Theses.cz
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Filozofická fakulta
Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci
Bc. Nela Nevařilová
Abbreviation Methods in Chat
Communication
Doc. PhDr. Ludmila Veselovská , M.A., Dr. Olomouc 2010
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Ludmila Veselovská, M.A., for her help, stimulating suggestions and useful advice which helped me in writing this study.
Declaration of Originality
I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own and certify that any secondary material used has been acknowledged in the text and listed in the bibliography.
May 11, 2010
……………………………………
Contents
1 introduction 6
1.1 Chat communication and word-formation processes 6
1.2 Sources and Methods of the Research 7
1.2.1 My own corpus 7
1.2.2 The British National Corpus (BNC) 8
1.2.3 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) 9
2 Language of the Internet 10
2.1 Historical introduction 10
2.2 Language of the chat rooms 12
2.2.1 Specific language features of chat rooms 13
2.2.2 Formal features of chat language 19
2.2.3 Grammatical features 20
3 Word-formation processes 23
4 Combination of morphemes 26
4.1 Inflection vs. Derivation 26
4.1.1 Inflection 26
4.1.2 Derivation 28
4.1.3 Compounds 33
5 shortenings 37
5.1 Abbreviations 37
5.2 Clippings 41
5.2.1 Truncations 43
5.3 Blends 45
5.4 Numbers and letters 47
5.4.1 Logograms 48
5.4.2 Pictograms 49
6 Other ways of language economy 52
6.1 Omitted letters and nonstandard spellings 52
6.2 Punctuation 55
6.2.1 Apostrophes in the corpora 57
6.3 Capital letters 59
6.4 Pro-forms and Ellipsis 60
6.5 Grammatical correctness 63
Conclusion 65
SUMMARY 67
Works cited 70
LIST OF TABLES 72
appendices 73
introduction
1 Chat communication and word-formation processes
This study has been written to analyse the specific characteristics of the chat style on the Internet. I dealt with a similar topic in my bachelor thesis (presented at Tomas Bata University in Zlin in 2008) where I concentrated on formal features of the abbreviation process, the usage of abbreviations by different generations and some other word-formation processes typical for the chat language.
In this M.A. dissertation I am going discuss the same topic in substantially more detail complementing my original corpus of data with a large number of other examples taken from the Internet and other sources, too. My theoretical framework is more complex in this thesis, and I am going to present the data in more systematic and revealing way to propose a more complex view of the specific characteristics of the chat-room style. I will relate the formal characteristics of the style to the specific pragmatic situation, the nature of the communication that ranges between spoken and written language, and other factors, including the age of people involved.
In the first part of this chapter I am going to introduce the methods of research used in the following parts of the study. The next chapter includes some basic facts from the history of the Internet, chat rooms, and focuses on some features of chat language. The third part of this thesis introduces the word-formation processes in English. I will mention the topic only briefly to concentrate on two basic methods of word-formation: combination (of distinct morphemes) and abbreviation. In the former I will pay attention to derivation and compounding, in the latter I will demonstrate the shortening processes, e.g. abbreviations, blends and clippings.
The last part of my thesis is about other ways of language economy in the chat communication. I will demonstrate examples of the omitting of punctuation, the usage of capital letters and apostrophes, ellipsis and other non-sentence fragments, i.e. all the formal means which frequently serve as a way of language economy in the chat language. I will also consider the grammatical correctness of the messages.
Throughout the text I will illustrate all my claims and conclusions with a number of more or less typical examples. The examples in this study are taken from the corpus I collected myself, from the British National Corpus and from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. I am going to mention all these sources, their origin and characteristics in more detail in separate subsections of the following chapter.
2 Sources and Methods of the Research
This text has been written to give a study of the chat language with focus on typical features of the style. The word-formation processes and basic terms are explained in this study using examples from three main sources: my own corpus and two other corpora.
To get examples from real chat discussion I collected a corpus of my own consisting of approximately 10,000 words. This corpus is introduced in subsection 1.1.1, and the list of examples are given in the Appendix at the end of this thesis. To support the word-formation processes, which are not so frequent in the chat language, I complemented my data with more examples from the British National Corpus and from the Corpus of Contemporary American English.[1]
The majority of examples used in the following analysis are taken from my corpus (1.1.1. or Appendix), i.e. from the corpus based on the chat-room communication as it appears in (virtual) reality on the Internet. As for the BNC and COCA, I used those corpora above all when looking for the forms of the words and their potential to go through some shortening processes. The limited usage of BNC and COCA is caused by the fact that none of them comprise separate samples of chat discussions. On the other hand, shortenings are processes that do not happen in chat language only, but also in common language. And, I assumed that the process is plausibly non-distinct. This expectation was partially born out and I mention the similarities and distinctions in the following text.
1 My own corpus
In my bachelor thesis the research on the usage of abbreviations by different generations was done. I found out that the older generation does not use abbreviations as frequently as younger generations. The research in the previous study was done with 10,000 words. In this study I work with the part of the old corpus but the parts taken from the chat of older generations were compensated with the chat discussions of younger people. So now, the corpus consists only of discussions of younger generations and it consists also of 10,000 words, because this amount proved to be adequate for the research of the chat language.
The corpus was taken from two web pages. The first one is where I visited rooms for young people. The second part consists of conversations found at the International meeting place where I focused on rooms with English speaking people.
For practical reasons considering following analysis I divided my corpus into lines. Each line represents a speech of an individual person and also examples presented in this study are not only numbered but also marked with the number of the line from the chat discussion. This corpus is a part of this study and you may find it in the Appendix.
The ethical question about conversation between people and its downloading may arise. Their conversations are used only for my research and the content of their messages is not a subject of this research. Moreover, only the conversations, which were displayed on the main screen, were downloaded, and people who participate in chat discussions should take into consideration that their messages can be read by anyone.
Apart from analysing the examples taken from my own corpus, I supported the word-formation processes (which were not so frequent in the chat language) with the examples taken from two other corpora - BNC and COCA.
2 The British National Corpus (BNC)
The British National Corpus consists of a 100 million samples of written and spoken language. It is the monolingual corpus; it deals only with modern British English. For my research it is important when it was created. The BNC was created in the late twentieth century so I expected the presence of some abbreviations. It is especially good that it contains several varieties of language. It is divided into spoken and written part.
'The written part of the BNC (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. The spoken part (10%) consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations (recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way) and spoken language collected in different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins.' (Davies, 2010)
3 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was released in 2008 and it contains more than 400 million words. What seems to be the advantage of this corpus is that it is updated once or twice a year. Both corpora, BNC and COCA were created in the late 90´s when chat discussions were slowly appearing. It also contains an updated vocabulary that might be helpful and interesting when looking for abbreviations. Moreover it is written that COCA is the only corpus, which could be used for looking at current ongoing changes in language. COCA consists of written as well as spoken language of several different genres, e.g.: fiction, popular magazines, newspapers or academic texts.
Mark Davies (2010) on his website provides the comparison of several corpora. I would like to demonstrate the differences between BNC and COCA.
Table 1: Differences between BNC and COCA
|Features |COCA |BNC |
|Availability |Free/web |Free/web |
|Size (millions of words) |400 |100 |
|Time span |1990-2009 |1970´s - 1993 |
|Number of words of text being added each year |20 million |0 |
|Can be used as a monitor corpus to see ongoing changes in English |Yes |No |
|Dialect |American |British |
|Wide range of genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazine, newspaper, academic |Yes |Yes |
()
Davies also says that COCA is the only corpus, which could be used to study ongoing changes happening in the language. “The Corpus of American English was designed from the ground up as a "monitor corpus" (a corpus that allows us to look at changes over time)”. The author mentions several examples of data from the corpus relating to ongoing changes in English and I will be especially interested in lexical, morphological and syntactic changes.
Language of the Internet
New ways of communication has been developed with the invention of new technologies. The development and frequent usage of chat discussions or texting resulted in some specific changes in the language, as we knew it. The texting or writing has to be as space economic as possible because each letter has to be paid for, the process of writing is not easy and people like to respond to messages fast. This study will examine some of the general characteristics of the chat-room language, i.e. of the language used on the Internet. It will provide some general facts from the history of the Internet and chat communication. Then, it will examine several word-formation processes operating in this style in English texts and give numerous examples to support the claim about some specific characteristics of this new style. I will focus especially on word formation, abbreviation and other ways of language economy.
1 Historical introduction
At first I will briefly describe the history of the Internet and chat programs. Then I will look more closely at the language of the Internet from the point of view of stylistics. Finally, I will introduce some formal and grammatical features of the chat language.
English is considered to be a Global language and we may definitely say that it is the language that rules the Internet. Most of the articles and programs available on the Internet are in English and the rest is usually at least translated into English. Why English?
Kate Burridge in her book Blooming English (2004) describes why English is so widely used. It is claimed by some people that English has an easy grammar system, but this is not exactly the truth. If we have a look at English grammar books they contain hundreds of pages. So English definitely does not have less grammar than any other language. Other people claim that English is so widely spread because of its vocabulary. There are many borrowings from different languages in English and therefore it may seem familiar to other non-native speakers of English. But none of these reasons is the cause of English being considered to be a Global language. As Burridge says, English became a Global language because of the power of its people. It includes political and military power. Economy and technology are other factors thats affected the spreading of English (3-8).
The Internet has appeared together with new technologies. The Internet was invented to serve as a tool to create a critical mass of intellectual resources. In 1969 researchers started working on the network and since 1980´s the first Internet has been introduced to us (Gromov). It has completely changed our lives in several ways. Not only do we have access to information of all kinds, we can also easily communicate with our friends, family or business partners via e-mail, chat communications or other communication programs.
As Crystal (2002) points out the invention of printing and new technologies have significant impact on our written as well as spoken language. Our written communication has changed a lot, from letters to e-mails and chat discussions. In spoken communication our vocabulary is enriched with the arrival of new technologies, for example with the invention of the telephone we had to change our language to fit this purpose, we had to adopt new phrases and so it is also with radio and television (128).
'At the beginning of the twenty-first century we are entering a further stage in the technologically motivated expansion of the linguistic resources of English, and this stage is likely to be more dramatic in its outcome than anything we have seen hitherto.' (Crystal 2002: 128).
Crystal (2002) calls the language of the Internet a Netspeak and he mentions five communicative situations that comprise the Internet - E-mail, The World Wide Web, a synchronous chat-group, an asynchronous chat-group and virtual worlds (128).
This study is focused on chatgroups. Chat programs also known as IRC or Internet Relay Chat was developed in the 1980´s. Even before the invention of the Internet there was a real time chat program that allowed users to communicate. It was possible to send messages between two users at the same time. Internet Relay Chat was created in 1988 by Jarkko “Wiz” Oikarinen (Cherry-Shearer).
There is a great variety of chat communication nowadays. You can enter a chat room or you can use other communication programs such as Skype, ICQ, Messenger etc. There are several functions of chat communication, you use it to communicate with your business partners, you can talk to your friends or family or you can look for a partner.
As I mentioned before I am going to focus on the language of chat rooms, especially synchronous ones but since they are part of the Internet, some of their characteristics may be applied to other forms of Internet communication. In the following part the features of the chat language will be described.
2 Language of the chat rooms
Chat communications have become widely known, and used as a means of communication among students or companies; they serve as communities in which a special kind of language was created. In the following chapters I will describe the specific language, formal and grammatical features of the chat language.
At first I would like to classify the chat language from the point of view of stylistics. The chat language may be considered to be a written language, but it also has some features which are typical for a spoken language. These features of a spoken language will be included in the following chapter about specific language features of chat discussion (2.2.1).
Ludmila Urbanová and Andrew Oakland (2002) characterize written language as more condensed and more closed. When we write, we try to be as brief and space economic as possible. It is not only because of the lack of the space but also because in English it is typical to be concise and humorous. For the English language it is typical to be compact and condensed. We might find a lot of infinitives, gerunds, past participles in the written language (31). The following examples show how English can be condensed.
Examples:[2]
[1] 790. d_berserk: back..been reading though.what's up with this science bs?
[2] 791. d_berserk: change the subject
[3] 800. CougarOn: is probably afraid to say it, lenny
[4] 823. odysa: u know your mythology i see [pic]
[5] 875. odysa: good ..blocked that idiot
In [1] you can see the past participle and the whole sentence is without a subject. This is quite typical for chat discussions to see the sentences without subjects; the chat users use their nicknames at the beginning of a line instead of subjects. In [2] the user wanted to say something like I would like to change the subject, but this construction would be too long and maybe also too polite for chat language. In [3] the personal pronoun is omitted and without context it may be ambiguous, we may not be sure who is the subject of the clause. In [4] some connection between two clauses is missing. Example [5] shows only an adjective in the first clause and again the pronoun is missing. The clause without shortenings might look like this: It is/was good that you blocked that idiot. All these structures make English more condensed.
In this part the general characteristics of the chat language were mentioned. In the following part the specific features of chat language will be examined.
1 Specific language features of chat rooms
I have introduced the history of chats and chat rooms in earlier chapters. In this section I shall look upon the specific language features of chat rooms.
The Internet allows people to communicate with each other in chat rooms. In this study I am examining the synchronous chat rooms in which people sent messages in real time.
Chat-groups involve discussions of several people, which cause radical linguistic innovations, changes in language as it has been discussed in earlier chapters. People in chats are from different countries and different backgrounds. They write in different styles and use different dialects, abbreviations or slang (Crystal 2004: 129-130).
However, chat groups serve as communities in which people tend to speak the same language; they imitate each other because they want to be a part of the community. Crystal (2009) in his book about text messages identifies six main kinds of distinctive features of this kind of language. They can be applied also to the language of chat rooms because it works at the same principles. He also points out that none of them are in fact linguistically novel (37).
In this chapter I shall look more closely at the chat language with characteristics of the spoken language. I will focus also, on pictograms and logograms as a frequent feature of the chat language. Examples of non-standard spellings and omitted letters will be given and beside these and abbreviations as a common feature will be mentioned. Some of these features will be studied further in chapter four and five. The former is about abbreviation processes, the later describes other ways of language economy used in chat language.
Chat language with features of a spoken language
In the previous lines it was stated that the chat language has features of written language. However, if we examine the chat language we may find also the features of a spoken language.
We feel that chat communication does not belong to the written language completely; it is affected by spoken language, even though it is not a perfect example of the spoken language. The spoken language mainly uses sound and paralinguistic means of communication. Sound means include stress, rhythm and intonation. Paralinguistic means including our body language, gestures, laughter and other nonverbal conversational behavior. The main function of these means is to show emotions (Urbanová, Oakland 2002: 9-11). You may argue that it is not possible to express these feelings in written chat language. Chat users have invented completely new ways how to show, or indicate their emotions. They may exaggerate punctuation marks, repeat the letters, alter capitalization and spacing or add some symbols (Crystal 2002: 131). The following are the examples of expressing emotions in chat discussions.
Examples:
[6] 205. marlboro_gold_uk winks at diamondjane87 *wink*WINK*wink*
[7] 356. Buffy82 [pic] plz note folks that six_pack id dyin for a help
n will help n will help nefin, male or female [pic]lmao [pic]
[8] 393. six_pack DoNt WoRRy lil_latina I CaN sEe YeA HaViN A PeRvE [pic]& DoNt 4GeT
Ma LoGgIe On YeAwAy OuT FaNkOs [pic]
This way of showing emotions in chat discussions is typical for chat rooms. Not only the text differs from the rest but it also somehow expresses or at least tries to express emotions. Capitalization in [7] enables the text to be seen well on the screen. In [8] the user went even further, he used capital and small letters in turns. It must have been difficult to write it like that but I am not sure about the effect. This part is difficult to read but at least it catches our attention.
Chat users were so inventive that they found a way how to convey also semiotic properties which add so much meaning to face-to-face conversation. They came up with emoticons and smileys. There may not be an ideal way how to show your emotions but they try to do it at least. Most of the chat messages contain some kind of emoticon or classic smileys such as :-) or :-( and, most of these were replaced by their graphic counterparts. You can see them in the examples [7] and [8]. Another way to show emotions is to write them, such as in example [6].
As the examples have shown, it is by no means clear that emoticons and smileys have important function in the chat language. They are one of the means to show emotions which is not often easy in written communication.
Pictograms and logograms
Among the most noticeable features of the language of chat rooms belong the usage of single letters or numerals and typographic symbols to represent words or parts of the words (Crystal 2009: 37). The following examples show the usage of letters and numbers instead of the whole words or phrases.
Examples:
[9] 178. wizzhmm: any1 for a chat here?
[10] 233. HotRugbyStar: thats good so wat ru up 2 gogogal ?
[11] 453. shanshan01: i g2g now bye bye
[12] 1054. B-RENT: Bsb4ever?
In the examples [9] and [12] the number replaces a part of the word (anyone and forever). In the examples [10] and [11] numbers replace the preposition (to). This type of shortenings will be described in details in the chapter 5.4.
Crystal (2009) points out that pictograms and logograms are not really new in the language. There is a connection between them and Egyptian writing called rebus. “A rebus is a message which, in its original definition, consists entirely of pictures that are used to represent the sounds of words, rather than the objects they refer to” (39). According to Crystal (2009) they are a part of the European linguistic tradition and some linguistic innovators may create abbreviations without being aware of the tradition (41).
Some people might be afraid that the usage of pictograms and logograms in texting language or the language of the Internet may replace the traditional language and that they will not be able to understand it. As we can see this language, innovations happened in the history and people survived with them so we do not have to be afraid of these changes.
Omitted letters
Another feature wildly found in chat language consists of words in which some letters are omitted. This group includes clippings or contractions. The following examples serve only as an introduction to this topic and I shall look more closely at omitting letters and nonstandard spellings in chapter 6.1., which gives detailed studies of this shortening process.
Examples:
[13] 19. princess.leigha [pic]ffs are all the barnsley/donny/rotherham/inbetweeny ppl
coming out to play now or summat [pic][pic]
[14] 42. scottish_soldier25: at the wk end im afraid diamondjane87
[15] 48. love-u-2: Hiya anyone wanna cht with a nice guy 22 from rotherham
In these examples we can see that the omitted letters were almost always vowels. It is simple. If we omit vowels the word is still understandable, as in [13] ppl (people) or in [15] cht means chat. In [14] it is interesting that the vowels were omitted only in the first part of the word (wk end- weekend). It depends on people if they decide to omit some letters and how much “economic” in writing they are. It is also clear why this process does not happen with consonants. If we take for example word weekend and omit all consonants we have eee left and I am sure that nobody will know what eee means.
Again, this kind of shortening of words has its antecedent as well. Crystal (2009) gives us examples such as Mr and Mrs, names of ranks (Sgt, Lt), standard abbreviations for weights and measures (kg, cm, ft) or some common abbreviation as dept (department) or advt- advertisement (46). “Looking through an old dictionary brings to light the interesting point that fashions in abbreviation change” (Crystal 2009: 47).
Different times and different places bring new types of abbreviations, as we can see in the chat rooms where new words are abbreviated. These words are usually common, frequently used words; they were shortened to save the user some time in writing.
A detailed study on omitting of letters is in chapter 6.1.
Nonstandard spellings
Chatting in synchronous chat groups requires fast responses. You must write fast and this is the main reason why it is common to find nonstandard spellings in chat language.
People do it unintentionally but most of them like playing with language and creating new words. Some of them are quite interesting because they were used in the past times as well. Wot was used after the Second World War, when the watcher Chad began to peer over walls, and we learned the catch-phrase Wot, no - ? (Crystal 2009: 49). The following are the examples of users´ creativity and play with words.
Examples:
[16] 15.[pic]diamondjane87: woop woop scottish_soldier25 lol. wen r u back?
[17] 67. therealkevincrosbie [pic]yeah u keep tellin yaself that diamondjane87 lol[pic]
[18] 100. scottish_soldier25: hiya joanne1989 howz u tonite?
[19] 108. diamondjane87: u probably wud
[20] 383. six_pack [pic]omfg Buffy82 get yea fánny out of ma face
its all wet [pic]lmfao[pic]
Most of these changes are connected with the pronunciation of words. In [16] the word wen is pronounced without h so the speaker used its written form also without h. Other words with nonstandard spellings such as yaself, howz, tonite or wud from the examples above are written according to their pronunciation. The last example [20] is a bit different. It reminds us some slang variety of English.
This kind of shortening is described and illustrated with more examples in chapter 6.1 about non-standard spellings and omitting of letters.
Abbreviations
The most common feature of the chat language is abbreviating. What is interesting is that abbreviations differ from room to room. They are usually shared by a group of people and sometimes, they are understood only by the members of the group. Crystal (2009) compares abbreviations to the slang. “Some texting expressions are exactly like slang. And “the chief use of slang”, as the old jingle goes, “is to show that you´re one of the gang” (56).
People want to belong to some community and moreover they want to participate and be seen in this community. That is probably the reason why they play with the language and try to be creative, and innovative about words (Crystal 2009: 57). One well established categorization of abbreviations is that they can be divided into Initials and Acronyms. In the following chapter (5) I will illustrate the general differences between these two terms, Detailed study will be in chapter 5.1.
Initials and Acronyms
Initials are words formed from letters of the words it represents; they are often called acronyms (Cambridge Encyclopedia). It is not anything new in the language, people have initialed words for centuries. The basic difference between initials and acronyms is that acronym is read as individual letters, but the aim of this small chapter is not to distinguish between these two categories.
In my bachelor study I was examining the usage of abbreviations by different generations and the result showed that abbreviations are used most frequently by younger people, while older generation is not so familiar with them. Moreover I made survey for the most frequent abbreviation and I found out that it was lol. The same research about frequency of abbreviations was done in this study (see chapter 5 .1).
The following examples were taken from my corpus (see chapter 1.1.1 or Appendix) and they show the usage of abbreviations.
Examples:
[21] 10. babyboyish: any sweet curvy lady in here for a chat.pm me
[22] 1. Damien_Myers: ffs
[23] 15. diamondjane87: woop woop scottish_soldier25 lol. wen r u back?
[24] 64. fsprite: any ladies want to chat to 25 m uk ? new pics on profile.... pm me
[25] 275. Buffy82: wot six_pack u know u love it really [pic]lmao
People very often abbreviate or create initials from words or phrases which are used repeatedly. The main reason why they are created is probably to spend some time in writing. They serve as some kind of a code of a chat room. If you are not a chat user it might be difficult for you to understand abbreviation pm as in [21]. If you chat regularly you are familiar with “netspeak” and you understand these abbreviations. In [24] there are abbreviations m and uk which are common in English language and you may come across them in your daily routine. Abbreviations in examples [22], [23] and [25] are used mainly in chat discussions but I think they are now spreading also in other forms of written communication, for example into e-mails or text messages.
Are initials and acronyms really new? The Latin initials pm (post meridiem) were firstly recorded in English in 1666, in the nineteenth century several abbreviations were created and used, for example RIP (rest in peace) or ND (no date). Later on abbreviations such as ASAP -as soon as possible, FYI -for your information or MD- managing director were created and used (Crystal 2009: 43).
The usage of initials and acronyms is also closely bound to some areas. For example VGC- very good condition- used in antiquarianism, ERA- earned run average- used in baseball or NNE- north-north east- used in geography (Crystal 2009: 44).
In chapter 5.1 you may see practical studies of abbreviations. You will find there also the study of abbreviations in BNC and COCA.
In an earlier chapter I mentioned some of the specific language features of the chat language. In the following section I shall look upon some of the formal features of chat language.
2 Formal features of chat language
In the earlier chapters I classified the chat language as a written language with several features of a spoken language. In this section I will illustrate some formal features of chat language. Chat conversation as a form of written language has several specific formal features. One of them is nick-initiated lineation (see following examples).
Examples:
[26] [pic]Damien_Myers: ffs
[27] [pic]dodzdadon: princess.leigha wat du u do, study,work..?
[28] [pic]neliste: hi
Each line is introduced with the nickname of the user. It would be interesting to focus on the nicknames themselves, so if you are interested you may see chapter 5.2.1 dedicated to the nicknames and the process called truncation.
Another feature is system messages. They are not sent by the users but by the people responsible for the server providing chat services. They serve as informative messages; some of them may be in a function of advertisement. The following examples show some types of system messages.
| |[29] 118. The Sun tells you: EXCLUSIVE - KELLY Brook has split from fiancé Billy |
[30] 450. Captain tells you: Sorry neliste, but I`ve never heard of that command
/redhed26 on the Chat.
[31] 455. Captain tells you: Howdi neliste [pic]CONGRATULATIONS!! You`ve made
the rank of Passenger Level 2. This means that you can now use your first
ChatCommand!! Click HERE if you wish to learn how to do [pic]
[32] 530. This is a CLEAN, English-only room without bad word filtering.
Things that are not allowed: Spamming, advertising, bullying and fighting.
[33] Keep it classy - Wireclub is a clean community - if you just want to cyber, get a
private room!
The example [29] serves as an advertisement in chat discussions. It was even complemented with the picture showing the logo of the magazine. The examples [30] and [31] are seen only by individual users and they have informative function. In [32] we can see a message that is shown when you enter a chat room. It has an informative function and it tells you what is allowed or not in a chat room. The example [33] has both functions, it is informative and it advertises Wireclub as a classy chat discussion server.
System messages are especially useful for new chat users, they provide them with necessary information and lead them how to participate in chat discussion. For users who attend chat rooms often system messages might be a bit irritating.
3 Grammatical features
In the previous sections I mentioned some of the language as well as formal features of the chat language. Having indicated chat language as written form with some features of spoken language I will now introduce some differences between the chat language and typical written communication. Some of them deserve more attention and will be described in another chapter.
Chat language differs from other written communication in several respects.
“The use of non-standard formations, jargon, and slang varies from group to group; all synchronous chatgroups rely heavily upon such processes, presumably as a mechanism of affirming group identity” (Crystal 2004: 165)
The first feature may be Elliptical constructions. Ellipsis which is typical for a spoken language found its way also in the language of chat rooms. Quirk et al. (1985) includes ellipsis into the group called “Irregular sentences”. They define them as “fragmentary, lacking constituents that are normally obligatory. The ellipsis may be recoverable from the linguistic form of the sentence or from the preceding linguistic context” (838). There are also several other “non-sentences” as Quirk et al. (1985) call them in the language of chat rooms, they will be described in details in chapter 6.4 about Pro-forms and ellipsis. Chat language consists not only of elliptical constructions but it is very often the verb that is missing. The following part gives the examples of non-finite and verb-less clauses found in my corpus.
Non-finite and verb-less clauses
To distinguish verb-less clauses I will use the classification of Veselovska (2006) which is based on the category/part of speech of a head. (114).
Table 2: Types of verb-less clauses and examples from my corpus
|Type of verb-less clause |Example from my corpus |
|Nominal |[34] 492. penfold1st: afternoon all |
|Adjectival |[35] 519. ILP: lol just honest |
|Adverbial |[36] 523. ILP: very! |
|Interjections |[37] 512. d_berserk: ouch |
|Wh-interrogatives |[38] 399. Kel20: oh yeah was good thanks, how about yours? |
|Wh+noun/adjective |[39] 723. Bѻsѕ_Ladʏ: What a fucking waste of time! |
|Infinitivals |[40] 470. Rosielips: just trying to get use to this again |
|Verbless predication |[41] 10. babyboyish: any sweet curvy lady in here for a chat |
All these examples are verb-less or the verb is in non-finite form (example [40]). Adverbial very in [36] serves as an approval or disapproval to some preceding question or statement. Interjection ouch in [37] serves as a reaction to something; to show feelings. How about in [38] is a typical beginning of a question or suggestion to do something. In [39] there is a statement or an expletive sentence. Ellipsis and pro-forms are quite frequent in chat language. They serve as a means of reduction at the level of a sentence. In most cases they do not make ambiguities and the sentences remain understandable.
This chapter introduced general features of chat discussions. The features were divided into three parts. Language features consist of characteristics of chat language as a spoken language, pictograms and logograms, omitted letters, non-standard spellings and abbreviations. Formal features include categories such as nick-initiated lineation and formal messages. The last group introduced ellipsis and pro-forms as means of language economy. Examples of verb-less clauses were also mentioned. The following chapter will introduce word-formation processes operating in English and those which are connected with the chat language, will be described in details in the next two chapters.
Word-formation processes
This chapter is going to describe in general word formation processes working in English. Some of the word formation processes, which are involved in the language of chat discussions, will be described in detail in the following chapters. Chapter 4 will consist of word-formation processes in which morphemes are combined. As opposed to chapter 5, that contains the word-formation processes in which morphemes are shortened.
Before I begin with a description of word-formation processes I would like to define the term “word”. There are several definitions of a word. Ingo Plag in the book Word Formation in English (2002) defines “word” as a “linguistic unit which deserves some attention” (4). She uses the definition of a word as an orthographic word, which means that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters, which is preceded by a blank space and followed by a blank space or a punctuation mark. She also knows that there are several objections to this definition. Generally, according to Plag (2002), words can be defined in four different ways: in terms of sound structure, in terms of its internal integrity, in terms of meaning and in terms of sentence structure (4).
In this study I will be especially interested in words from phonological point of view and in their syntactic functions.
As Crystal says in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language (1995) there is an important balance between the stock of native words and the great amount of foreign borrowings into English over the centuries. Word formation processes play an important role in English vocabulary growth (119).
According to Stockwell and Minkova (2001) we can count about ten main sources of words in English. These are inheritance, derivation, blending, compounding, conversion, creative imagination, initials, shortenings, using names as ordinary words and some very rare echoic processes (3).
This listing may seem confusing so I will use the classification of Veselovska who divides word-formation processes into three main groups (borrowings, combination of morphemes and shortenings). In this study I will focus on word formation processes which are somehow connected with the language of chat discussions. The word-formation processes in which morphemes are combined will be examined in chapter four. Chapter five will illustrate word-formation processes in which morphemes are shortened. Borrowings are not subject of this study.
To understand word formation processes we must be aware of what they really are and which words are subjects to them. Ingo Plag (2002) says that when talking about word formation processes we are dealing with morphologically complex words and complex words can be decomposed into their smallest meaningful units called morphemes. There are two types of morphemes. Free morphemes can occur on their own (12-13). Stockwell and Minkova (2001) use the term “roots” or “free root morphemes” for free morphemes. They define them as the centers of word-derivational processes. They carry the meaning and very often they are independent words (61).
For a better understanding I will give you some examples from my own corpus. Words such as picture, people, work, know, day are all free morphemes, they carry the meaning and they can exist on their own.
The second group of morphemes is bound morphemes. They can only occur if attached to some other morpheme. It depends on the position in which they are attached to the root, stem or base. They are then divided into prefixes, suffixes or infixes (Plag 2002: 12-13). Stockwell and Minkova (2001) include prefixes, suffixes and infixes into one group called affixes (61).
To support this theory I will use some examples from my own corpus.
Words with prefixes: disappear, underscore, ineffectively, illegal, unproven.
The common prefixes found in words in chat discussions are very often negative ones.
Words with suffixes: terrorist, madness, discussion, conviction, believer, reputation, attachment.
As opposed to free root morphemes affixes carry very little meaning; they serve to modify the meaning of the stem. Affixes can appear in two functions. In the first one they participate in word-formation processes; these affixes are called derivational. The second function of affixes that do not participate in word-formation, is called inflectional (Stockwell and Minkova 2001: 64-66). The differences and details will be described in chapter 4.1.
Another process connected with bound morphemes is the source of Compounds. If a bound root morpheme is attached to another morpheme which is also a root, the result is a compound (Stockwell and Minkova 2001: 62). This process with examples will be analyzed in chapter 4.1.3.
Shortening processes such as blending, conversion, initials and shortenings are the main subjects of this study and deserve more attention in their own chapter (see chapter 5).
Not only the processes mentioned in this chapter are the sources of English vocabulary there are also other sources of the large English lexicon which are worth mentioning. For example, source of the vocabulary which has become quite productive recently is Neologisms; the process of creating new words without basing them on some pre-existing words. According to Stockwell and Minkova (2001) this process happened when there was a need to name some new things or inventions (14). We may find several neologisms in the Netspeak, the language of the Internet. Chris Sherman in his article mentions some of the most popular and therefore frequent neologisms in the Netspeak. For example, the brand name “google” is now used by people as a generic word for searching (Sherman). From my own experience also the verb “to google” created from the well-known brand name is widely used as a generic verb for searching on the Internet. Chris Sherman mentions several other examples of neologisms such as “spamdexing” (spam + index), which refers to people who create garbage or deceptive pages. “Searchjacking” (search + hijack) is a variation, referring to people who attempt to fool search engines by using popular but unrelated keywords in their meta tags (Sherman).
Another source which expands the vocabulary is Echoic words. They can be divided generally into three groups. The first group includes imitative words such as oh! Ah! Ouch! The second group consists of words coined to sound like a noise made by some object or creature, such as bang, buzz, splash. The last group includes the words which sounds were suited to the meaning such as flip, flap, flash, snuff (Stockwell and Minkova 2001: 18). Echoic words are used in chat discussions quite often, they are used together with smileys and emoticons to show or express the emotions and they serve as a substitute for emotions and other feelings expressed normally in face to face communication (for more details see chapter 5.4.2 about Pictograms).
All the word formation processes are productive in English and most of them found their way into the language of chat discussions. I would like to demonstrate those that are seen and frequent in the chat language. At first I will look more closely at word-formation processes in which morphemes are combined to form new words or phrases, and then I will look upon the word-formation processes, which are subjects of shortenings.
Combination of morphemes
As it has been stated above, word-formation processes can be divided into three main groups. The borrowings and other less frequent word-formation processes were illustrated in the previous chapter. The following two chapters will focus on the word-formation processes that are more common and also more frequent in the chat language. In this chapter I shall look more closely upon the word-formation processes in which morphemes are combined to form larger units. I will begin with Inflection and Derivation, and then I will focus on Compounds.
1 Inflection vs. Derivation
In the following sections I will define both processes and I will state the differences between them. I will do a survey on the productivity of derivational and inflectional processes in chat discussions and I will also focus on the words, which are the products of inflection or derivation, and which were affected by shortening processes happening in the chat language.
1 Inflection
When we want to discuss Inflection or Derivation we are taking into consideration a complex word, which means words that are made up of two or more morphemes. But some complex words are not “new”, for example plural suffix –s in student-students does not create new lexemes (Plag 2002: 18). Carstairs-McCarthy (2002) introduces the idea that some words do not have to be listed in dictionaries, they are variants of a word that is more basic and its meaning is predictable (28). Booij (2005) defines the inflection as “the morphological marking of properties on a lexeme resulting in a number of forms for that lexeme, a set of grammatical words” (99).
We have two types of inflection- regular and irregular. Regular inflection includes for example suffix –s as the regular method of forming plurals. On the other hand, there are several nouns which plurals are irregular, for example tooth- teeth or child-children and this kind of irregularity requires the dictionary entry (Carstairs-McCarthy 2002: 31-33). To list all inflectional morphemes I will use the table created by Veselovska (2005: 13).
Table 3: List of English bound inflectional morphemes
|... |Category |Morpheme |Example |Meaning/Function |type |
|1. |N |-s |book-s |Number [plural] |optional |
|2. |N |´s |Mary´s |Case [saxon genitive] |configurational |
|3. |Pron |-s/-r |hi-s/ou-r |Case [possessive] |configurational |
|4. |Pron |-m |hi-m/who-m |Case [object] |configurational |
|5. |V |-s |he read-s |Agreement [3sgPres] |configurational |
|6. |V |-ed |stopp-ed |Tense [past] |optional |
|7. |V |-en |writt-en |Aspect [perfect] |optional |
|8. |V |-ing |read-ing |Aspect [progressive] |optional |
|9. |A |-er |small-er |Grading [comparative] |optional |
|10. |A |-est |small-est |Grading [superlative] |optional |
|11. |Num |-th |four-th |XXX? [ordinal] |?configurational |
When looking at chat language we do not expect any reductions in inflectional endings. To prove this I was looking for examples in my corpus of chat discussion. I will use the table by Veselovska (2005:13) to divide inflectional endings.
Table 4: Study of English bound inflectional morphemes
|Category |Morpheme |Example |Note |
|Noun |-s (for plurals) |Ladies, pics, pluses, newcomers, horizons, |*ladys, *trouser |
| | |citizens, habits, babies… | |
|Pronoun |-s,-r, -m |His, our, him, mine, him, my… | |
|Verbs |-ing,-s, -ed, -en |Enjoying, puts, called, has been… |Have gotten, rollin, doin, chillin, |
| | | |chattin, makin, havin, feelin |
|Adjectives |-er, -est |Higher, better, later, longer, sexier, the | |
| | |biggest, the smallest, the hottest… | |
There are not many oddities in words that were created by inflection. The thing which seems to be frequent in chat language is omitting of –g from the suffix –ing at the end of verbs in progressive form or gerunds. There was also one example typical for American English- have gotten. When looking for irregularities in forming the plural I found only two examples- ladys- as a plural for ladies and trouser- word which was probably misspelled. Surprisingly chat users tend to follow the grammatical and syntactic rules.
2 Derivation
Derivation as opposed to inflection is a process in which new words are made up by adding endings to more basic forms of the word. What does derivation has in common with inflection is, according to Plag (2002), “that significant number of derivations is not even treated by dictionaries as separate entries”. Stockwell and Minkova (2001) defines the basic principle of this “regular derivation” as: “if the new word can be fully comprehended given a knowledge of the meaning of the base and also of the endings, then it is not a new word and should not receive independent dictionary treatment, because just by knowing the parts you also know the whole” (11).
There are generally two types of derivations, derivation by affixation and derivation without affixation. For better orientation they will be described and complemented with examples in separate chapters.
1 Derivation by affixation
As it was mentioned in the introduction to the word-formation processes an affix is a bound morpheme that is attached to the base. Affixes can be generally divided into prefixes, suffixes and infixes- that are quite rare in English.
Plag (2002) gives us even more detailed classification of affixes. She says that “any given English suffix derives words of only one category, for example –ness only derives nouns, -able only adjectives and –ize only verbs. Prefixes are more problematic in this respect, because they not only attach to bases of different categories, but also often derive different categories” (108).
There are several classifications of affixes by different authors. For my analysis I will use the classification of Veselovska (2005). She gives some of the more frequent English suffixes and divides prefixes according to their origin into Germanic and Non-German, moreover she includes in her list some of the more frequent roots of Latin origin and some morphemes of Greek origin (131-140).
Prefixation and Sufixation
I divided prefixes, suffixes or roots into five groups according to their origin. I was interested in the presence of them in chat language. I did not include all the prefixes, suffixes or roots because it is not possible and it would deserve more attention in some other work. I chose only the most common and frequent ones. Also the examples are not complete, there were many more examples but I do not find it necessary to mention all of them.
Table 5: Prefixes, suffixes and roots according to their origin
|Origin |Prefix, suffix or root |Examples |
|Germanic |Un-, be-, for-, with-, out-, over- |Unpatriotic, unlike, unproven, without, within, *overated, |
| | |forget, |
|Non-Germanic |Ab-, ad-, bi-, con-, de-, en-, in- mis-, |Admit, advertising, aboard, abilities, absolutely, |
| |post-, trans- |congratulation, consider, confuse, deceit, demise, |
| | |deformation, enter, enact, mischievously, misspell, |
| | |*mispell, |
|English |-able, -age, -al, -en, -er, -ful, -ish, -ism,|Scottish, reputation, publication, conversation, madness, |
| |-ity, -ment, -ship |looser, judgement, statement, attachment, political, |
| | |informative, security, mythodology, |
|Latin |-aud-, -cap-, -clud-, -fin-, -id, -mem-, |Capable, finally, define, member, remember, nation, report,|
| |-nat-, -port-, -tend- |pretend |
|Greek |Auto-, hypo-, mono-, -phil-, pro- |Promote, promise |
As it is noticeable from the table, the prefixes, suffixes or roots of English and non-Germanic origin are the most frequent in words in chat language. There were only a very few examples of words with Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes or roots. Germanic prefixes, suffixes or roots are quite frequent in English language but they were not so frequently used in the language of chat discussions. There are also two examples which were misspelled (mispell and overated). This study deals with reductions of words and when we look at words with prefixes or suffixes there are no shortenings in words, at least which I noticed.
Infixation
As Plag (2002) says morphologists usually agree that there are no infixes in English. However, at least in spoken language we may find some words containing infixes. Infixes in these words serve to express strongly negative attitude of the speaker, for example words such as abso-blooming-lutely or the expression abso-bloody-lutely are frequently used these days (127).
With the invention of information technologies and the Internet itself the language also changed and several infixes were created. Burridge in her book Blooming English (2004) says that this sort of expressive infixing is widespread. She gives notice of several restrictions in the usage of infixes. They do not happen just anywhere in the word, they are put before a stressed syllable. She gives example of abso-bloody-lutely, which is fine, but if the word has only an initial stress it´s impossible to infix anywhere, such as criminal- *crim-bloody-inal- which just does not work (11). The number of syllables is also important in infixing. Infixing more likely happens in words of three or more syllables. There are also meaning restrictions to certain infixes. Burridge (2004) gives the example of the infix bastard; speakers might use tele-bastard-vision, but they will not use *fan-bastard-tastic. Burridge (2004) says that all these facts might look trivial and speaker are sometimes not completely aware of stress of syllable structure, but when infixing they follow the rules and they are sensitive to these things (11).
Words with infixes were not present in my corpus of chat discussions, but it is probably because the corpus was not large enough. To show some examples of infixes I will use BNC and COCA.
I decided to choose two infixes- “bloody” which is quite old infix and “fucking” which seems to be the new one. When talking about their “age” I mean the times when they were used, “bloody” was used some years ago while “fucking” seems to be used these days or not a long time ago. This was also proved by the corpora, because BNC, as it was mentioned at the beginning, comprises of older sources of texts while COCA is being updated and is newer. I searched both corpora for words which consist of infixes “bloody” and “fucking”, for this task I used the pattern *bloody* and *fucking*.
Table 6: Words with the infix “bloody”
|Words with infix *bloody* |BNC |COCA |
|abso-bloody-lutely | |1 |
|halle-bloody-lujah | |1 |
|un-bloody-real | |1 |
| not-bloody-likely |2 | |
|withstands-bloody-cold-ar |1 | |
|un-bloody-natural |1 | |
| serbo-bloody-croatian |1 | |
| in-bloody-buggering-deed |1 | |
| inter-bloody-fering |1 | |
| multi-bloody-storey |1 | |
| big-bloody-hearted |1 | |
| a-bloody-men |1 | |
As you can see in this table infix “bloody” was more frequent in BNC, which is older from the two corpora, in COCA it was not so frequent. The second table shows the exact opposite.
Table 7: Words with the infix “fucking”
|Words with infix *fucking* |BNC |COCA |
|so-fucking-what | |6 |
| un-fucking-believable |1 |6+3 |
|any-fucking-thing | |2 |
|fan-fucking-tastic | |2+2 |
| unbe-fucking-lievable | |2 |
|twenty-fucking-two | |1 |
|john-fucking-wayne | |1 |
| jesus-fucking-christ | |1+1 |
| i-don't-fucking-care | |1 |
|abso-fucking-lutely | |1+1 |
|paradise-fucking-lost | |1 |
|un-fucking-real |1 | |
| persona-non-fucking-grata |1 | |
The second table shows some of the words consisting of infix “fucking”. As you can see most of them appeared in COCA and only a few were present in BNC.
As my short research proved both corpora are useful when looking for words with infixes even though you must think about the trends in infixes and the age of corpora.
3 Derivation without affixation (Conversion)
To demonstrate this kind of derivation I will use the example from the book by Stockwell and Minkova (2001)
This is a major oversight.
She graduated with a major in geography.
She majored in geography.
In all these examples the same words appear in different functions. They look alike and they also sound alike. Conversion is a process in which a word is shifted from one word class to another one, for example nouns are converted into verbs. According to Stockwell and Minkova (2001) this process is very productive these days (12).
As I mentioned in the chapter about neologisms the language of the Internet is enriched by new words and some of these are also involved in the process of Conversion.
For example the verb to google is used as a general word for searching. It was converted from the brand name of the search engine (Google- which is a noun).
To sum up the main difference between Inflection and Derivation I will use the table by Plag (2002: 22).
Table 8: Differences between derivation and inflection
|Derivation |Inflection |
|Encodes lexical meaning |Encodes grammatical categories |
|Is not syntactically relevant |Is syntactically relevant |
|Can occur inside derivation |Occurs outside all derivation |
|Often changes the part of the speech |Does not change part of the speech |
|Is often semantically opaque |Is rarely semantic opaque |
|Is often restricted in its productivity |Is fully productive |
|Is not restricted to suffixation |Always suffixational (in English) |
3 Compounds
Another process which deserves more attention in this chapter is compounding. The word-formation process called Compounding is included in this chapter because it is a process in which morphemes are combined but it is also interesting from the point of view of Shortenings. Compounds are usually long words or phrases in which, because of the language economy in chat language, we expect some kind of shortening. In this part I will look upon the compound words in chat discussions from the point of view of their structure and their shortenings. The two processes which are generally connected with shortenings of compounds are blending and acronyms (discussed in details in chapter 5.3 and 5.1).
Booij (2005) says that compounding is the most frequent way of making new lexemes. Compounds are combinations of two or more words or to be more precise roots, in which one word modifies the meaning of the other (75). At this point it is important to introduce the term “head”. In syntax, phrases consist of minimally a head, and it is the syntactic category of the head that determines the category of the phrase. A phrase with an adjectival head is an Adjective Phrase, a phrase with a noun as head is Noun Phrase etc. (53). In English there is even the rule called Right-hand Head Rule (RHR), which means that head is on the right side of the word or phrase (Booij 2005: 54). Booij (2005) also divides compounds into endocentric and exocentric. The compound in the first group includes a head. The latter group, on the other hand, does not include a head. These are for example words like pickpocket or cut-throat- they lack a head (79).
Plag (2002) offers us the transparent structure of English compounds (175).
[XY]Y
X = root, word, phrase
Y = root, word
Y = grammatical properties inherited from Y
(Plag 175)
To explain the pattern above we may think for example about the compound a blackboard. According to the RHR the head is a board (symbol Y in the pattern), black is a left hand member whose general function is to modify. So a blackboard is a kind of a board and as a board is a noun in singular the whole compound inherited these grammatical properties (as shown in the pattern).
Carstairs-McCarthy draws the attention to the distinction between compounds and phrases; sometimes it is difficult to distinguish them. He gives an example of a green house and demonstrates this difference as its literal meaning and a meaning a glass structure, where plants are reared. His explanation is based on the stress. In phrases the stress is on the last word (green hóuse). In compounds such as greenhouse the stress is on the first element (gréenhouse). He supports his theory with one more fact. Compounds usually have the idiosyncratic or unpredictable meaning as opposed to the phrases (Carstairs-McCarthy 2002: 59-60). Both Carstairs-McCarthy (2002) and Plag (2002) divide compounds into several groups.
Table 9: Compounds according to Plag (185)
| |Noun (N) |Verb (V) |Adjective (A) |
|Noun |film society |brainwash |stone-deaf |
|Verb |pickpocket |stir-fry |- |
|Adjective |greenhouse |blindfold |light-green |
|Preposition |afterbirth |- |- |
As you can see in the table nouns, verbs and adjectives can be combined in a compounding process. Some of these combinations are very productive, but there are also some restrictions in some cases.
As I mentioned in the introductory to this part I examined the corpus from the point of view of compounds. I expected not many compounds present in the language of chat discussions and if they are there they must be somehow shortened, but the results are surprising. Generally, there was not a high number of compounds, but definitely they were not shortened. It would be interesting to have a look at their form- if they are hyphenated, separate words or as one word. At this point we expect that chat users write fast and they do not like to be hindered by hyphens. And this was true, the research proved that the vast majority of compounds were without hyphens and most of them appeared as one words. The following table shows some of the compound from the chat discussion and the forms in which they appeared.
Table 10: Research on compounds
|Common spelling |Hyphenated |Separate words |As one word |
|chat room | |chat room (529) |chatroom (636) |
|chat command | | |chatCommand (454) |
|work gloves |work-gloves (621) | | |
|crossdresser | |cross dresser (605) | |
|lawnmower man | | |lawnmowerman (1370) |
|Wireclub | |wire club (769) |wireclub (532) |
|chat world | | |chatworld (896) |
|haircut (noun) | |hair cut (1021) |haircut (1030) |
In the first column of the table there is the most common form, but it is usually not the only one which is possible. The next three columns consist of examples from my own corpus. I choose only the interesting examples of the compounds found in my corpus, usually that ones which appeared in a form which is not really typical for the individual compound. As you can see from the table chat users followed the language economy, they almost always omitted hyphens and most of the compound appeared as one words to save time not using the spacebar.
This chapter examined the word-formation processes in which morphemes were combined. At first it was Inflection and Derivation, which found their way into the language of chat discussions. The process of Infixation was complemented with the examples taken from BNC and COCA. Secondly it was Compounds, which were studied and as the research of corpus proved they were not so frequent in chat discussions.
The second group of word-formation processes, which will be more productive in chat language, includes shortenings. At first I will examine abbreviations, they will be divided into Acronyms and Initials, then I will look upon Clippings and the process called Truncation, then I will look closely at Blends and Numbers used in words or instead of words.
shortenings
In the previous chapter I worked with word-formation processes in which morphemes were combined. This chapter will examine the word-formation processes, which are connected with shortenings. At first abbreviations divided into Initials and Acronyms will be analyzed, the theory will be supported with the examples from my corpus as well as with examples from BNC and COCA. Secondly I will examine the process called Clipping with subsection dedicated to the process called Truncations. Again, both processes will be complemented with examples from my corpus and BNC and COCA. The next subchapter will be about Blends and because they are not so frequent in chat discussions the examples will be taken from BNC and COCA. The last process I will mention in this chapter will be about words combined with numbers or numbers used instead of whole words. This part will be divided into logograms and pictograms and will be supported with the examples from my corpus.
1 Abbreviations
The first type of shortening words, I would like to mention, is called Abbreviations. According to Plag (2002) they are similar in nature to blends, because both are amalgamations of parts of different words; both involve loss of material. They differ from truncation and blends in the fact that prosodic categories do not play a prominent role.
There are at least three terms used in the category of abbreviations- the word abbreviation itself, acronym and initials.
Abbreviations is a larger group which involves both- acronyms and initials. “Abbreviations are most commonly formed by taking initial letters of multiword sequences to make up a new word” (Plag 2002: 161). “A typical acronym takes the first sound from each of several words and makes a new word from those initial sounds” (Stockwell and Minkova 2001: 27). At this moment we have two similar definitions, but Initials differ from Acronyms in the way of pronunciation. “If the resulting word is pronounced like any other word it is a true acronym” (Stockwell and Minkova2001: 7). Plag (2002) comes with one more group of abbreviations. “Apart from words composed of initial letters, one can also find abbreviations that incorporate non-initial letters”. She gives examples such as BSc for Bachelor of Science or Inc. for Incorporated (Plag 2002:161).
Plag (2002) is also interested in the orthographic and phonological properties of abbreviations. According to her, abbreviations can be spelled in capital or in lower case letters. She summarizes the whole group of abbreviations in well-arranged table.
Table 11: Spelling and pronunciation of abbreviations
|Spelling |pronunciation |example |
|In capitals |As initials |CIA |
|In capitals |As acronym |NATO |
|In lower case letters |As initials |e.g. |
|In lower case letter |As acronym |radar |
Stockwell and Minkova (2001) include one more group among Abbreviations and these are Reverse Acronyms. It is the reverse process of creating words. It is very often used in business and advertisement. A company chooses its name in a form of an acronym and after this they start to think what the letters could mean. To show you this in practice I will use the examples of Stockwell and Minkova (2001). CARE is the acronym for Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe or AID means the Agency for International Development (9).
Initials and Acronyms became very popular and people use them because they are short and easy to remember.
I did research on the frequency of abbreviations and their structure and pronunciation.
I analysed my corpus of 10,000 words (see 1.1.1 or Appendix). I was looking for Initials and Acronyms. There were 237 Initials and Acronyms in my corpus, which is not much, but if we study a larger corpus it would be definitely a higher number. The number tells us that in my corpus there were 2.37 % of Initials and Acronyms.
I was also interested in the frequency of individual Initials and Acronyms (see Table 12) and finally I divided them into two groups according to their pronunciation (see Table 13).
Table 12: The most frequent Acronyms and Initials
[pic]
As you can see in the chart the most frequent Abbreviation (I will use the general term) is lol, which was mentioned 104 times in my corpus. People used it usually at the end of their message to show that they find something funny or they are not to serious about something. There are also other abbreviations connected with laughing, they are not as frequent as lol, but, they were often used by some people. These are lmao- laughing my ass off, lmfao-laughing my fucking ass off, rofl-rolling on the floor laughing.
Chat rooms are places where people very often look for partners, so the presence of abbreviations such as pm- for private message, m-male, f-female is not surprising.
Abbreviations such as uk, BBC and etc are common in everyday life and people used them in chat discussion as well. The last abbreviation, which needs to be clarified is omg- oh my God. This expression is used to show emotions, people use it when they are surprised or they do not believe in something.
Table 13: Acronyms and Initials
|Acronyms (read as one word) |Initials |
|lol (13) |ffs (1) |
|lmao (212) |pm (10) |
|rofl (265) |m (64) |
|lmfao (325) |uk (64) |
|omg (412) |ty (576) |
| |wb (360) |
| |asl (427) |
| |ok (507) |
| |BBC (726) |
| |Etc.(720) |
Most of the abbreviations present in my corpus may be considered to be Initials. But some of them may belong to the group called Acronyms, these are expressions that are used quite often and I think that they once belonged to Initials but with the rising frequency of their usage they moved to Acronyms and are now pronounced as one words. They also moved from the written language to the spoken one. They, are often used by teenagers in common conversations.
The chart 12 shows the most frequent abbreviations in my corpus. It would be interesting to examine BNC and COCA from the point of view of abbreviations.
This research is a bit complicated because some abbreviations may have more than one meaning or they may be not really abbreviations. When it was possible I tried to eliminate these “non abbreviations”.
Table 14: Abbreviations in BNC and COCA
|Abbreviation |BNC |COCA |
|lol |6 |26 |
|pm |1306 |4078 |
|lmao |0 |1 |
|uk |17282 |1673 |
|lmfao |0 |1 |
|omg |0 |9 |
|bbc |4251 |1850 |
|etc |5027 |10115 |
|rofl |0 |1 |
In the table you can see the number of tokens of different abbreviations in both corpora. We must take into consideration two facts. The first one is the age of both corpora, which means that COCA is being updated and is newer. The second fact is the size of both corpora. COCA has 400+ million of words while BNC only 100 million. Abbreviations are quite a new trend so we expect them more frequently in COCA which also the numbers in the table show. But some common abbreviations such as bbc or uk were more frequent in BNC. I must say that I cannot make clear conclusion about the usage of abbreviations in both corpora and this task deserves more attention in some other work.
2 Clippings
Stockwell and Minkova (2001) call this process shortening. It is the process of making words shorter and it affects not only words but also whole phrases, such as in zoological garden is shortened to zoo (10). As Plag (2002) says this process appears in larger communities of speakers to express familiarity, she gives examples such as lab, which is used by laboratories; demo is a part of vocabulary of people who attend demonstrations (154). As Stockwell and Minkova (2001) add shortenings save time and space and many of shortened words entered the language and speakers have lost track of where they come from (10). Sometimes we do not even know that the word is a clipping.
Most clippings are mono-syllabic or disyllabic and they are very often based on the first part of the base word or on the material from a stressed syllable (Plag 2002: 154).
I searched my corpus for clippings and the process of their formation. Clippings will be divided into two groups according to which part of the word is lost (see Table 15). The number after each example means the line in the corpus in which the example appeared.
Table 15: Clippings
|The beginning is lost |The ending is lost |
|cos (because) (222) |Pic (picture) (64) |
|cause (because) (270) |Hun (hunny) (104) |
|phone (telephone) (731) |Cam (camera) (346) |
|papers (newspapers) (735) |Disco (discotheque) (566) |
|bday (birthday) (1008) |Teens (teenagers)(862) |
| |Prob (probably)(998) |
| |Fem (female)(1480) |
| |Emotes (emotions) (925) |
| |Haps (happening)(332) |
| |Ad (advertisement)(1296) |
As the results proved the most of the clippings were based on the first part of the word and the ending was lost (in the table you can see only a few examples), but there were also some clippings that were based on the second part of the word (see first column in the table). As it was mentioned in the theory, Clippings are usually used in some groups and this is completely true about chat discussions, there are several common Clippings used, such as pic for picture, cam for camera or fem for female.
I looked for the clippings in BNC and COCA. As COCA shown to be better for abbreviations, BNC seems to be quite useful when looking for clippings.
Table 16: Clippings in BNC and COCA
|Clipping |BNC |COCA |
|cos |16298 |971 |
|phone |7648 |65938 |
|bday |0 |4 |
|pic |166 |162 |
|hun |192 |552 |
|cam |420 |1580 |
|disco |742 |1204 |
|prob |41 |144 |
|fem |15 |92 |
|ad |1789 |13783 |
In the table you can see the number of tokens of some clippings. The examples in the table are clippings, which were present in the corpus of chat discussions and if you study them you may say that they are not recently created words. If you take into consideration the size of both corpora, the results say that clippings are generally more frequent in BNC (you must multiply the results by four – because of the size of both corpora).
1 Truncations
A special type of shortening called Truncations must be involved in this group. Plag (2002) connects the term Truncations with the term “prosodic morphology”, which is the case where the relevant category is expressed through prosody. Generally there are two processes connected with this definition- truncations and blends (146).
“Truncation is a process in which the relationship between a derived word and its base is expressed by the lack of phonetic material in the derived word” (Plag 2002: 146). Truncation happens mainly with first names.
You may have already found out why this term is mentioned in this study. One of the formal features of the chat language is nick-initiated lineation (mentioned in chapter 2.2.2) which means that each line in chat discussion is introduced with the user´s nickname. Nicknames are very often formed with the user´s first name or combination of a name and some kind of characteristic of a person; of course these are not the only possibilities of creating a nickname.
Truncated names are very often formed with adding –y suffix which means diminutive and these kind of words are created when we feel familiar somewhere or familiar with the person, they also express positive affection towards the person (Plag 2002: 147).
When we decide to enter some chat room we want to find friends, we want to have pleasant conversation and this means that we want to fit into this room and this affects the choice of our nickname. Nicknames tell a lot about us, they are the first thing that people read about us in a chat room and they must somehow reflect our personality.
Now I am going to have a look at the structure of truncations and the process of their formation.
According to Plag (2002) truncations are monosyllabic even if they are shortened from the word with four syllables. There is also a tendency for truncation to begin and end in consonant, but some of them end in vowels as well. Plag (2002) divides truncations into three groups. In the first group there are names in which the ending is missing (Alonzo-> Al), in the second group it is a primarily stressed syllable which provides the material for the truncation (Adolphus-> Dolph), and the third group involves words where a secondarily stressed syllable survives truncation (Abigail-> Gail), in other words the beginning is lost (150).
I examined my corpus from the point of view of the nicknames used in chat discussions. I expected several first names in several modifications and I was not disappointed. I chose only a few examples to illustrate three processes connected with the process of truncation. To be sure about the forms and etymology of first names I consulted these web pages about the first names ().
Table 17: Nicknames and truncation
|Diminutives –y, -ie, -ee |The beginning is lost |The ending is lost |
|Andy -> Andrew |Liam -> William |Mat -> Matthew |
|Angie -> Angela | |Wil -> William |
|Marky -> Mark | |Kel -> Kelly |
|Sammy -> Samuel | |Silva -> Sylvia |
|Harry -> Henry, Harold | |Lil -> Lilly |
|Terry -> Terence, Theresa | |Jeff -> Jeffrey |
|Ollie -> Oliver, Olivia | |Pen -> Penelope |
|Rossie -> Rose | |Tom -> Thomas |
|Bobby -> Bob | |Alex -> Alexander/ra |
|Lenny -> Leonard | |Ali -> Alison |
As you can see in the table the first column includes first names in diminutives, which means that they involve suffixation, but if we have a look properly at the words we may see that the process of truncation took place in some of these examples as well. For example the name “Andy” was at first shortened to “And” and the diminutive suffix –y was then added. Another good example of this is the name “Terry”, shortened from “Theresa” and then diminutive suffix –y was added. The second column is quite poor; there were not many names in my corpus that were shortened by leaving beginnings of them. On the other hand, first names, which came through the process of truncation and lost their endings are very frequent in nicknames. For example the name Mat was created by shortening from its full form Matthew, or Jeff lost its ending from Jeffrey etc. To complete the results, there were also first names in nicknames that were not shortened, for example: Jane, Stephen, James, Emma Louise, Ashley or Bridget.
3 Blends
Stockwell and Minkova (2001) give also another term for blends and it is portmanteau words. This term was taken from Lewis Caroll, the author of Through the Looking Glass. He gave an example of blend “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”- like a portmanteau, two meanings packed up into one word (6). It´s a good definition but to be more precise I will use the definition of Plag (2002). “Blends are words that combine two (rarely three or more) words into one, deleting material from one or both of the source words” (155).
Plag (2002) distinguishes two groups of Blends. The first group is compounds that are shortened to form a new word (breath + analyzer -> breathalyzer). In this group the first element modifies the second one. A breath analyzer is a kind of analyzer and according to Plag there are good reasons not to treat shortened compounds as proper blends. On the other hand, the second group includes blends, which denote entities that share properties of the referents of both elements (a brunch is both breakfast and lunch). She adds another important semantic property of blends and that is that both base words of a blend must be somehow semantically related, it means for example both must be nouns otherwise their combination will not be possible (155-156).
Plag (2002) also talks about the size of blends.
'With most of the blends we see that words are combined that have the same size (measured in number of syllables). In these cases the blend is of the same size as the constituents. If there is a discrepancy between the two base words, we find a clear pattern: the blend has the size of the second element, as can be seen with brunch, boatel and guesstimate.' (160)
Blends are words that were created to save space and time, but they are also used to show familiarity or membership in some group. As Stockwell and Minkova (2001) say blends are also created in technical terms, for example in medical practice or in chemistry. According to them “blending is an area of word formation where cleverness can be rewarded by instant popularity” and they give examples such as sexploitation or Chunnel which were created in the seventies and are now common words (7).
I did research on blends in my corpus, but I was not successful. It is probably because the corpus was not large enough. So I decided to look up some blends in BNC and COCA. It is not possible to find all of them, there is not such pattern, so I decided to look for the frequency of some blends chosen according to the article about blends by Stockwell and Minkova (2001) and I also checked the Internet to find some common blends.
Table 18: Blends in BNC and COCA
|Word |BNC |COCA |
|brunch |25 |1157 |
|eurovision |36 |42 |
|heliport |11 |47 |
|multiversity |2 |13 |
|newscast |6 |744 |
|paratroops |28 |46 |
|smog |154 |1089 |
|travelogue |23 |131 |
|swimsation |0 |0 |
|chortle |19 |68 |
|shrimpburger |0 |2 |
|cattlegate |0 |8 |
|simulcast |5 |103 |
The results show that blends are present in both corpora. Some of them were created recently such as shrimpburger or simulcast and they are more frequent in COCA because this corpus is being updated. Some blends such as brunch or newscast seem to be used quite often according to the number of tokens. Generally I recommend COCA for research of blends.
4 Numbers and letters
Another process involved in this chapter is the process connected with using numbers or letters in words or instead of whole words. It is included in the chapter about shortenings because it makes words shorter.
Chat users are very creative with the language, they want to be different and moreover they need to respond fast. These facts lead to the usage of pictograms and logograms in the language of chat discussion. These two phenomena will be analyzed in separate subchapters.
1 Logograms
The definition at WiseGeek says that logograms are “symbols used in writing language that stand for an entire word or morpheme, a meaningful unit of speech” (Foster). Logograms in chat language or in texting language may be used alone or in combination with letters. Not only the numerals but also the letters can be used as logograms, for example “r” can stand for the verb “are” or “u” can stand for the pronoun “you”.
To illustrate this I will use examples from my corpus:
Examples:
[42] 41. [pic]niki_1982: any1 fancy a chat [pic]
[43] 393. six_pack DoNt WoRRy lil_latina I CaN sEe YeA HaViN A PeRvE [pic]& DoNt
4GeT Ma LoGgIe On YeAwAy OuT FaNkOs [pic]
[44] 1054. B-RENT: Bsb 4ever?
[45] 504. nina250485: hi any black guys fancy a chat with a white girl pm me xxxx
[46] 325. six_pack [pic]plz note guys Buffy82 is gaggin for it feel
free 2 pm her she will love it [pic]lmfao[pic]
[47] diamondjane87: woop woop scottish_soldier25 lol. wen r u back?
In the first three example logograms are used in combination, they are parts of words. In the example [45] they stand for “kisses” and in the example [46] they are used alone instead of preposition. In the last example [47] you can see the letter of the alphabet which stand for words (are, you).
I analysed my corpus of 10,000 words (1.1.1 or Appendix). I was looking for all logograms, numerals as well as letters of the alphabet. Then I divided them according to the part of speech they stood for, except for one category that includes logograms which were parts or words). The results are shown in the table below.
Table 19: Logograms in my corpus
|Part of a speech |Frequency |Percentage in the corpus |
|Pronoun (u,yr) |122 |1,22 |
|Verb (r,c,b) |32 |0,32 |
|Part of a word (any1, every1, 4ever) |18 |0,18 |
|Preposition (4) |9 |0,09 |
|Conjunction (n) |4 |0,04 |
As you can see in the table the percentage of logograms in chat discussion is not high, but definitely they are a part of the chat language. It depends on users if they choose an abbreviated form of a word or not. Even though there is no rule or a system in the usage of logograms we may say that some words are abbreviated more often, for example the pronoun “you” is substituted with “u” or the verb “are” is substituted with “r”.
2 Pictograms
“Visual shapes, or pictures, are used to represent objects or concepts” (Crystal 2009: 38). According to Crystal (2009) emoticons are types of pictograms. Crystal (2009) in his book about texting says that most pictograms belong to the category called “computer art” (39).
Emoticons are very frequent in chat discussions. A few years ago people in chat discussions used only easy pictograms, created from the signs on the keyboard such as :-) or :-(. But nowadays chat rooms and other communication programs offer emoticons in a graphic form such as [pic] or [pic]. You can just easily choose which one you want to use to express your feelings and click on the right button. There is a great variety of these emoticons on the Internet. People are so creative that they not only express their feelings with emoticons they found ways how to send for example roses. A few years ago people were so inventive that they were able to create a rose only with signs on the keyboard-
@(---´---´---, nowadays there are pictures for this, such as [pic].
These emoticons and pictograms enable people to show their emotions and they compensate the lack of emotions in written communication. Chat discussion is full of emoticons, they express not only positive feelings but also negative ones.
It would be interesting to have a look at the frequency of emoticons and their function in chat discussion.
I analyzed pictograms in my corpus of 10.000 words. I counted the emoticons and other symbols expressing emotions.
Table 20: Emoticons and other symbols and their frequency
|Emoticon |Frequency- number |
|[pic] |120 |
|[pic] |21 |
|[pic] |20 |
|xxx or [pic] |20 |
|[pic] |20 |
|[pic] |15 |
|[pic] |8 |
|[pic] |7 |
The most frequent emoticon was that one which expresses the feelings of happiness or laughter. Chat rooms are places where we chat with friends or we are looking for friends or partners and we want to look and sound positive, that is why many messages are complemented with positive emoticons. Sometimes we also flirt with people so the emoticons representing winking or provoking are used. We may come across people we are not comfortable with and in these cases we use negative emoticons.
As you can see people tend to express emotions in their messages using emoticons. What is interesting is that some of them used whole words to show emotions.
For example:
[48] 22. hoo81 finds everyone boring... . o O ( YAWN! )
[49] 205. marlboro_gold_uk winks at diamondjane87 *wink*WINK*wink*
[50] 252. RedBull33 hifives marlboro_gold_uk... *SMACK*
[51] 950. mrrocknroll68: spark: forget the disrespectful. If in your heart you feel
worthy, you are worthy. *salutes*
These expressions are very often written in asterisks or in brackets. The reason for that is that the user wants to separate the expressions with emotions from the rest of the text to avoid misunderstanding. Also the position of emoticons is quite interesting. They very often appear at the end of the message, sometimes the emoticon is the only content of the message to show what you think about the previous message, you can agree and be happy with that or you can get angry or be surprised.
This chapter focused on word-formation processes, which are subjects of shortenings. At first abbreviations were analyzed, there was quite a high number of initials and acronyms used in the chat language and most of them were abbreviations created for chat discussion, such as pm for private message or asl for age, sex, location. Some of the abbreviations found their ways also into spoken language (e.g.: lol or omg). BNC and COCA, as corpora that do not contain the chat language, were not very useful when looking for abbreviations, although some of the old abbreviations can be found there (e.g.: uk, bbc or etc.)
The second part was about Clippings, which are usually used in some groups and this is completely true about chat discussions. There are several common Clippings used there, such as pic for picture, cam for camera or fem for female.
I looked for the clippings in BNC and COCA. As COCA shown to be better for abbreviations, BNC seems to be quite useful when looking for clippings. The process called Truncations was involved in this part and it concerned the nicknames that were very often changed into diminutives or shortened.
Blends were included in the third part of this chapter. They were not present in the chat language but they were quite frequent in BNC and COCA.
The last part of this chapter was about numbers or letters used in words or standing instead of words. This process was quite productive in the chat language and there were mostly grammatical words, which consisted of numbers or letters.
Other ways of language economy
In the previous chapters I was talking about the language economy at the level of words. I mentioned several word-formation processes that lead to the shortening of words. Now I would like to move to the different level, I would like to have a look above words, I would like to talk about sentences and the possibilities of their shortenings in the chat language. I will describe the ways chat users use to make their sentences and the whole language shorter, how they save time and space while participating in chat discussion. I will begin with one process, which does not completely belong to the chapter about shortenings at that is why it is involved in this chapter. It is the process of omitting letters and the usage of nonstandard spellings. Then I will look upon the usage of punctuation and capital letters in the chat language. I will also illustrate the usage of pro-forms and ellipsis in the chat language. Finally I will look more closely at grammatical correctness of the chat language.
1 Omitted letters and nonstandard spellings
There are people who are good spellers and people who are bad ones; it is not only about texting or chat discussion, it is generally true in life. But some people intentionally play with the language; they manipulate the writing system (Crystal 2009: 48).
I have already mentioned several reasons why people play with the language in chat discussions. On the one hand, they want to be seen, they want to differ; on the other hand, they want to fit in the group, so they use the language, which is used in chat discussion. Some people who do not participate or are not keen on chat discussions may be against these innovations.
Crystal says that these nonstandard spellings might include representations of informal and regional speech, such as dat- that, sorta-sort of, wassup- what´s up, wiv-with or da-the.
But he also adds that these nonstandard spellings are a part of English literary tradition and some of them have been given entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
Cos- in OED from 1828.
Wot- in OED from 1829
Thanx- in OED from 1936.
(Crystal, Txtng 49).
As I mentioned in the chapter about Abbreviations (5.1), Initials are words in which all letters are omitted except the first. But as Crystal says there are also other cases in which texters shorten words by omitting letters from the middle. This process is usually called contraction (Crystal 2009: 49). Words may also shorten words by omitting the endings, it is called clipping and it was discussed in chapter 5.2.
Contractions or omitting of letters are quite frequent in chat discussions and they are usually the vowels that are omitted. I will be interested in these words, which lack some vowels and I will be interesting if the users use the same pattern for omitting vowels. Moreover I will have a look at the words with nonstandard spellings.
To support the theory with examples I analyzed my corpus for nonstandard spellings used by chat users. There were several words that were misspelled, probably unintentionally; these are not subjects of this study. I was interested in nonstandard spellings, which were created intentionally. Surprisingly the vast majority of words with nonstandard spellings were grammatical words (see the table).
Table 21: Non standard spellings in my corpus
|Nonstandard spelling |Standard spelling |Part of the speech |
|wat (3),wot (275) |what |pronoun |
|wen (15) |when |interrogative pronoun |
|wer (355) |where |interrogative pronoun |
|wud (108), shud (496) |would, should |modal verbs |
|yo (34), yea(393), yaself(67) |you, yourself |personal, reflexive pronoun |
|ur (306), urs (310) |your, yours |possessive pronouns |
|dats (387), dis (1046) |that is, this |demonstrative pronoun |
|em (1368) |them |personal pronoun |
|cos (222), cause (1368) |because |conjunction |
|thanx (228), thks (1254) |thanks |verb |
Some other non- grammatical words with nonstandard spelling from the corpus: tonite-tonight, tho-though, plz- please, nefin- nothing, fanny-funny, ma-my, easir-easier, thru- through.
As you can see in the table chat users are quite creative when they participate in chat discussion. Most of the words are written phonologically and you understand them even though they are written in nonstandard form. Most of them were grammatical words, because they are very frequent not only in written but also in spoken language and there is the lowest risk of misunderstanding when using nonstandard spellings. Some other words, which were in nonstandard spellings were also the words which are used frequently, such as please or thanks because the users are aware of the fact that they may not be understood when using “strange or different” spellings.
The second part of the research in this chapter was about omitted vowels in words.
The results are almost the same, most of the words in which vowels were omitted were either grammatical words or frequently used words. The reason why there are vowels that are omitted and not consonants was mentioned earlier in this work. If we omit consonants words will not be understood, but when we omit vowels words seem to be understandable. You can check that in the table with examples from my corpus.
Table 22: Words with omitted letters in my corpus
|Words with omitted letters |Standard spelling |Part of the speech |
|nt (17) |not |negative particle |
|dnt (84) |Do not, don´t |negation |
|hv (1093) |have |verb |
|nvr (1040) |never |adverb |
|cht (48) |chat |verb, noun |
|yr (330) |year |noun |
|frm (458) |from |preposition |
|ppl (381) |people |noun |
|wk end (42) |weekend |noun |
|thks (1254) |thanks |noun |
|jking (1359) |joking |verb |
|cme (1372) |come |verb |
As you can see you will probably understand all of the words in which vowels were omitted. It is quite common way how to shorten words in chat discussion. People tend to shorten words which are commonly used in chat discussions, but sometimes you may come across some words which may be, especially for non-native speakers, difficult to understand, such as gdgd- which means good, good or pvt- which means private.
2 Punctuation
The first thing we notice about chat discussions is either the lack of punctuation or exaggerated punctuation. The reason for that is people either write without punctuation to save time and space or they decide to write with pronunciation and they usually exaggerate it to show strong emotions or to be seen on the screen.
Examples:
[52] 1357. alexlaw77: i have no idea i just made the observation yesterday
[53] 695. MissGiedre: it was awesome!!!!!!!!!
[54] 720. Canadian_Wolf: aWOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooo
.................................
In example [52] we can see that the user completely omitted punctuation. In the next example [53] we can see the exaggerated punctuation to show strong emotions and in the last example [54] the user uses punctuation to be different, to be seen from the rest of conversations.
We must also take into consideration that not all contributions are sentences, very often there are only semi clauses or just phrases or words.
Quirk et al. (1985) states the hierarchy of punctuation marks. They say that: “We have a well-defined hierarchy of signs reaching from the word to the paragraph” (1611).
Their hierarchy looks like this (Quirk et al. 1985: 1612)
Unseparated letters ...opted...
Hyphen ...co-opted...
Word-space ...since co-opted...
Comma ...men, since co-opted...
Colon ...men, since co-opted: Smith...
Semicolon ...men, since co-opted; Smith and Fox;
Period ...men, since co-opted; Smith and Fox; they had been very
useful. Votes of thanks...
Paragraph ...men, since co-opted; Smith and Fox; they had been very
useful. Votes of thanks were proposed.
Before the meeting...
The usage of hyphens was mentioned in the chapter about compounds. The usage of apostrophes, period, question and exclamation marks will be described in the following parts.
I studied the first 500 lines of my corpus from the point of view of punctuation. I was interested in the usage of period, question marks or exclamation marks to end a sentence. I also came across several examples in which period, question marks or exclamations were used differently.
I analyzed the lines according to one criterion. Period, question marks or exclamation marks are used in clauses. The chat discussion does not always consist only of clauses, we may find several verb-less clauses and sometimes a line consists only of one word or abbreviation (these forms usually lead to shortenings of the whole clause and has been described in details in chapter about grammatical features – 2.2.3.). If there is a verb-less clause, phrase, word or abbreviation I do not count it as a clause and therefore I do not expect any punctuation. The column called “used partly-correctly” includes lines in which punctuation was used and not used at the same time or was used but not according to the rules.
Table 23: The usage of periods, question marks and exclamation marks in my corpus
| |Used correctly |Used partly-correctly |Used incorrectly |
|Period, question and exclamation |284 |8 |208 |
|marks | | | |
As I mentioned earlier chat language does not consist only of clauses, more often there are just words or phrases in which punctuation is not necessary and therefore they are included in the first group in which punctuation was used correctly. On the other hand, chat discussion includes also longer clauses sometimes even complex clauses. These were also analyzed and divided into groups according to the usage of punctuation. You can see that quite a high number of users do not care about punctuation. The most frequently it was the question mark, which was missing in the questions, but users also do not end clauses with period marks.
Chat users on the one hand omit punctuation to save time and space, to respond fast, but on the other hand they sometimes use punctuation marks for special purposes.
Special usage of question and exclamation marks
Examples:
[55] 1079. InvisibleArts: wait wait what !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! nerdlove is you
????????
[56] 1241. MizzAshley: whats up room!!!
[57] 1354. ZombieQueen: well yes i agree alex.....but if you have these wireclub friends
on yahoo or messenger or yahoo messenger
[58] 796. lennywoods: now he can figure out all of life...but he does not know his true
age...
In the example [55] you can see multiple exclamation and question marks. The exclamation marks emphasize the importance of the message and question marks show curiosity or surprise of the user. There is a question in [56] but there is an exclamation mark instead of question mark used. The clause is more a statement than a question. Dots in [57] serve as a pause, to give the user time to think or to show that he or she was thinking for some time, that it was not a spot decision. Dots at the end of [58] serve as a marker to show, that the message is going to continue, probably on the next line. Messages tend to be short, so the usage of dots at the end of lines is quite frequent. They serve to show that it is not everything the user wanted to say.
1 Apostrophes in the corpora
I analyzed my corpus from the point of view of apostrophes. I was interested in the usage of them and moreover I looked for the words in which apostrophes were omitted.
Table 24: Apostrophes in my corpus
|Apostrophes in my corpus |113 |
|Words spelled without apostrophes |132 |
As you can see from the table the frequency of apostrophes is not very high. Chat users break the rules about apostrophes because they slow down the process of writing and they are not necessary for understanding (it is the same case as will be described in chapter about capitalization). You will understand the word or phrase even if it is written without apostrophes (im- stands for I´m, dont- clearly represents the contracted form of do not, thats represents the form that is or werent stands for were not). The total number of apostrophes found in my corpus was 113.
Omitting of apostrophes in BNC and COCA
Chat users do not take care of apostrophes in their messages. Apostrophes are not necessary for understanding and they slow down the process of writing so there are no objections why not to omit them.
It would be interesting to look at the omitting of apostrophes in BNC and COCA. Both corpora consist of the written as well as spoken texts and I will look for the frequency of words with omitted apostrophes in each section in each corpora.
Table 25: Words without apostrophes in BNC and COCA
|Example |BNC-written |BNC-spoken |COCA-written |COCA- spoken |
|im |29 |69 |1814 |1612 |
|werent |21 |0 |20 |83 |
|wasnt |46 |0 |111 |242 |
|thats |137 |36 |285 |2380 |
|dont |138 |1 |833 |1815 |
As you can see from the table above, both corpora consist of words written without apostrophes. The chat language belongs to the written language so at this moment we are not interested in words found in spoken language in the corpora. If we take into consideration the size of both corpora, we may say that there is not a big difference between them when talking about words without apostrophes. It would be interesting to have a look at the texts in which these words appear but there is not space for it in this study.
3 Capital letters
Initial capitals are used not only for marking the beginning of the sentence, but they also serve to mark proper nouns, this means for example persons, places, days of the week, month etc. Initial capitals are also used for names of organizations and institutions.
They are sometimes used in writing to indicate spoken prominence for the words so specified Quirk et al. 1985: 1637-1638). Capital letters also appear in Initials and Acronyms (see chapter 5.1)
What about the chat language and capital letters? As I mentioned earlier, we must reply fast in chat discussions and using capital letters may slow down the process of writing. So I expect breaking the rules of Capital letters in chat discussion and I am going to do research on that. I will divide the results according to the rule that was broken.
Table 26: Capital letters in my corpus
| |Number |
|Pronoun I (written as i) |155 |
|Proper names |93 |
Table 27: Capitalization of the personal proun I.
|Personal prounoun I |Frequency |
|Written as “i” |155 |
|Written with capital letter “I” |266 |
In the table you can see that the rules about capitalization in English are very often broken. Capitalization is not important for understanding and so the users do not care about it much. First person singular pronoun was very often written with small “i” (in the Table 27 you can see the frequency of the first person singular pronoun from the point of view of capitalization. As you can see this pronoun was misspelled in 155 cases, even though it was spelled correctly in 266 cases. The group called “proper names” in the Table 26 includes the names of people, countries and names of companies. Chat users tend to write them with small letters too, so you may come across the names of countries with small letters such as canada, towns such as leicester, doncaster or famous companies such as facebook or wireclub. The word “English” was also very often written with small letter.
4 Pro-forms and Ellipsis
Pro-forms and Ellipsis were briefly mentioned in the chapter about grammatical features of chat language. When observing the chat language you will definitely notice that it very rarely consists of proper sentences. More often pro-forms and ellipsis are used.
Pro-forms
There are two kinds of bond between pro-form and its antecedent. These are co-reference and substitution. Co-reference refer to the same thing or set of things and is usually expressed by personal pronoun or definite noun phrase containing the, this, that, these and those. Substitution is a relationship between pro-form and antecedent whereby the pro-form is understood to have replaced a repeated occurrence of the antecedent (Quirk et at. 1985: 863).
Chat language very often called “chat discussion” in this study is a discussion between people, they write and respond to other users´ messages and this involves the usage of several pro-forms in a function of co-reference (see some examples below).
[59] alexlaw77: only result was that wireclub links it without ur permission
seekord: is that legal?
DarklyDreaming: yes
ZombieQueen: well they can only link if you want it to
DarklyDreaming: no illegality to it
perfectionsdemon: I want to know how wireclub gets that info to link it? my email addresses aren't the same.
This part of conversation was taken from my corpus. You can see there several references backwards represented by pronouns. For example that in the second line stands for the whole previous clause, or they in the fourth line mean people in charge of Wireclub. In all cases you need context to understand and get the meaning of pro-forms. If I give you a sentence without context you may not understand or you may misunderstand it (have a look at example [60].
[60] ZombieQueen: well they can only link if you want it to
Without the context you do not know who “they” are and you are probably also not sure what does “it” stands for.
I have already mentioned several examples of pro-forms in a function of coreference, now I would like to give some examples of pro-forms in a function of substitution.
[61] lennywoods: Hey River...You Will Not Answer Your Age...How About This One...Do You Wear A Towel On Your Head??
[62] DarklyDreaming: ooh, you're clever.
DarklyDreaming: did you learn that one in grade 5 or what. don't be a pedo.
In example [61] you can see that “one” refers to “the question” – the word which is not even explicitly mentioned. In the next example “that one” refers probably to some knowledge or expression mentioned previously. Again you need a context and if you are involved in chat discussion you must follow the screen and respond fast and so the usage of pro-forms in inevitable.
Ellipsis
Another process, which is frequent in the chat language is ellipsis.
“To distinguish ellipsis from other kinds of omission, it is important to emphasize the principle of VERBATIME RECOVERABILITY that applies to ellipsis; that is, the actual word(s) whose meaning is understood of implied must be recoverable”(Quirk et al. 1985: 884).
There are several categories of ellipsis and to show them digestedly I would use the table from Quirk et al. In my research I will be interested only in two types of ellipsis- situational and then in nonfinite and verb-less clauses because these are very often present in chat language.
Table 28: Main categories of ellipsis by Quirk et al. (894)
[pic]
Situational ellipsis
Some ellipsis might be weakly recoverable and they may depend on knowledge of a precise extra-linguistic context. The term situational ellipsis includes these examples and also other cases where it is quite clear what is omitted (Quirk et al. 1985: 895). To demonstrate these practically I will use the classification of ellipsis by Quirk et al complemented by examples from my corpus.
Table 29: Types of ellipsis with examples from my corpus
|Type of ellipsis |Examples from my corpus |
|Ellipsis of subject alone (first, second and third |[63] 413. diamondjane87 [pic]guess u will never know marlboro_gold_uk |
|person) | |
| |[64] 813. ThreeEightSeven387: cheating bastard. |
| |[65] 390. xtaking_a_chancex: says hi to all. |
|Ellipsis of subject plus operator |[66]150. sgreen36: fine and hows u plainjayne1981 |
|Ellipsis in interrogative sentences |[67] 416. andy8885: hey anyone in Stockport? |
|Ellipsis of operator alone |[68] 291. trident_barclay: amber4711 you had a good day honey? |
Ellipsis of the subject is quite common in chat language. It is because of the fact that the lines are introduced with a nickname, which may serve as a subject- for the third person and it would be redundant to write two subjects (see example [65]). Ellipsis of subject plus operator is not so common but they sometimes appear in chat language, probably because of language economy. Ellipses in interrogative sentences are also frequent in chat discussions although the question marks at the end of interrogatives are very often omitted. In example [67] there is an ellipsis of “is there” and we can see also the correct usage of the question mark. The last example shows ellipsis of operator, the sentence remains understandable.
5 Grammatical correctness
Lack of punctuation, shortenings or omitting of letters may suggest that chat users do not care much about the correctness of their writing, but it is not true. To create abbreviations and other words, which must be understandable you must not be illiterate, you must know the rules of the language quite well. Your participation represented by your writing in chat discussions represents your person. People generally try to write as well as they can. In this study I proceeded from words to phrases and finally to sentences. Now it is time to have a look at the sentences from the grammatical and syntactic point of view. There are only a very few examples of sentences which contain some grammatical mistake. Ellipsis and other pro-forms were mentioned in the previous chapter and abbreviations and other innovations say that users know and care about what they do and what they write. Sometimes we may come across some typing errors caused by fast writing such as everyonees (instead of everyone), fjuck off, nto (not), exactky (for exactly) or ello for hello. Sometimes words seem to be written incorrectly but it may be a purpose of chat user to write it like that (e.g.: nightlifeeeee, hunni, alotta).
The following examples will demonstrate the proper usage of some grammatical issues.
Examples:
[69] 201. any ladies up for a chat pm me
[70] 200. sgreen36: quite busy. so what u doing now
[71] 167. amber4711 give marlboro_gold_uk the biggest hug from the smallest gal in
town
[72] 838. Instructor_ont: kinda amazes me, but it should be clearly seen, that alot of people in chat rooms, just say whatever to get a rise out of other people, whether they believe the drivel they type, they don't care, for them the fun is in the fight or pissin people off
Example [69] demonstrates the proper usage of plural noun, moreover the user also used an indefinite article and the pronoun is also used in the correct form.
In the next example [70] the proper tense is used, even though it is without punctuation. Example [71] demonstrates the proper usage of superlative of adjectives. And the last example [72] shows that users sometimes use also compound sentences. But this is an exception in the chat language; users tend to use shorter constructions as it was demonstrated in this whole study.
All of these examples proved that users mostly follow the grammatical rules and it also supports the theory that abbreviations and other shortened forms are not a sign of carelessness.
In this chapter some other ways of language economy were examined. At the beginning I described omitted letters and non-standard spellings in the chat language. This together with grammatical correctness, which was mentioned at the end of this chapter, show that users take care about what they write, they do some changes in language intentionally. On the other hand, the lack of punctuation and capital letters show that they are not totally correct. But as it was demonstrated, punctuation or capital letters are not important for understanding messages and users are definitely aware of this fact. Finally elliptical sentences and the usage of pro-forms were described. Generally, chat users tend to make their language as short as possible using all means of language economy.
Conclusion
This text was written to analyze the specific characteristics of the chat language. It may serve as a guide for people who would like to attend chat discussions but do not know the specific features of the language used there.
The first part introduced the whole study and offered the detailed information about the corpora used for the research. In this thesis I discussed the chat language in details. The theoretical framework was supported with data from three different corpora, i.e. BNC, COCA and my corpus. In the thesis I described the similarities and differences in these three corpora when using them for the research. BNC proved to be useful when doing research on infixes and clippings, COCA contained examples of words with infixes, abbreviations and blends. Generally, COCA was better for the research on language innovations, because it is the corpus thats updated. My corpus of chat discussions revealed the lack of blends and words with infixes, but on the other hand it consisted of words with letters and numerals, emoticons and words with omitted letters or with nonstandard spellings.
At the beginning of the second chapter I mentioned the history of the Internet and chat rooms. Then I focused on the features of the chat language. They were divided into three groups. The first group involved specific language features. I found out that the chat language has characteristics not only of written but also of spoken language. Pictograms and logograms, omitted letters, abbreviations and non-standard spellings proved users´ creativity and play with the language. The second group demonstrated some formal features of chat discussion. Nick-initiated lineation and system messages were mentioned in this part. The last group of grammatical features consisted of examples of pro-forms, ellipsis and verb-less clauses, which are also typical for the chat language.
The third chapter introduced the topic of word-formation processes. Those, which are not so frequent in chat language, were mentioned in this part.
The fourth chapter focused on word-formation processes in which morphemes are combined. At first Derivation and Inflection were examined, and then Compounds were analyzed.
Word-formation processes affected by shortenings were demonstrated in the fifth chapter. These processes showed to be very productive in the chat language. Acronyms, Initials and Clippings were quite frequent in the chat language, as opposed to blends, which were not found in my corpus (1.1.1 or Appendix). The creativity of chat users can be also seen in the way when they used numerals or letters to stand for words or parts of words. The research showed that words, which were affected by these changes were mostly common words, used in chat discussions or in case of “numerals and letters” they were grammatical words.
The last chapter of my thesis was about some other ways of language economy in the chat language. The lack of punctuation and Capital letters may suggest that users do not take care about their writing. But most of the messages in my corpus (1.1.1) showed to be grammatically correct which proves that users take care about their writings and change it intentionally.
Chat language and the language of texting have appeared quite recently. With the new technologies we have to expect also some changes in language, which I proved are not a sign of carelessness but they show that users know their language well and they like playing with it. Face-to-face communication is being replaced by online communication and people should be aware of the changes happening in the language.
SUMMARY
Cílem této práce bylo analyzovat specifické charakteristiky jazyka chatu na Internetu. Práce může sloužit jako návod pro uživatele Internetu, kteří by se rádi zapojili do chatové konverzace v anglickém jazyce, ale neznají specifika jazyka chatu.
Se stejným tématem jsem již pracovala ve své bakalářské práci (byla obhájena na Univerzitě Tomáše Bati ve Zlíně v roce 2008). V bakalářské práci jsem uvedla některé vlastnosti charakteristické pro jazyk chatu, zaměřila jsem se na použití zkratek různými generacemi lidí.
Téma této magisterské práce je stejné, je ovšem rozebráno mnohem podrobněji. Můj původní korpus je doplněn o další data, především chatů mladší generace, protože ta se ukázala jako nejproduktivnější, co se týká změn v jazyce. Celkem jsou v práci použita data ze tří různých korpusů. Teorie je doplněna příklady z mého korpusu, příklady z Britského národního korpusu (BNC) a korpusu současné americké angličtiny (COCA). Všechny charakteristiky jazyka chatu zmíněné v této práci jsou doplněny konkrétními příklady. Zkoumala jsem take využitelnost jednotlivých korpusů u některých procesů tvoření slov. Mnou vytvořený korpus chatových diskuzí obsahoval množství zkratek, clippingů, slov s vynechanými samohláskami, slov s nestandardním pravopisem, emotikonů a slov, ve kterých byly použity číslovky nebo jednotlivá písmena abecedy. Britský národní korpus a korpus současné americké angličtiny, i když neobsahují vzorky chatové komunikace, se ukázaly být velmi hodnotným zdrojem zkratek, clippingů, blendů a také slov obsahujících infixy. Korpus současné americké angličtiny je každý rok doplněn o nová data, a proto by se dalo říct, že obsahuje více slov, které byly ovlivněny jazykovými změnami. Zkratky, blendy a další změny však nejsou v jazyce zcela nové a proto nalezneme příklady některých starších slov i v Britském národním korpusu. Jako výborný příklad mohou sloužit infixy -bloody- a –fucking-. První zmíněný, byl používaný v jazyce dříve. BNC obsahoval více příkladů s infixem –bloody-. Druhý zmíněný infix byl častější v korpusu COCA. Zkratky jako bbc a uk byly častější v BNC, zatímco zkratky jako lol, lmao a omg, které patří mezi nové zkratky, byly zastoupeny ve větší míře v COCA. První část této práce uvedla metody výzkumu použité v celém textu. Popsala také vlastnosti použitých korpusů.
Další kapitola zahrnuje základní historická fakta o Internetu a chatové komunikaci. Soustředí se také na některá specifika jazyka chatu, která jsou rozdělena do tří skupin. První skupina zahrnuje specifické vlastnosti jazyka chatu. Jak výzkum v práci ukázal, jazyk chatu nemá vlastnosti jen psané komunikace, ale také mluveného jazyka. Piktogramy a emotikony slouží pro vyjadřování emocí. Logogramy, vynechávání písmen ve slovech, zkratky a nestandardní pravopis ukazují na to, že uživatelé chatu si rádi hrají a předvádějí svou kreativitu v jazyce. Druhá skupina popisovala některé formální vlastnosti jazyka chatu. Jednotlivé řádky konverzace jsou vždy uvedeny přezdívkou uživatele. Kromě uživatelských zpráv můžeme na chatu najít také systémové zprávy, které mají informativní funkci. Poslední skupina zmiňuje gramatické charakteristiky jazyka chatu. Soustředí se na neslovesné věty.
Třetí kapitola uvádí základní procesy tvoření slov v angličtině. Tato kapitola slouží pouze jako úvod k následujícím dvěma kapitolám, které se soustředí na dvě základní metody tvoření slov v angličtině (kombinace morfémů a zkracování morfémů).
Ve čtvrté kapitole jsou popsány procesy tvoření slov, ve kterých dochází ke kombinaci morfémů. Podrobně je popsán proces Inflekce, Derivace a Compounding. Derivační proces je dále rozdělen na prefixy, sufixy a infixy a jednotlivé kategorie jsou doplněny příklady. Proces známý jako Compounding je demonstrován na příkladech z mého korpusu.
Pátá kapitola se soustředí na procesy tvoření slov, ve kterých dochází ke zkracování. V kapitole podrobně popisuji například zkratky, blendy a clippingy. Zkratky jsou rozděleny na inicialismy a akronymy a jsou opět doplněny o příklady ze všech korpusů. Nejvíce byly zkratky zastoupeny v mém korpusu, BNC a COCA obsahovaly jen malé množství chatových zkratek. V této kapitole byl také popsán a na příkladech demonstrován proces v angličtině známý jako Clippings. Všechny tři korpusy prokázaly přítomnost mnoha clippingů. Proces, týkající se jmen- přezdívek, známý jako Truncations, byl také popsán v této části. Závěrečná část této kapitoly byla věnována slovům, jež obsahovala číslice nebo písmena abecedy, slovům, ve kterých byla vynechána písmena nebo obsahovala nestandardní pravopis, piktogramům a logogramům, které jsou nedílnou součástí chatových diskuzí. Při vynechávání písmen ve slovech se téměř vždy jednalo o vynechání samohlásek. K vynechávání docházelo u běžných slov a často se také jednalo o gramatická slova jako have, don´t, not. Při vynechání samohlásek obvykle nedocházelo ke ztrátě srozumitelnosti. Mohli jsme však narazit na slova, která mohla být obtížně srozumitelná, např. gdgd- good good nebo pvt- private. Slova, která byla napsána nestandardně, byla také většinou gramatická slova, např. wat, wer, wud. Piktogramy (emotikony), které byly v chatové diskuzi použity pro vyjádření emocí, byly také analyzovány. Nejčastějším emotikonem byl pocit štěstí a radosti nebo smíchu, protože chaty jsou místa, kde si obvykle hledáme přátele nebo partnery.
Logogramy byly analyzovány podle toho, jaký slovní druh zastupovaly. Nejčastěji se jednalo o zájmena (u, yr), slovesa (r), předložky (4) nebo spojky (n). Logogramy byly často součástí slov (any1, every1 nebo 4ever).
Poslední část této práce se soustředí na ostatní typy jazykové úspornosti použité v chatové komunikaci. Nejprve se zabývá použitím interpunkce v chatové komunikaci. Dokazuje, že většina uživatelů chatu interpunkci nedodržuje. Zvláštní pozornost je věnována používání apostrofů. Další část se věnuje používání velkých písmen. Soustředí se na osobní zájmeno „I“. Jak výzkum dokázal, většina uživatelů nedodržuje pravopis s velkým písmenem. Další část demonstruje příklady elipsy a jiných nevětných struktur hojně používáných uživately chatu. Poslední část této kapitoly je věnována gramatické správnosti chatové komunikace. Všechny předchozí zmíněné metody mohou naznačovat, že uživatel nedodržuje jazykové a gramatické konvence, ovšem z hlediska gramatické správnosti je jazyk chatu téměř bezchybný. Můžeme se setkat s překlepy, ale jinak je většina příspěvků gramaticky správná.
Internet a chatové komunikace se objevily spolu s novými technologiemi a přináší sebou i změny v jazyce. Na první pohled se tyto změny mohou jevit jako nedbalost uživatelů chatu, ale při bližším zkoumání zjistíme, že tyto změny jsou cílené a slouží jako jazyk komunity. Ti, kteří nejsou se změnami srozuměni, jen těžko do této komunity proniknou.
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LIST OF TABLES
1. Differences between BNC and COCA
2. Types of verbless clauses and examples from my corpus
3. List of English bound inflectional morphemes
4. Study of English bound inflectional morphemes
5. Prefixes, suffixes and roots according to their origin
6. Words with the infix “bloody”
7. Words with the infix “fucking”
8. Differences between derivation and inflection
9. Compounds according to Plag
10. Research on compounds
11. Spelling and pronunciation of abbreviations
12. The most frequent Acronyms and Initials
13. Acronyms and Initials
14. Abbreviations in BNC and COCA
15. Clippings
16. Clippings in BNC and COCA
17. Nicknames and truncation
18. Blends in BNC and COCA
19. Logograms in my corpus
20. Emoticons and other symbols and their frequency
21. Non standard spellings in my corpus
22. Words with omitted letters in my corpus
23. The usage of periods, question marks and exclamation marks in my corpus
24. Apostrophes in my corpus
25. Words without apostrophes in BNC and COCA
26. Capital letters in my corpus
27. Capitalization of the personal proun I.
28. Main categories of ellipsis by Quirk et al. (894)
29. Types of ellipsis with examples from my corpus
appendices
P I My corpus (1.1.1)
Anotace
Autor: Bc. Nela Nevařilová
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Název diplomové práce: Abbreviation Methods in Chat Communication
Vedoucí diplomové práce: Doc. PhDr. Ludmila Veselovská, M.A., Dr.
Počet znaků (včetně příloh) : 196 788
Počet příloh: 1
Počet titulů použité literatury: 21
Charakteristika práce v ČJ:
Cílem této práce bylo analyzovat specifické charakteristiky jazyku chatové komunikace na Internetu. Práce uvádí základní fakta z historie Internetu a chatových skupin a popisuje specifické charakteristiky jazyka chatu. Představuje základní procesy tvoření slov v angličtině, soustředí se na dva základní typy- kombinace morfémů zkracování morfémů. Práce také popisuje další způsoby jazykové úspornosti, například použití interpunkce, velkých písmen, elipsy a dalších polovětných vazeb. Text je doplněn příklady ze tří různých korpusů, BNC, COCA a mého vlastního korpusu chatových diskuzí.
Klíčová slova v ČJ:
Jazyk chatu, specifické charakteristiky, tvoření slov, kombinace morfémů, zkracování, jiné způsoby jazykové úspornosti, elipsa, interpunkce, velká písmena
Charakteristika práce v AJ:
This work is aimed as an attempt to analyse the specific characteristics of the chat style on the Internet. The thesis consists of some basic facts from the history of the Internet and chat discussions. Specific features of chat language are described. I will also introduce word formation processes in English and concentrate on two basic methods of word-formation: combination of morphemes and shortenings. Other ways of language economy will be also mentioned, i.e. examples of omitting of punctuation, the usage of capital letters, ellipsis and other non-sentence fragments. Throughout the text I will illustrate all my claims and conclusions with numbers of typical examples taken from three different corpora, i.e. the corpus I collected myself, the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English.
Klíčová slova v AJ:
Chat language, specific features, word-formation, combination of morphemes, shortenings, other ways of language economy, ellipsis, punctuation, Capital letters
appendix p i: My corpus
Date: 24.4.2008
Chat:
1. [pic]Damien_Myers: ffs
2. [pic]EndofDaze: diamondjane87 cunt
3. [pic]dodzdadon: princess.leigha wat du u do, study,work..?
4. [pic]andym30: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
5. [pic]neliste: hi
6. [pic]xukguyx08: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
7. [pic]diamondjane87: EndofDaze mothercunt
8. [pic]kido: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
9. [pic]xxswxx: hay all u lovely people how r we tonight?
10. [pic]babyboyish: any sweet curvy lady in here for a chat.pm me
11. [pic]superbabeswansea: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
12. [pic]miSs_Secret: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
13. [pic]scottish_soldier25: enjoying the leave diamondjane87 doin nuffin lol
14. [pic]EndofDaze: yep!
15. [pic]diamondjane87: woop woop scottish_soldier25 lol. wen r u back?
16. [pic]mattuk1985: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
17. [pic]dodzdadon: princess.leigha r u nt gonna chat with me?
18. [pic]nina8: no im tunisien Dilz
19. (Message from km_mulls) aww how cute are u [pic]
20. [pic]princess.leigha [pic]ffs are all the barnsley/donny/rotherham/inbetweeny ppl coming out to play now or summat [pic][pic]
21. [pic]diamondjane87: u dont need to tell me "yep!" i know this
22. hoo81 finds everyone boring... . o O ( YAWN! )
23. [pic]mattuk1985: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
24. [pic]nina8: do u know tunisia Dilz ?
25. [pic]levent_ist: heyaaaa everyonees.....who wants to chat for crazyyyy....
26. [pic]EndofDaze: yep [pic][pic]
27. [pic]SingleFunMale2004: I Aint Ignoring You But I'll Be Back Soon
28. [pic]levent_ist: i like nightlifeeeee
29. [pic]therealkevincrosbie: hi neliste
30. [pic]SingleFunMale2004: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
31. [pic]levent_ist: who wants to dance with meee)
32. [pic]midget20: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
33. [pic]diamondjane87: yes this......... [pic]
34. [pic]EndofDaze: yes yo momma
35. [pic]red_devil_33: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
36. [pic]Medic.69: princessfi82 hot hot hot
37. [pic]eolande: hello all
38. [pic]princess.leigha [pic]wheres he buggered off to nah lol[pic]
39. [pic]willo: hey room
40. [pic]princessfi82: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
41. [pic]niki_1982: any1 fancy a chat [pic]
42. scottish_soldier25: at the wk end im afraid diamondjane87
43. [pic]x_tallguy_x: hello Stella_lady2006 how r u [pic]
44. [pic]harriers70d: ello to all
45. [pic]diamondjane87: awww scottish_soldier25 [pic]
46. [pic]red_devil_33: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
47. [pic]Kel20: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
48. [pic]love-u-2: Hiya anyone wanna cht with a nice guy 22 from rotherham [pic][pic]
49. [pic]Leandro_20: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
50. [pic]Bigtrigger69: I`m away from my keyboard for a while - but I`ll be back later (messages will be saved for me)
51. [pic]princessfi82: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
52. [pic]Bigtrigger69: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
53. [pic]therealkevincrosbie: hiya niki_1982 u wanna chat with me?
54. [pic]nina8: oh really have u been there before Dilz ?
55. [pic]diamondjane87 grins at BadBoyBubba mischievously.
56. [pic]diamondjane87: yey new emote
57. [pic]levent_ist: im living holidaay))
58. [pic]diamondjane87: go me
59. [pic]BadBoyBubba winks seductively at diamondjane87.
60. [pic]diamondjane87: i rule
61. xxswxx: hi eolande how r u on this fine thursday night
62. [pic]willo: leicester anyone?
63. [pic]BadBoyBubba [pic]emotes are for winners [pic][pic]
64. [pic]fsprite: any ladies want to chat to 25 m uk ? new pics on profile.... pm me
65. [pic]nina8: r u english Dilz ?
66. [pic]i.love.spanking: any one wanna chat
67. [pic]therealkevincrosbie [pic]yeah u keep tellin yaself that diamondjane87 lol[pic]
68. [pic]smiler192: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
69. [pic]diamondjane87 [pic]yes thats right!! in ur face non emote users!![pic]
70. [pic]EndofDaze: u suck
71. [pic]nina8: hi LLBboy ,how was ur day?
72. [pic]squaddie_22: hooooooorny!
73. [pic]diamondjane87: i do not suck!
74. [pic]diamondjane87: u do
75. [pic]bluebeard64: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
76. [pic]dusty05: hey anyone wanna chat to 20/m/southampton???
77. dodzdadon: any1 accountants int he room yet?
78. [pic]iamlink: heyhey princessfi82 [pic]
79. [pic]bigry: hey room andy ladys from scotland wanna chat pm me
80. [pic]therealkevincrosbie [pic]all women clean [pic][pic]
81. [pic]princessfi82: hi iamlink
82. [pic]xxcymruambythxx: hollyoaks is borin me
83. [pic]joanne1989 says hi to all.
84. [pic]EndofDaze: i dnt need emotes i have this: [pic]
85. [pic]eolande: xxswxx fine thanks u?
86. [pic]breese1674: hi joanne1989
87. [pic]harriers70d: hiya joanne1989
88. [pic]MarcieBaby08: anyone wana pm me? x
89. [pic]Angie22co: Hi all!!
90. amlink: sorry about my pic princessfi82
91. [pic]diamondjane87: sit on it then [pic]
92. [pic]sgreen36: sure MarcieBaby08
93. [pic]wantmexxx: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
94. [pic]love_to_live: [pic]EndofDaze
95. [pic]bigry: any ladys fancy a chat
96. [pic]brit_soldier_77: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
97. [pic]miSs_Secret: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
98. [pic]xxswxx: not bad eolande stuck at work all night
99. [pic]wantmexxx: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
100. [pic]scottish_soldier25: hiya joanne1989 howz u tonite?
101. [pic]diamondjane87: therealkevincrosbie how rude, all women rule and the
sooner u learn this the sooner we can quit messing around and shag
102. [pic]EndofDaze: i will an ill like it
103. [pic]sgreen36: hi there joanne1989
104. [pic]MarcieBaby08: sgreen36 k hun
105. [pic]joanne1989: hi ppl
106. oanne1989: im ok ty
107. [pic]love_to_live [pic]amber4711 [pic][pic]
108. [pic]diamondjane87: u probably wud
109. [pic]Leandro_20: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
110. [pic]brit_soldier_77: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
111. [pic]sgreen36: welcome plainjayne1981
112. [pic]EndofDaze: women are cunts, they dnt just have them
113. [pic]therealkevincrosbie: lol yeah yeah diamondjane87 as the saying goes hunni ....... dont hate the playa hate the game!!! [pic]
114. [pic]willo: any leicester ppl in
115. [pic]levent_ist says hi to Angie22co.
116. [pic]squaddie_22: any1 fit about?
|[pic] |The Sun tells you: EXCLUSIVE - KELLY Brook has split from fiancé Billy Zane |
117. [pic]plainjayne1981: hey all the 18 pluses
118. [pic]breese1674: cute pic joanne1989
119. [pic]taliisman77: hi joanne1989
120. [pic]steven23msn: babe
121. [pic]diamondjane87: errrr ok therealkevincrosbie ..... r u rly called kevin tho?
122. [pic]steven23msn: how r u
123. [pic]joanne1989: [pic]
124. [pic]steven23msn: male
125. [pic]plainjayne1981: thanks sgreen36 how are you
126. [pic]Angie22co: Hi levent_ist how u?
127. plainjayne1981: thanks sgreen36 how are you
128. [pic]Angie22co: Hi levent_ist how u?
129. [pic]choocichoo looks around.
130. [pic]gogogal says hello to everybody.
131. [pic]therealkevincrosbie: yes i am diamondjane87
132. [pic]iamlink: your pics are nice though princessfi82 [pic]
133. [pic]diamondjane87: ur called kevin crosbie?? therealkevincrosbie
134. [pic]maddy_from_poland: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
135. [pic]amber4711 [pic]love_to_live xx[pic]
136. [pic]thonglover_uk04: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
137. [pic]pat_apu: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
138. [pic]amber4711 says hi to all.
139. [pic]LadyLostris: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
140. [pic]dodzdadon: sex any!
141. [pic]therealkevincrosbie: yes diamondjane87 ( sheesh how hard can it be!! )
142. [pic]dodzdadon: sex any1?
143. [pic]Diesel786786: hiya all_fun
144. [pic]taliisman77: hi amber4711
145. Diesel786786: hiya all_fun
146. [pic]taliisman77: hi amber4711
147. [pic]dodzdadon: accountants any1?
148. [pic]sgreen36: fine and hows u plainjayne1981
149. [pic]mids28: hey everyone
150. [pic]dodzdadon: josb any1?
151. [pic]levent_ist: angie22co im verywell ))
152. [pic]diamondjane87: therealkevincrosbie !!! dont get cocky!
153. [pic]peewee-usa: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
154. [pic]Woodynz: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
155. (Message from km_mulls) [pic]
156. [pic]peewee-usa: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
157. [pic]plainjayne1981: im ok thanks sgreen36
158. therealkevincrosbie: ahh but man with hole in pocket feel cocky all day diamondjane87 [pic]
159. [pic]bluebeard64: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
160. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk creeps behind diamondjane87 and roars: BOOOH!
161. [pic]kizza702: 18 f uk pm me
162. [pic]LadyLostris: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
163. [pic]sgreen36: good so what u been doing plainjayne1981
164. [pic]diamondjane87: marlboro_gold_uk [pic]
165. [pic]amber4711 give marlboro_gold_uk the biggest hug from the smallest gal in town [pic]
166. marlboro_gold_uk snogs diamondjane87 to the floor.
167. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk puts on his shades [pic]and does the madness baggy trouser dance with amber4711
168. [pic]davecorsa: hey
169. (Message from miranda1981) hey..wanna help me take the pi ss out of a loser guy? lol
170. [pic]Diesel786786: hiya any1 lol
171. [pic]wizzhmm says hi to all.
172. [pic]iamlink: heyhey choocichoo ?
173. diamondjane87 kisses marlboro_gold_uk.
174. [pic]BadBoyBubba: diamondjane87 .... are u really called jane? [pic]
175. [pic]amber4711 welcomes all newcomers.
176. [pic]wizzhmm: any1 for a chat here?
177. [pic]wizzhmm says hi to amber4711.
178. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk tickles diamondjane87 's back
179. plainjayne1981: sgreen36 this and that lol
180. [pic]Diesel786786: hiya amber4711
181. [pic]six_pack [pic]any girls in from manchester wanna chat[pic]
182. (Message from manchesterlad1984) Hi there
183. [pic]HotRugbyStar: any ladies for a chat pm me
184. [pic]choocichoo says hello to iamlink.
185. [pic]amber4711 [pic]trident_barclay[pic]
186. sgreen36: so a busy day then plainjayne1981 lol
187. [pic]Jameswa23 says hi to all.
188. [pic]willo: no one from leicester?
189. [pic]HotRugbyStar looks for someone to chat with.
190. [pic]iamlink: you have lovely pictures choocichoo [pic]
191. [pic]iamlink: better than mine anyway choocichoo !
192. (You tell manchesterlad1984) hi hru?
193. [pic]tinribs1987: any ladys for a chat pm me plz
194. [pic]choocichoo: ty iamlink
195. [pic]plainjayne1981: yeah pretty busy sgreen36 what about you
196. iamondjane87: further south marlboro_gold_uk [pic]
197. [pic]diamondjane87: haha
198. [pic]sgreen36: quite busy. so what u doing now
199. [pic]cdlad: any ladies up for a chat pm me
200. [pic]TheTemptress: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
201. [pic]sgreen36: quite busy. so what u doing now plainjayne1981
202. [pic]gogogal looks for someone to chat with.
203. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk winks at diamondjane87 *wink*WINK*wink*
204. [pic]iamlink: how come in black and white though choocichoo ?
205. [pic]HotRugbyStar bows to gogogal hoping that she wants to chat.
206. [pic]wizzhmm says hi to gogogal.
207. BadBoyBubba flicks diamondjane87 's bean [pic]
208. [pic]markyboy180: looking to chat with a female PM me
209. [pic]gogogal: HotRugbyStar hey how r u
210. [pic]diamondjane87: lmao BadBoyBubba thanks
211. [pic]a1fie: any females from herts??
212. (Message from manchesterlad1984) not bad bit single and bored
213. [pic]gogogal: wizzhmm hello how r u
214. [pic]plainjayne1981: watching jackie chan on jetix lol
215. [pic]EndofDaze: fucking cunts
216. [pic]nffcwatto: I`m away from my keyboard for a while - but I`ll be back later (messages will be saved for me)
217. [pic]diamondjane87: shush u
218. [pic]HotRugbyStar: good gogogal and u?
219. Stella_lady2006: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
220. [pic]choocichoo: cos i just did iamlink lol
221. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk tickles diamondjane87 's thighs [pic]
222. [pic]wizzhmm: i am good gogogal
223. [pic]amber4711 [pic]omg ffs another new name ?[pic]
224. [pic]sammyluvs: hello [pic]
225. [pic]choocichoo: darling EndofDaze [pic]
226. [pic]gogogal: HotRugbyStar good thanx
227. nffcwatto: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
228. [pic]EndofDaze [pic]get ur cunt out for the lads[pic]
229. [pic]Jameswa23 [pic]anyone fancy a chat?[pic]
230. [pic]gogogal: wizzhmm good to hear
231. [pic]HotRugbyStar: thats good so wat ru up 2 gogogal ?
232. [pic]markyboy180: hello sammyluvs
233. [pic]diamondjane87: bit higher marlboro_gold_uk lol
234. [pic]cittycat83: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
235. [pic]taliisman77: ello sammyluvs
236. markyboy180: hello sammyluvs
237. [pic]diamondjane87: bit higher marlboro_gold_uk lol
238. [pic]cittycat83: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
239. [pic]taliisman77: ello sammyluvs
240. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk is astonished by diamondjane87.
241. [pic]BadBoyBubba [pic]belly button diamondjane87 ?? [pic]Lol[pic]
242. [pic]gogogal: HotRugbyStar chillin and chattin u
243. [pic]therealkevincrosbie sighs deeply.
244. [pic]diamondjane87 [pic]no i think u know where BadBoyBubba [pic][pic]
245. (Message from terry_fortune) hi howur?
246. [pic]amber4711 runs over to desprado6 and hits desprado6 on the head with my club [pic]bam bam [pic]
247. diamondjane87: marlboro_gold_uk [pic]
248. [pic]HotRugbyStar: yea me to gogogal its hot over in the u.s. at the moment
249. [pic]choocichoo: Be back in a mo!!!
250. [pic]RedBull33 hifives marlboro_gold_uk... *SMACK*
251. [pic]iamlink: haha, no worries choocichoo
252. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk chucks red_devil_33 a beer.
253. [pic]iamlink: you like my pic choocichoo ?
254. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk chucks RedBull33 a beer.
255. nina8: yeah approximetly
256. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk [pic]tab abuse[pic]
257. [pic]gogogal: HotRugbyStar lucky u
258. [pic]Kel20: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
259. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk [pic]i bet i know what diamondjane87 likes [pic][pic]
260. [pic]sgreen36: welcome hotgirlsingle
261. [pic]HotRugbyStar: whys that gogogal ?
262. [pic]diamondjane87 [pic]lol marlboro_gold_uk ...... do tell[pic]
263. gogogal goes ROFL (Rollin` On the Floor Laughing)
264. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk [pic]shh diamondjane87 there's children present [pic][pic]
265. [pic]Buffy82 jumps up and down on six_pack.
266. [pic]six_pack: Buffy82 [pic]
267. [pic]diamondjane87 [pic]lol marlboro_gold_uk ...... is it x-rated [pic][pic]
268. [pic]gogogal: HotRugbyStar cause i live in ireland and weather is terrible
269. [pic]nina8: hi terry_fortune ,how u r doing?
270. [pic]trident_barclay: Evening folks [pic]
271. [pic]RedBull33 thinks that Buffy82 is ..-* HOT *-..
272. [pic]EndofDaze: gogogal are you a stripper [pic]?
273. [pic]Buffy82: wot six_pack u know u love it really [pic]lmao
274. [pic]Buffy82: hey RedBull33
275. amber4711 [pic]trident_barclay again pmsl[pic]
276. [pic]six_pack agrees with Buffy82 wholeheartedly.
277. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk [pic]lol diamondjane87 not quite x rated no, more like a v or a w [pic][pic]
278. [pic]Kel20: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
279. [pic]trident_barclay: amber4711 hello honey [pic]sorry i keep getting called away honey [pic]
280. [pic]gogogal: EndofDaze no im not
281. [pic]HotRugbyStar: aww yea i hear the uk su cks weather wise
282. [pic]RedBull33: msn crash on you Buffy82 ?
283. [pic]Buffy82: lol six_pack
284. [pic]amber4711: awww trident_barclay lol
285. [pic]cruxdlux: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
286. [pic]Ollie_Ingham69: Mr_Luvr_Luvr_Umm whatup playa! lol
287. [pic]Buffy82: yeah RedBull33 it does my head hun
288. diamondjane87 [pic]well marlboro_gold_uk unless its x-rated i just dont want to know [pic][pic]
289. [pic]trident_barclay: amber4711 you had a good day honey? [pic]
290. [pic]EndofDaze: gogogal but ur name says gogogal ?
291. [pic]princessfi82: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
292. [pic]Buffy82 [pic] oh brilliant [pic]
293. [pic]amber4711: yeah not bad trident_barclay aint done much today lol and u ?
294. [pic]kungfoolai: hi every1
295. [pic]harriers70d: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
296. [pic]cruxdlux: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
297. [pic]gogogal: EndofDaze so
298. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk [pic]tut tut diamondjane87 broaden your horizons [pic][pic]
299. trident_barclay: amber4711 a busy day at work honey [pic]all right for you lazy girl [pic]
300. [pic]Bigtrigger69: I`m away from my keyboard for a while - but I`ll be back later (messages will be saved for me)
301. [pic]Bigtrigger69: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
302. [pic]trident_barclay: ke you?
303. [pic]amber4711 giggles.
304. [pic]EndofDaze: gogogal that must mean ur a stripper
305. [pic]iamlink: heyey kungfoolai
306. [pic]trident_barclay: kungfoolai how are you?
307. [pic]EndofDaze: ??
308. [pic]diamondjane87 [pic]lessen urs marlboro_gold_uk haha[pic]
309. [pic]nina8: yeah approximetly Dilz
310. [pic]james091085: 22 m leeds here pm me girls
311. (Message from Silvasantos) [pic]hello
312. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk sHaKeS aLl OvEr LaUgHiNg At diamondjane87.
313. rident_barclay: evening Kel20 [pic]you okay?
314. (You tell Silvasantos) hi
315. [pic]hottmale23662: ta da!!
316. [pic]HotRugbyStar looks for someone to chat with.
317. [pic]james091085: y is every1 so quite in here these days
318. [pic]hottmale23662: diamondjane87!
319. [pic]marlboro_gold_uk picks up a feather duster and waves it at diamondjane87 [pic]
320. [pic]diamondjane87: hottmale23662
321. fsprite: I`m away from my keyboard for a while - but I`ll be back later (messages will be saved for me)
322. [pic]HotRugbyStar: any laides for a chat pm me pics on profile
323. [pic]six_pack [pic]plz note guys Buffy82 is gaggin for it feel free 2 pm her she will love it [pic]lmfao[pic]
324. [pic]Leandro_20: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
325. [pic]Leandro_20: Now I`m back again - Time to Chat [pic]
326. [pic]six_pack goes ROFL (Rollin` On the Floor Laughing) over Buffy82.
327. [pic]Buffy82 slaps six_pack.
328. EmmaLouiseMay: Evening All, 17 Yr Old Hampshire Lass x
329. [pic]markyboy180: Any ladies wanna chat pm me
330. [pic]hottmale23662: what's the haps today diamondjane87?
331. [pic]six_pack: Buffy82 ohhhhhh i like it [pic]
332. [pic]kizza702: kizza702@hotmail.co.uk add me im 18 f uk no over 28 ty
333. [pic]six_pack cheers with enthusiasm for Buffy82.
334. [pic]Kel20: hiya tridentbarclay [pic]yeah im pretty good you?
335. [pic]hottmale23662 gives choocichoo a demanding kiss on her lips.
336. [pic]sgreen36: welcome kimwales
337. trident_barclay: Olivia17 i know i'm handsom but no need to keep following me [pic]
338. [pic]diamondjane87: nothing hottmale23662 , same old dude!!
339. [pic]llx_liam_xll1: I`m away from my keyboard right now - but I`ll be back later (your message has been saved for me)
340. [pic]squaddie_22: boored fit squaddiehere
341. (Message from Silvasantos) [pic]how are you
342. [pic]irish_buc12: any1 wanna chat pm me
343. [pic]sgreen36: hi EmmaLouiseMay
344. [pic]safc241986: anybody want 2 c my 22 year old gf do a dirty cam show about 9 or 10
345. [pic]trident_barclay: all good here Kel20 [pic]you had a y honey?
346. [pic]BadBoyBubba: ................
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