sequencing and turn taking. The difficulty arises when a speaker responds to different speakers, instead of staying with one particular voice. We always know who is speaking in a chatroom because the username prefixes the talk. However, we do not always know to whom the speaker is responding unless they use the usernames. The regulatory systems are thus placed under increased pressure. This study seeks to establish whether such pressure increases participants' competence in speech exchange relations, or alters the regulatory systems.

In chatroom conversation the individual word is paramount. There is no such thing as an utterance; why not? therefore, we may have to define new forms of 'speech-act' to analyse to reflect a mixed-sequence probability.

Like other areas of the Internet, chatrooms too have etiquette, and rules of cybersense are continuously evolving. Jill and Wayne Freeze point out in their book Introducing WebTV (1998),

..that what is written is not always what is meant. A fair amount of meaning relies on inflection and body language. It is best to clarify a person's intentions before jumping to conclusions or getting defensive. (p. 135).

"Rules" are however already established in IRC - for instance, the convention that capitals imply shouting. Other, more subtle conventions also are developing, as well as abbreviated "talk".

Gudykunst and Kim (1997) which linguistic “school” do they belong to? make several assumptions whilst conceptualizing communication (pp. 6 - 13) which hold true in an analyses of electronic communication, and include the following:

ASSUMPTION 1: COMMUNICATION IS A SYMBOLIC ACTIVITY

Gudykunst and Kim (1997) identify symbols as in operation link this back to Sapir/Whorf? when " a group of people have agreed on their common usage". (p. 6). Due to the rapid communication aspects of chatroom dialogue symbols are frequently used as well as abbreviations. Because a symbol such as:) to represent a smile has no cultural basis, everyone easily adopts it. However, an abbreviation such as btw (by the way) may not be as easy to see by someone not used to English. Therefore, chatroom conversation in all languages must follow a pictographic symbolic convention, depicted by emoticons. The abbreviation of words and phrases will be language specific. What of forms such as “OK”?

Symbolic activity in chatrooms will form a chapter in this thesis. In an analysis of chatroom conversation the percentage of abbreviations used will be revealed as well as emoticons. Emoticons are a unique communicative response in that they do not necessarily reveal how one is saying what they are saying. For example, a person could be quite angry, however, by putting :) at the end of a few words one would think that the person was happy or that what they said was a joke. This is in contrast to oral speech where we have the cues of voice and sight and are able to determine whether the said words coincide with the views of the actual speaker. Robin Hamman (1996, 97, 98, 99) has written several papers on chatroom participation in his MA and Ph.D work (see bibliography: http://se.unisa.edu.au/b.html) in an attempt to show how speech is constructed (see The Role of Fantasy in the Construction of the On-line Other: http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/fantasy.html). details?

ASSUMPTION 2: COMMUNICATION IS A PROCESS INVOLVING THE TRANSMITTING AND INTERPRETING OF MESSAGES

Gudykunst and Kim identify transmitting messages as "the process of putting our thoughts, feelings, emotions, or attitudes in a form recognizable by others. We then refer to these transmitted symbols as a message. Interpreting messages is the process of perceiving, or making sense of, incoming messages and stimuli from the environment. " (p. 7)

In chatroom conversation the way we transmit and interpret messages is different from the Gudykunst and Kim model. They claim that only messages can be transmitted, not meaning. Their interpretation of communication between participants is based on the perception that messages are transmitted and interpreted based on our background: our culture, ethnicity, and family upbringing as well as on our unique individual experiences. Therefore, since no two people have the same background or individual experiences no two people are able to transmit or interpret messages in the same way. How this model is reflected in my chatroom analysis will be important to this study because there is no sure way with current technology to know any more about someone than what they reveal, and what is “revealed” could easily be a mis-representation. problems here: you need to tease out exactly what they mean.

Transmitting and interpreting several message at once can cause confusion. Also, if a few people leave the chatroom as we are quickly typing out what we want to say, we have hanging conversations. To add to the confusion, a person could log on three times into the same chatroom using different log-on names. At some point the chatroom can disintegrate into nonsense communication. A result of this study into chatroom conversation will be to establish the limits of conversational analysis within the chatroom environment. The final conclusion to three years of research very well could be that due to the instabilities within the chatroom milieu the analysis of conversation is not always conclusive - a possible limit on my research paradigm, and one which will be revisited in the concluding chapters of the thesis.

ASSUMPTION 3: COMMUNICATION INVOLVES THE CREATION OF MEANING

Gudykunst and Kim (pp 20-23) argue that only messages can be transmitted from one person to another. Meaning cannot be transmitted due to its ambiguity. With this assumption it is the channel used to transmit a message's influence which creates meaning (ie. 'the medium is the message'). Within chatrooms there is rarely formality, which affects the form of the dialogue. There is often a sense of instability, as people come and go, often without greetings or salutations. It is a medium wherein one can express whatever emotion they are feeling at the time and not worry about the immediate social consequences of the words written. this is a big and important claim: develop it.

Gudykunst and Kim point out that if we do not know others, we use our stereotypes of their group memberships to interpret their meaning, such as their culture, ethnic group, social class and age. In chatrooms we seldom have such clues readily available. I am referring to chatrooms in English. A chatroom where the participants speak in Yiddish, Swahili, or Yukaghir (USSR - NE Siberia) or the participants speak in specific slang may still have words used as cues which can express meaning just as symbols, such as the :) = J ; :| = K ; :( = L does. (On the Macintosh these faces comes up when :) :| :( is typed.) Explain this more carefully.

Conversations in chatrooms with others are usually carried on with short sentences. There are several reasons for this: 1. If several people are 'speaking' at once, then it is necessary to respond quickly. Unless paragraphs of text are available to cut and paste one is limited by both the speed at one types, and the number of people in the chatroom. 2. If we do not know anyone in the chatroom short sentences may be 'spoken' in order to decrease misinterpretation as much as possible. The nature of the conversation will always determine how brief the conversation can be. Before we say 'the Indians suck' we would have to be comfortable with whom we thought was in the chatroom, otherwise we would find ourselves being misinterpreted. Were we referring to the Cleveland Indians baseball team, native Americans, people from India, a sorority or any number of things? If we further qualify our conversation then there are fewer chances for misinterpretation. 'The Indians will never make it to the World Series', 'The Indians show no interest in baseball'', 'I reckon Pakistan will nuke the Indians'. Or any other variation of the word 'Indian' can clarify a conversation: Indian club (but a club as in a group of people or a club which is shaped like a large bottle used singly or in pairs for exercising the arms?) an Indian pitcher could mean a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, or a native American pitcher or to a person from Newfoundland it could represent their home (it is the floral emblem of Newfoundland) or to a botanist it could be the plant Sarracenia purpurea found east of the Rocky Mountains.

Gudykunst and Kim (1997 pp 124 - 126) list Beck's (1988) five reasons why misinterpretations occur and these reasons also show the problems to be dealt with in chatroom conversation:

1. We can never know the state of mind - the attitudes, thoughts, and feelings - of other people.

2. We depend on [messages], which are frequently ambiguous, to inform us about the attitudes and wishes of other people.

3. We use our own coding system, which may be defective, to decipher these [messages]

4. Depending on our state of mind at a particular time, we may be biased in our method of interpreting other people's behaviour.

5. The degree to which we believe that we are correct in divining another person's motives and attitudes is not related to the actual accuracy of our belief. (Beck. 1988, p.18) So? Spell out the consequences of these problems

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Elements of differences in Internet chat to established conversational analyses and its affect on meaning which will be developed in the thesis.

New ways of thinking about conversation will emerge with the growing widespread use of computers as a form of communication. (Charles Ess, 1996; Michael Stubbs, 1996)
E-mail is replacing a lot of traditional letter writing (Landow, 1997)
E-mail's primary difference to letter writing is the rapidity of response expected when an e-mail is sent
Chatrooms involve exchange even more hastily done (Spender, 1995)
In chatrooms conversations are informal (Turkle, 1995)
In chatrooms conversations are often experimental (Turkle, 1995)
Participants experiment with various personae (Turkle, 1995)
Chatroom conversations are often used for entertainment and escape, since virtual conversations can have little to no real life significance (Turkle, 1995)
The primary difference between oral communication and electronic communication is how we re-address the Self (Turkle, 1995)
What we say has value and power.
The power of the spoken word versus the power of the written word
Reading and speech theory are separate disciplines these are haphazard: each needs development, but in proper sequence, to build your argument
- In my work I will combine reading and speech theory

ASSUMPTION 4. COMMUNICATION TAKES PLACE AT VARYING LEVELS OF AWARENESS

'A large amount of our social interaction occurs at very low levels of awareness' (Abelson, 1976; Berger & Bradac, 1982; Langer, 1978, 1989).

Chatroom conversation is not necessarily routine because a person is rarely in a chatroom because they have to be. Chatroom conversation is intentional conversation. Unlike conversation which we engage in because we need to: ie. the person is there in front of us (a partner, supervisor, friend, neighbour, family, shop assistant...) or we have received a letter or e-mail and need to answer; chatrooms are where we go when we really don't need to have communication with anyone in particular.

As we do not know with whom we are speaking or their background in a chatroom, our awareness is heightened. To be a part of a chatroom conversation we need to pay attention to what others are saying. is there evidence that this is happening? However, due to the speed of conversation in chatrooms there is rarely the opportunity to ask someone to clarify what they are saying. People either intuit conversation or respond in whatever way seems to fit at the time. patterns? examples? Chatroom conversation is one of the rare instances in human communication where there is little retribution for saying the 'wrong' thing. can you tie this back to “flaming”?

ASSUMPTION 5: COMMUNICATORS MAKE PREDICTIONS ABOUT THE OUTCOMES OF THEIR COMMUNICATION BEHAVIOUR

When people communicate, they make predictions about the effects, or outcomes, of their communication behaviours: they choose among various communicative strategies on the basis of how the person receiving the message will respond" [Miller and Steinberg (1975) p. 7.] see Jakobson on “address”

Almost all communication in chatroom is based on one's pre-conceived concept of what type of people are in the chatroom. The nature of the chatroom will dictate the sort of conversation one is engaged in for the most part. Whether the chatroom is an Orthodox, sexual, political, sport, or educational site, will make the conversation much more predictable. For example, a physicist wishing to chat on string-theories or worm-holes in space may not find the people to speak with in an Eastern-Orthodox chatroom.. The communicative strategy is to be in the chatroom that appears to be of the same mindset.

ASSUMPTION 6: INTENTION IS NOT A NECESSARY CONDITION FOR COMMUNICATION

Gudykunst and Kim argue that intentions are instructions we give ourselves about how to communicate (Triandis, 1977) p. 11. Chatroom conversation differs from other conversation behaviours in that the scripts (predetermined courses of actions we have learned, ie the greeting ritual; (Gudykunst and Kim p. 12) we use may have no meaning to ourselves but to others within the chatroom they may seem sincere, whether to us they may or may not be sincere.

Discourse management and topical goal.

TURN CONSTRUCTIONAL UNITS (TCUs)

Conversational analyses suggest speakers talk in units of speech, and at the completeness of a unit speakers change (Sacks et al 1974, Eggins & Slade 1997, Halliday 1978). They define a TCU as a complete unit of language, the end of which signals a point of possible speaker transfer (Eggins & Slade 1997). In a multivoiced chatroom there may be a dozen conversations happening at the same time. Developing a transcription process for this will become a major focus of discovering the TCUs.

When we analyze casual, spontaneous conversation we have to deal with the MANAGEMENT of the whole encounter, taking into account factors such as who speaks when, placement of topics, and progression towards, and digression from particular topical goals. Turn-taking in oral conversation is important in that it defines who is in control (Wiemann, 1985). This same control should be demonstrated in chatroom conversation, as well as how turns and management of topics in conversation differ across chatrooms. develop this more

In face-to-face oral conversation the way speakers organise 'who speaks when' is by a turn-taking system, which is composed of a 'turn constructional component', a 'turn allocation component' and a set of rules which cover both the construction and the allocation of turns (Eggins & Slade, 1997 pp 24-27).

With turn-taking in conversations there are often adjacency pairs where the "interdependence of two-part units of dialogue, such as question/answer and summons/answer will show that the occurrence of a first part of such a pair will, in some way, define what comes next as the appropriate second part, so the uttering of that second part in a similar way helps to define what precedes it as the appropriate first part". (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1974). give examples...

Deborah Tannen (1989) shows how conversation provides the source for linguistic and literary analyses. She argues that repetition establishes rhythm and meaning by patterns of constraints and contrasts. In chatroom analyses, I will note patterns to discover if chatroom talk also follows this concept of patterning, and where it departs from rules and practices established for "natural conversation" by CA theorists. If Tannen is right, and conversation “patterns” as pre-disposes textual structure, then that too could be up for change! But what of Walter Ong, who aruges the REVERSE, that after literacy, text patterns talk?

De-coding oral language (Wold 1978)

In chatroom as in oral communication, "language and communication take place in real time, and the structure of language is to a great extent given in temporal patterns because of the primary oral character of natural language." (Wold, 1978 p.3) This study therefore, will aim to explore some of the problems which occur due to the temporal aspects of chatroom talk.

When turn taking is explored, the temporal sequence of information will take on greater meaning. Turn taking in chatrooms, as will be said later, is not the same as turn taking in oral communication. Chatrooms present a chaotic form of turn taking which has as much to do with detemporalization as it does with spatialization. yes - good point - but explain it more - an example would help.

Wold adopts an explicit social-psychological approach to language (similar to Ragnar Rommetveit (1972a, b, 1974). This communicative perspective implies that we have to consider definite constraints both with respect to the ways in which an individual expresses him/herself and to the information then interpreted. A chatroom social-psychological approach to language differs though in several ways to Wold's views. explain in more detail

Wold emphasizes the importance of whom we are speaking with. This is because in oral communication we have the cues of the other person, either from sight or from hearing them. We then choose our words in a way which we perceive will suit the other person. For example, if we know our listener is from a higher or a lower social background than us and we want to appear as of the same social grouping we will take on the air of their social background. see also Bourdieu This could include such utterances as slang, accent (accent referring only to distinctive pronunciation, for example, speaking pidgin in Hawaii, sounding like from East London, Brooklyn, Texas) or speaking a particular dialect (dialect referring to grammar and vocabulary as well, for example saying 'He done it' or saying 'He did it").

Further study related to this section on decoding oral language includes:

Regarding problems relating to experienced duration:

Ornstein, R. E. (1969) On The Experience of Time. Harmondsworth, England. Penguin Books.

Regarding problems relating to perception of sequences:

Bakker, D. J. (1972) Temporal Order in Disturbed Reading. Rotterdam. Rotterdam University Press.

Regarding problems relating to attempts to describe the time pattern of conversations:

Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968) Psycholinguistics: Experiments in Spontaneous Speech. London. Academic Press. ?how will these help? – you need to show how all of this helps and will inform your analyses of chat.

SPEECH ACT THEORY

Theorists/writers: John Austin (1962), Jurgen Habermas (1989), John Rogers Searle (1965, 1969, 1976), Deborah Schiffrin (1987), Terry Winograd (1986).

My focus is on the "speech-act", and the effects of "written conversation". Speech Acts involve uttering identifiable words that are perceived as coherent to members of the speech community (Gudykunst and Kim 1997 p. 153).

Chatrooms are instant, changing communities which often have no consistent centre, no obvious ideology (unless it is a particular ideological chatroom), and no direction (unless one is assigned and adhered to). There is little difference between a chatroom or when people crowding on to an elevator, train or bus with no one knowing anyone, all begin to converse. There is usually one who is louder than the rest, one who is funnier, someone is usually offended or not interested. Chatrooms provide a social community study which will need to establish guidelines for analyses. My research project aims to provide one aspect of that set of guidelines.

Speech-act theory analyzes the role of utterances in relation to the behaviour of the speaker and hearer in interpersonal communication. Chatrooms are Speech communities in which groups of people use rules to guide how they use language and interpret others' use of language (Hymes, 1974; Halliday 1978). A community act (the LOCUTIONARY ACT), is defined with reference to the intentions of speakers while speaking (the ILLOCUTIONARY force of utterances) and the effects they achieve on listeners (the PERLOCUTIONARY effect of their utterances) (Austin, 1962). 'This means that every utterance can be analysed as the realization of the speaker's intent to achieve a particular purpose' (Eggins &Slade 1997, p. 40).

Language spoken in speech communities (e.g. chatrooms) serves at least three functions:

First, the informative function of language is to provide others with information or knowledge.
Second, the expressive function of language is to tell others our attitudes, feelings, and emotions.

· Third, the directive function of language is used to direct others (e.g. causing or preventing some action) (Gudykunst and Kim 1997, p. 236). Examples of each from chat sites? NOTE: Can this be used to fine-tune your CATEGORIES of chat sites?

The philosopher John Austin (1962) pointed out that many utterances do not communicate information but are equivalent to actions ('I apologize...", "I promise...', 'I will...'). Austin defined clear categories of speech which used performative verbs, used to indicate the speech act intended by the speaker, (Poole 1999, p. 36) from such speech acts as:

I name this ship Aurora.

I pronounce you husband and wife.

I find the accused guilty as charged.

Close the window. (Georgakopoulou & Goutsos 1997, p. 2) So? What are the consequences of this for your work?

· DIRECTIVES (speakers try to get their listeners to do something eg. begging, commanding, requesting: "Close the window."

· COMMISSIVES (speakers commit themselves to a future course of action):

· EXPRESSIVES (speakers express their feelings, eg apologizing, welcoming, sympathizing)

· DECLARATIONS (the speaker of an utterance brings about a new external situation, eg. christening, marrying, resigning)

· REPRESENTATIVES (speakers convey their belief about the truth of a proposition, eg. asserting, hypothesizing)

(Crystal, 1992: p121)

For a speech act to be successful certain conditions must be met. These 'felicity conditions' require a response to each speech act. If I say "do you want to have a private chat?" and the response is "I like tofu", then my request is not fulfilled and my speech act is not successful. However, in a chatroom, those lines could very well appear one after another, though they are not adjacent speech acts. Cite Sachs etc. I could have asked "what food do you like?" and then typed the line "do you want to have a private chat?" before the person I was addressing responded. Thus their answer is not to my most recent statement, but to a prior one.

\|/link these better

Speech situations are composed of speech events (Hymes, 1974), activities that in turn have rules governing the use of speech (e.g. getting-to-know-you conversations - (Gudykunst and Kim 1997 p. 328)

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Discourse Analysis

Theorists/writers: Norman Fairclough (1989, 1995), Deborah Tannen (1989).

The term Discourse Analysis does not refer to a particular method of analysis. It does not describe a theoretical perspective or methodological framework but instead describes the object of study: language beyond the sentence. (Tannen, 1989, p6). Discourse Analysis studies complete text (both written and spoken), giving attention to textual form, structure and organization at all levels; phonological, grammatical, lexical and higher levels of textual organization in terms of exchange systems, structures of argumentation, and generic structures: within social, political and institutional practices of dialogue (Fairclough 1982, 89, 95). Its analysis then extends out to its social and cultural contest - a feature my own research will pick up. Yes – but why are you doing that? What do you seek to reveal?

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Reading Theory

Theorists/writers: Umberto Eco (1979, 1986, 1995), J. Kristeva (1980), Michael Payne (1993).

Kristeva (1980, 1986) builds on the works of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Bakhtin to examine the speaking subject and the signifying structures of social practice. It is Kristeva's work on intertextuality which is useful in this study of Internet "conversations".

Kristeva (1986) charts a three-dimensional textual space whose three "coordinates of dialogue' are:

the writing subject
the addressee (or ideal reader)
exterior texts

Kristeva describes this textual space as intersecting planes which have horizontal and vertical axes.

"The word's status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is orientated towards an anterior or synchronic literary corpus) ... each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read ... any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." (p. 37)

Essentially, every text is informed by other texts which the reader has read, and the reader's own cultural context. The simplest articulation of intertextuality can be seen in the footnotes that indicate source materials to which a given text is alluding, or which are known to have influenced the author. A constructive hypertext can make this notion of intertextuality an externally accessible "mosaic" of multiple texts, placing the internal connections about which Kristeva theorizes into a visible forum which can be expanded by each subsequent reader.

My own work seeks to extend Kristeva's modelling of the layering of text, into the ever more complex and shifting systems of talk-texts. By combining her highly theorised models with the analysis of conversation and discourse linguistics, I hope to establish both a theory-rich, and methodologically complex, means of analysing contemporary electronic talk-culture.

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A SEMIOTIC MODEL FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE

Eco (1995) states that natural language (or any other semiotic system) is articulated at two levels: the expression-plane and the content-plane. On the expression-plane, 'natural languages consists of a lexicon, a phonology and a syntax'. The concepts which we can express are on the content-plane (Eco, 1995 pp 20-24). Eco further subdivides these two planes into 'Form, Substance and Continuum'. How we think and express ourselves, according to Eco, is dependent on our 'content-form'. use this

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This section in progress

Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) including: Electronic Communicated Analysis, Computational Linguistics and Text and Corpus Analysis

Theorists/writers: Charles Ess (1996), Michael Stubbs (1996),

Rhetorical theories explain what these are derive their basic orientation from the modes and technologies of communication that prevail in a given society, and new technologies and communication practices propel the evolution of new forms of consciousness and culture (Ess, p.237).

Analyzing patterns of words and grammar in chatrooms, Instant Messenger, and within discussion group environments will present challenges not faced in other forms of textual analysis. Linguistic researcher, Michael Stubbs begins his book, Text and Corpus Analysis (1996), with a question: "How can an analysis of the patterns of words and grammar in a text contribute to an understanding of the meaning of the text?" (p.3) Stubbs continues with an explanation of text, which will be the working definition of text I will use in my own research:

By text, I mean an instance of language in use, either spoken or written: a piece of language behaviour which has occurred naturally, without the intervention of the linguist. This excludes examples of language which have been invented by a linguist merely to illustrate a point in a linguistic theory. Examples of real instances of language in use might include: a conversation, a lecture, a sermon, an advert, a recipe..." (Stubbs, p.4) Explain why you support this view. How does it fit the ? theorists you embrace (exp. Kristiva) and what does it help you to do?

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PRAGMATICS

Theorists/writers: M. A. K. Halliday (1978), S.C. Levinson 91983), Nofsinger (1991).

Pragmatics is the study of linguistic communication, of actual language use in specific situations. In theory, we can say anything we wish, however, in practice, we follow a large number of social rules (many of them unconscious) that constrain the way we speak (Crystal, 1987: p. 120-122). It studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others (Levinson, 1983; Nofsinger, 1991). Amongst the areas of linguistic enquiry, several main areas overlap. Pragmatics and semantics both take into account such notions as the intentions of the speaker, the effects of an utterance on listeners, the implications that follow from expressing something in a certain way, and the knowledge, beliefs, and presuppositions about the world upon which speakers and listeners rely when they interact. Pragmatics also overlap with stylistics and sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, as well as discourse analysis.

These areas are all concerned with the analysis of conversation and will be translated to the study of conversation in chatrooms. How meaning is derived and how symbols (emoticons) and words are interpreted in chatrooms can produce errors. There is often miscommunication in intercultural discourse. In specific there are pragmalinguistic errors, when different languages or cultures have different meanings for the same symbol or word Gudykunst and Kim (p. 219-221). Other errors in communication which have been isolated are sociopragmatic, and "stem from cross-culturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behaviour" (J. Thomas, 1983. P. 99); inchoactive errors come about when the "true value of discourse" is not appreciated, when we do not understand the values people place on what they say or represent (Riley, 1989, p. 237). Other errors in communication, such as nonlinguistic errors, occur as a result of misinterpreting non-verbal cues (Riley, 1989) will not have value in chatroom speak.

SEMIOTICS

THIS SECTION IN PROGRESS

Theorists/writers: Daniel Chandler (1995-1999),

Daniel Chandler divides oral and written text into two categories giving a list of differences: Here I will seek to link speech-act and reading/writing theory together as it is in chatroom dialogue.

Spoken Word	*Written Word*
aural	visual
impermanence	permanence
fluid	fixed
rhythmic	ordered
subjective	objective
inaccurate	quantifying
resonant	abstract
time	space
present	timeless
participatory	detached
communal	individual

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Linguistics (to establish a chatroom linguistics)

diachronic (historical - comparative/philology)

synchronic

structural (syntax and phonology) your work has elements of each?

Linguistic schools of thought

a. Functional sentence perspective (FSP)- - analyses utterances in terms of their information content - The semantic contribution of each major element in a sentence is rated with respect to the dynamic role it plays in communication.

FSP is a theory of Linguistic analysis associated with the modern exponents of the Prague School of linguistics. It refers to analysis of utterances (or texts) in terms of the information they contain, the role of each utterance part being evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole. The notion of communicative dynamism has been developed as an attempt to rate these different levels of contribution within a structure, particularly with reference to the concepts of RHEME and THEME. See also Halliday

b. Dependency grammar - Explains grammatical relationships by setting up dependencies (or valencies) between the elements of a construction.

***>> Syntactic structure - is represented using dependency trees - sets of NODES whose interconnections specify structural relations. Every tree contains a governor and a set of dependents, each of which bears a specific relation to the governor.

c. Tagmemics - focuses particularly on the need to relate linguistic form and function.

d. Stratificational grammar - views language as a system of related layers (strata) of structure.

e. Systemic linguistics - grammar is seen as a network of systems of interrelated contrasts; particular attention is paid to the semantic and pragmatic aspects of analysis and also to the way intonation is used in the expression of meaning.

Information structure of messages: THEME vs. RHEME (RHEMATIC)

re. analysis of the information structure of messages

RHEME (RHEMATIC) - The part of a sentence which adds most to the advancing process of communication (it has the highest degree of communicative dynamism) - it expresses the largest amount of extra meaning, in addition to what has already been communicated.

THEME (themat-ic, -ization) - by contrast carries the lowest degree of communicative dynamism. The theme is the part of a sentence which adds least to the advancing process of communication - it expresses relatively little (or no) extra meaning, in addition to what has already been communicated.

COMMUNICATIVE DYNAMISM - an utterance is seen as a process of gradually unfolding meaning, each part of the utterance contributing variously (dynamically) to the total communicative effect.

Some parts of an utterance will contribute little to the meaning, because they reflect only what has already been communicated: these thematic aspects would be considered to have the lowest degree of CD. By contrast, rhematic aspects have the highest degree of CD, containing new information which advance the communicative process.

Bakhtin, M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by V. W. McGee. May be useful: spell out How.

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B. FIELD LITERATURE and CURRENT RESEARCH

Chatroom and Internet literature:

Daniel Chandler (1995-1999), Anna Cicognani (1996-1999), George P. Landow (1987 -1999), Mark Poster (1988 -1999), Howard Rheingold (1985-1994), Sherry Turkle (1995-1999).

George P. Landow has published a substantial amount of work on hypertext, both on the Internet (http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow) and in hardcopy, as well as being involved with the hypertextual publishing company, Eastgate (http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc).

Landow speaks of the "paradigm shift" from print to electronic writing. (1992) He builds upon earlier writers: Barthes, Foucault, Bakhtin, and Derrida in his discussion of this "shift". Landow's work is in hypertext and how blocks of text are linked. As with Kristeva, I am interested in how and how far this theorisation relates to the structuring of the "talk-text" of Internet chat.

I will also apply the work of Daniel Chandler (http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc) to my study. Chandler teaches courses on semiotics on-line and at the University of Wales. His study of codes (textual codes and social codes) as iconic signs links well with the codes of Interactive texts within the Internet environment, and provides a means of re-contextualising my study within socio-cultural contexts.

Earlier writers important to the evolution of hypertext study are Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault, Theodore Nelson, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Barthes and Foucault were early users of terms such as link (liaison), web (toile), network (reseau) and interwoven (s'y tissent), all of which contributed to understanding of hypertextuality (Landow, 1992. p. 8). In general I am tracing the development of moves found in what is called "active" reading, and "intertextual" or culturally-embedded text, both of which are focused in the contemporary study of discourse. Cite Fairclough 1989/92/95.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) uses the term heteroglossia (Emerson & Holquist 1981) to describe the inscription of multiple voices engaging in dialogue within the text. Paul Taylor (1992) points out that, "heteroglossia focuses on the production of meaning through dialogue except that heteroglossia avoids the emphasis on (narrowly defined) consensus and explicitly celebrates diversity" (p. 138).

Hypertext as heteroglossia, then, is the collaborative mode which avoids a totalizing movement toward consensus; heteroglossia instead validates the diversity of values and voices that are produced by the variety of individuals. Yes – how does this help your analysis?

In interactive Internet "speaking", especially through chatrooms and Instant Messenger, Bakhtin's concept of the utterance builds upon the work already done in Conversational Analysis. Bakhtin identifies "utterance" as the primary building block of dialogue; utterance is to dialogue what lexia is to hypertext. These utterances provide an interpersonal verbal ritual that is a basis of communication. (Goffman 1971: 62-94) and Goffman 1981: 5-24). Without more than one utterance there can be no dialogue for, as Michael Holquist (1990) argues, every "utterance is always an answer to another utterance that precedes it, and is therefore always conditioned by, and in turn qualifies, the prior utterance to a greater or lesser degree (p. 60)"

(See http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/features/eyman/bakhtin.html).

It is this sense of multi-connectedness my work seeks in IRC/IM talk.

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Methodology in cyberspace is different from any other environment. Sherry Turkle writes, "Virtual reality poses a new methodological challenge for the researcher: what to make of on-line interviews and indeed, whether and how to use them" (Turkle, 1995, p.34), quoted by Hamman (1966). Researching within virtual communities one must embrace a multi-disciplinary approach, why? as I have shown in the number of theoretical models I am using in this thesis. My own proposal however creates specific theoretical and methodological "focus points "within this multidisciplinary, and establishes a new direction for such study. – develop

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Methodology in cyberspace is different from any other environment. Sherry Turkle writes, "Virtual reality poses a new methodological challenge for the researcher: what to make of on-line interviews and indeed, whether and how to use them" (Turkle, 1995, p.34), quoted by Hamman (1966). Researching within virtual communities one must embrace a multi-disciplinary approach, as I have shown in the number of theoretical models I am using in this thesis. My own proposal however creates specific theoretical and methodological "focus points "within this multidisciplinary, and establishes a new direction for such study.

My exploration of the use of such "natural" language will extend to how it is constructed within chatrooms, Instant Messenger, and within discussion groups environment. Eggins and Slade in Analysing Casual Conversation, write:

"Interacting is not just a mechanical process of taking turns at producing sounds and words. Interacting is a semantic activity, a process of making meanings" (p.6).

It will be in the analysing of text on-line that I hope to find and describe a new process of meaning making in participants' conversation. The main differences I have hypothesized at the start of this study are that discussion groups are not as casual as IM or chatroom conversation. In discussion groups people usually take more time and care with what they write. They may use a spell/grammar check, and think before posting their text. There is a textual format with discussion groups. Instant Messenger and chatrooms appear at first sight to be less disciplined and more varied. But CA analysis has already showed this is not the case in casual conversation. My research suggests that there are similar, contextual forms at work in on-line chat, and that any differences my analysis can establish will be more a matter of degree than of essence.

There are positive and negative aspects of doing analytical research in cyberspace. The most difficult aspect is the inability to do follow-up work with participants in chatrooms. Unless the person is identified and their e-mail address is noted so that they can be tracked within chatrooms they become lost to the researcher.

People in cyberspace often change their name for use in other chatrooms, and sometimes within the chatroom they will change their name. For example, in an academic chatroom where there is scholarly discussion about an issue a person may log in as 'laProf'. In a sex-chatroom, the same person may be 'lovelylegs'. In a political chatroom the person may choose to be 'senator'. One's character is only part of one's on-line repertoire. A person can be a feather, fire hydrant, cloud or a riverbank. How the person's 'speaking' persona changes in different chatrooms is an area I intend to explore. In the meantime, my research will foreground some of the ways in which such changes might be described and identified. Summing this up, Robin B. Hamman in his MA Dissertation (1996) writes;

The multiple selves that users of on-line chat rooms experiment with on-line are part of a whole self. Experimentation with these Selves is possible, at present, only within the narrow-bandwidth space on on-line chat rooms. People become Cyborgs when two boundaries become problematic, 1) the boundary between animal and human and, 2) the boundary between humans and machine. http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/home.html Do you intend to develop the “CYBORG” idea? Is it just another metaphor for SYSTEM versus individual/moment, which linguistics identifies?

The indication is clear: on-line "cyborg identity" involves deliberative production of persona via performed interactive talk-text. It is this talk-text, already deployed by thousands, which I aim to analyze.

`The most obvious positive in my proposal is the amount of material available. With millions of people on-line and thousands of chatrooms and discussion groups there is a wealth of material. At the same time, the size of the field indicates the growing cultural importance of on-line "talk-texting" activities, and the resultant need to establish means of analysis. As my study will be from an ethnographic linguistic position I will limit my study to those who are in the chatrooms and discussion groups within the zine, southernexpressway. I will also access Instant Messenger (IM) transcripts between people who have given permission for the use of their conversation.

Ethnography is defined as "the acts of both observing directly the behaviour of a social group and producing a written description thereof." (Marshall, 1994, 158). In this study I will observe, analyse and present the discourse of chatroom and discussion group cultures.

Notes:

Phonology study of the sound patterns that occur within languages. Some linguists include phonetics, the

study of the production and description of speech sounds, within the study of phonology.

Diachronic (historical) phonology examines and constructs theories about the changes and

modifications in speech sounds and sound systems over a period of time. For example, it is

concerned with the process by which the English words "sea" and "see," once pronounced with

different vowel sounds (as indicated by the spelling), have come to be pronounced alike today.

Synchronic (descriptive) phonology investigates sounds at a single stage in the development of

a language, to discover the sound patterns that can occur. For example, in English, nt and dm

can appear within or at the end of words ("rent," "admit") but not at the beginning.

ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

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