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Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Analysis of Exclamations Posted to Two Electronic Discussion Lists
Abstract
Past research has reported that females use exclamation points more frequently than do males. Such research often characterizes exclamation points as “markers of excitability,” a term that suggests instability and emotional randomness, yet it has not necessarily examined the contexts in which exclamation points appeared for evidence of “excitability.” The present study uses a 16-category coding frame in a content analysis of 200 exclamations posted to two electronic discussion groups serving the library and information science profession. The results indicate that exclamation points rarely function as markers of excitability in these professional forums, but may function as markers of friendly interaction, a finding with implications for understanding gender styles in email and other forms of computer-mediated communication.
... Systematic gender differences have been noted in CMC modes such as e-mail, discussion forums, chat, and blogs, especially as regards discourse-pragmatic phenomena such as topic and politeness (Herring, 1994(Herring, , 2003Herring & Paolillo, 2006). Of particular relevance to this paper, a smaller number of CMC studies have also identified gender differences with respect to micro-level phenomena such as emoticons (Witmer & Katzman, 1997), punctuation (Waseleski, 2006), and non-standard orthography (Zelenkauskaite & Herring, 2006). ...
... Consistent with findings that women smile more than men in face-to-face settings, emoticons and other textual representations of smiling and laughter are also used more often by women than by men in both synchronous and asynchronous CMC (Herring, 2003;Witmer & Katzman, 1997). Relatedly, in a study of an asynchronous discussion forum, Waseleski (2006) found that exclamation points were used more often by females. However, rather than functioning as markers of excitability, as has been popularly claimed, the exclamation points were analyzed by Waseleski as indicating friendly interaction. ...
... The most common type re question marks. The main subtypes of repeated punctuation found in the full iTV SMS corpus are broken down by gender in Figure 8. (Note: The symbols …, !!!, and ??? in the figure are used to represent any number of repetitions of the symbol greater than 1.) Females used more repeated punctuation, especially exclamation points, than did males, consistent with the finding of Waseleski (2006). The results for the other types of insertion (with the exception of inserted Zz at the beginning and end of a message, which hese, most common is typing an apostrophe after a vowel to replace a diacritic that would be present in the standard written language. ...
Unlike traditional genres of writing, interactive text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) exhibits considerable typographic variability. This study analyzes gender variation in abbreviations and insertions in mobile phone text messages (SMS) posted to a public Italian interactive television (iTV) program. All broadcast SMS were collected for a period of two days from the web archive for the iTV program, for a corpus of roughly 1,500 SMS, and the frequency and distribution of abbreviations and insertions, as well as overall message lengths, were analyzed according to sender gender. The results reveal that females posted more and longer SMS and used more non-standard forms, contrary to previous gender-related findings in the sociolinguistics and CMC literatures. Differences are also found in the types of abbreviation and insertion that females and males preferred. An explanation for these findings is proposed in terms of the local and contex-tual norms of an implicit iTV SMS dating market.
... Moving on to the second theme, while early mentions of 'unconventional' or 'non-standard' punctuation in the CMC literature (e.g. Runkehl et al., 1998 ;Werry, 1996 ) emphasize the difference between prescriptive punctuation rules and actual usage in empirical data, research has also addressed aspects of sociolinguistic variation, notably gender, with the fondness of female users for expressive punctuation repeatedly pointed out ( Waseleski, 2006 ;Baron & Ling, 2011 ;McSweeney, 2018 ). Herring & Zelenkauskaite (2008) examine public text messages in Italian for correlations between author gender (indicated by names and pronouns) and omission or iteration of punctuation signs. ...
... In alphabetical order,Baron & Ling, 2011 ;Crystal, 2015 ;Gunraj et al., 2016 ;Herring & Zelenkauskaite, 2008 ;Houghton et al., 2018 ;Ling & Baron, 2007 ;McSweeney, 2018 ;Ong, 2011 ;Squires, 2012;Vandergriff, 2013 ;Waseleski, 2006 ; and our own research, Androutsopoulos, 2018 ; 2020 ; Busch, 2018 ; 2020 . ...
This paper outlines a multi-level framework for empirical research on punctuation in digitally-mediated interaction and exemplifies it by close qualitative analysis of a corpus of WhatsApp conversations collected among secondary-school students in Northern Germany. We propose a sociolinguistic analysis of digital punctuation that orients to Silverstein's notion of “total linguistic fact” (Silverstein 1985), i.e. the integrative study of linguistic form, language practices, and language ideologies. Applying this to the case of the period, our analysis integrates its frequency of use in digital conversations, its placement in a message, the illocutionary force of messages that contain a period, and their sequential placement in digital interaction. Our findings suggest the period undergoes a process of pragmaticalization, i.e. a gain of pragmatic functions at the expenses of syntactic ones. In particular, its overall quite rare use in message-final position is found to contextualize a terminal point in the on-going interaction. Based on the interplay between digital data, ethnographic insights and interviews with informants, the analysis then shows that the metapragmatic awareness of period use among the adolescents is linked to its on-going enregisterment as an index of communicative distance and a part of adult and professional registers of language. We suggest the pragmaticalized period is a salient feature of a register of informal written language, which our informants identify as part of their everyday out-of-school digital practices. These informal practices co-exist with institutional literacy norms to which the students equally orient to. We juxtapose these insights to the thematising of punctuation in German school textbooks.
... Academic research has moved from treating these orthographic means as markers of 'excitability' in the speech of women, a phrase that unfortunately connotes emotional randomness, to acknowledging their non-genderness and multifunctionality. Waseleski (2006), for instance, identifies three broad functions for them in digital communication, namely their being markers of: friendliness (expressions of cordiality and thanking), factuality (statements, regardless of their truth value) and, in only c. 10% of her data, excitability (sarcasm, flaming and effusive thanks). Although all three functions were present in our corpus, exclamation marks and capitalisation were primarily used as markers of excitability (principally flaming 10 ), as in (4), and factuality, as in (5). ...
... 9 See, for example: https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2012/04/25/ how-mail-and-texting-have-driven-people-overuse-exclamation-points-confes sions-serial-exclamation-pointer/bSKe7sq0TEZLHcq1bq5A7M/story.html; and http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/exclamation-point-flowchart. 10 The term flaming is used here as in Waseleski's (2006) work, which includes a continuum from the expression of annoyance to the verbalisation of personal insults. ...
There has been a major cultural shift away from 'passive'consumption to more active production of digital texts by citizens. Yet,this does not mean that we all participate in digital media in the same ways and for the same reasons. Nor does it mean that we all have the same level of access to digital networks. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the diversity and fluidity of citizen participation in digital environments by examining the discourse style of a particular group of digital users, namely citizens whose contributions become crowdsourced to prominence in microblogging. We refer to this form of citizen participation as 'influential', in as much as the discourse of these citizens attracts inordinate levels of attention and can trigger social contagion. We conduct a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of a corpus of tweets posted by a group of citizens who emerge as 'influential' within a Twitter debate about the minimum / living wage. Our analysis reveals that their discourse style is characterised by (i) limited content originality but a high participation rate; (ii) a continuum of thematic engagement; (iii) high levels of emotionality; and (iv) a preference towards stance-taking acts that convey full confidence in one's views.
... In terms of the effects of emoticons and punctuation, if it is the case that the wink emoticon is most effective as a sarcasm marker (e.g., Derks et al., 2008), then we would expect the wink emoticon to have the biggest influence on irony ratings. If, on the other hand, the ellipsis (e.g., Hancock, 2004) or exclamation mark (e.g., Whalen et al., 2009; see also Adams, 2012;Waseleski, 2006) is more effective, then we would expect the highest irony ratings in these conditions instead. For more exploratory purposes, we also tested the influence of the tongue face emoticon (following Carvalho, Sarmento, Silva, & de Oliveira, 2009;Garrison, Remley, Thomas, & Wierszewski, 2011). ...
... This is partially in line with Carvalho et al. (2009), who include the tongue face emoticon in their category of positive emoticons, and perhaps Garrison et al. (2011), who suggest it indicates playfulness. Interestingly, the presence of an exclamation mark made all comments appear more positive, which would support previous work by Waseleski (2006), which suggested that exclamation marks may function as markers of friendly interaction. The presence of ellipsis did not affect perceived emotional impact. ...
Most theorists agree that sarcasm serves some communicative function that would not be achieved by speaking directly, such as eliciting a particular emotional response in the recipient. One debate concerns whether this kind of language serves to enhance or mute the positive or negative nature of a message. The role of textual devices commonly used to accompany written sarcastic remarks is also unclear. The current research uses a rating task to investigate the influence of textual devices (emoticons and punctuation marks), on the comprehension of, and emotional responses to, sarcastic vs. literal criticism and praise, for both unambiguous (Experiment 1) and ambiguous (Experiment 2) materials. Results showed that sarcastic criticism was rated as less negative than literal criticism, and sarcastic praise was rated as less positive than literal praise, suggesting that sarcasm serves to mute the positive or negative nature of the message. In terms of textual devices, results showed that emoticons had a larger influence on both comprehension and emotional impact than punctuation marks.
... Then, Wilson acknowledges his being the first subordinate to refuse, "criticizing" for Edmund's takeover of the cashier which causes a sudden increase of orders (lines 6-9). While Wilson's response is (superficially) impolite, he imitates a friendly tone with exclamation marks (Waseleski, 2006). He also implies Edmund's fast-trade skills, which are normally valued in catering business. ...
... Given this online context, his consecutive use of exclamation mark in the last situation further imitates the tone of (mild) argument (cf. Waseleski, 2006). In the interview, Fred also made it clear that he had "intended to lecture some troublemakers who create a bad work mood". ...
Workplace discourse analysis (WDA) has gathered momentum to researching how people interact and manipulate power in face-to-face workplace talk under the Communities of Practice (CofP) framework. However, WDA studies have seldom touched on how colleagues talk after work and outside the workplace; nor have these studies questioned whether the CofP framework can conceptualize such an emergent form of workplace talk. Drawing on empirical data collected from one Hong Kong branch of an Italian restaurant, this study aims to (1) explore how its employees communicate workplace issues and negotiate power in Facebook Status Updates after work and (2) examine use of the CofP framework in their talk which takes place outside the workplace. Adopting methods of discourse analysis, we find that colleagues individualize their talk in Status Updates for highlighting professionality, suggesting administrative changes, managing colleague relationships, and releasing work-oriented tension. In these processes involving Netspeak, institutional authority, official hierarchy and predetermined status are largely fluctuating or collapsing. Simultaneously, there are often ambiguity or invisibility in relation to the indispensable substances in a CofP, namely the strength of joint enterprises, form of mutual engagements and use of shared repertoire. We conclude by arguing that (1) Status Updates can be strategically used after work, usually in a more casual and personal manner, to attain workplace-oriented goals and re/negotiate power among colleagues, and that (2) it remains questionable whether the online workplace talk by a group of colleagues after work can be appropriately conceptualized by the existing use of CofP framework in WDA.
... Consistent with findings that women smile more than men in face-to-face settings, emoticons and other textual representations of smiling and laughter are also used more often by women than by men in both synchronous and asynchronous CMC (Herring, 2003;Witmer & Katz, 1997). Relatedly, in a study of an asynchronous discussion forum, Waseleski (2006) found that exclamation points were used more often by females. Rather than functioning as markers of excitability, as has been popularly claimed, the exclamation points were analyzed by Waseleski as indicating friendly interaction. ...
... The main subtypes of repeated punction found in the full iTV SMS corpus are broken down by gender in Table 3 Except for repeated question marks, which were used equally often by both genders, females used more repeated punctuation of each type than did males. This is especially the case for exclamation marks, consistent with Waseleski's (2006) findings for an Internet discussion list and with the societal expectation that females are more emotionally expressive. ...
This study analyzes gender variation in nonstandard typography--specifically, abbreviations and insertions--in mobile phone text messages (SMS) posted to a public Italian interactive television (iTV) program. All broadcast SMS were collected for a period of 2 days from the Web archive for the iTV program, and the frequency and distribution of abbreviations and insertions, as well as overall message lengths, were analyzed according to sender gender. The results reveal that females posted more and longer SMS and followed more, and more varied, nonstandard typographic practices, contrary to previous gender-related findings in the sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication literatures. A theoretically grounded explanation for these findings is developed in terms of the localized norms of a heterosexual market--and an implicit dating market--in Italian iTV SMS. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures and 17 notes.)
... Tiyaamornwong, O'Connor, & Seibold, 2002; Guiller & Durndell, 2006; Jaffe, Lee, Huang, & Oshagan, 1999; Postmes & Spears, 1992; Savicki, Lingenfelter, & Kelley, 1996; Waseleski, 2006). Therefore, there is still lack of understanding on how anonymity in CMC affects gender as a social identity in small group communication context. ...
... Flanagin et al. (2002) indicated that due to perceived status differences in gender by women, in general women 1) perceived their contributions to be accepted more readily in CMC setting than in FtF setting, 2) enjoy the anonymity more than men, and 3) recognize the social benefits afforded them through reduced social cues. Waseleski (2006) found that in CMC discussions, 73% of the exclamations were posted by females, while only 27% of them were posted by males. Most of these exclamations fell into the category of 1) thanks used in closing or opening (e.g.: Thanks! ...
Topics within small-group communication have been explored in many contexts, such as work group, organizational meeting, or online network. This area of discipline is considered crucial because this type of communication assimilates interpersonal relations within a social setting. Two elements that largely affect small-group communication dynamics are anonymity and social identity. This research invokes previous research in anonymity and social identity within small-group communication pertaining to the level of agreement and the level of group attraction through a series of experiments.Anonymity in small-group communication context is defined as a condition where the group members are not identifiable. To create anonymity among group members, this study utilized the benefit of a chat room in computer-mediated communication (CMC), which allows group members to participate in group discussion anonymously without the fear of being judged. It is argued that groups communicating synchronously via CMC would have a higher agreement than those communicating face-to-face (FtF) because the anonymity in CMC eliminates all of visual cues and therefore, unites all group members. It is also argued that members in groups in FtF are more likely to be interpersonally attracted than those in CMC. Thus, members communicating via FtF would have larger cumulative group attraction than those in CMC. Meanwhile, social identity in small-group communication context is defined as the tendency of a group member to associate with fellow members who share similarities with him or her and hold prejudice against members who are different than him or her. The element of social identity that was being activated in this study was the gender identity. This was done through using a gender-related case, an opinion scale, and distributing participants into groups of different gender compositions. It is argued that single-gender groups would have higher level of agreement and group attraction than mixed-gender groups.The experiment assigned participants into six different groups. The groups communicated via FtF or via CMC. In each setting, there were male-only groups, female-only groups, and mixed-gender groups. The only statistically significant result from the experiments suggested that in CMC, female-only groups had a higher level of agreement than mixed-gender groups. However, there were also differences of mean agreement between female-only groups in FtF and female only groups in CMC. Those communicating via CMC had higher agreement. In terms of level of group attraction, there was not any significant result in any condition. This finding suggests that in CMC, groups that are exclusively females are more conducive than other gender compositions in reaching agreement. Meanwhile, the lack of significance in group attraction between FtF and CMC suggests that people have become more familiar with anonymous CMC settings allowing them to substitute the available textual cues for visual cues.
... Users whose gender or Iranian-hood could not be determined were excluded from the analysis. The data were analyzed based on a coding scheme by Waseleski (2006), using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The coding scheme is based on impoliteness strategies classified as off-record (implicit) and on-record (explicit), which are formulated by Bousfield (2008). ...
En este trabajo se estudia la evolución del modelo pedagógico denominado clase inversa (CI), traducción del término flipped classroom en inglés, en la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras en Asia oriental. El concepto fue propuesto en los Estados Unidos como una nueva estrategia de enseñanza en el entorno de la tecnología multimedia. Simplemente, el modelo metodológico de la clase inversa transfiere el proceso que tiene lugar en el aula tradicional fuera de ésta, al mismo tiempo que integra herramientas tecnológicas multimedia (Mazur, 1991; Lage, Platt, & Treglia, 2000; Bergmann & Sans, 2012). Sin embargo, este planteamiento a priori sencillo, implica un cambio profundo en la concepción del proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje, tanto a nivel particular para docentes y estudiantes en las aulas, como a nivel institucional para contar con la mentalidad e infraestructura necesarias (Zhai, 2010; Webb, Doman & Pusey, 2014).
La revisión sistemática presentada realiza una búsqueda entre más de mil artículos académicos escritos sobre la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras utilizando la base de datos CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) durante un período de siete años de enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras, de 2012 a 2019. No se han encontrado trabajos publicados sobre la CI para la enseñanza de lengua extranjera con anterioridad al año 2012 en esta base de datos. A través del método de análisis bibliográfico y del método de análisis de contenido, se analizan las características y tendencias de la investigación en el aula de lenguas extranjeras en Asia oriental. Este análisis se lleva a cabo en términos de diferentes idiomas extranjeros, distintas asignaturas de inglés, dada su presencia mayoritaria, y varios modelos de enseñanza. Los resultados son analizados simultáneamente desde tres perspectivas: valores y objetivos de la enseñanza, el enfoque adoptado en la investigación y la metodología de la CI.
... Users whose gender or Iranian-hood could not be determined were excluded from the analysis. The data were analyzed based on a coding scheme by Waseleski (2006), using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The coding scheme is based on impoliteness strategies classified as off-record (implicit) and on-record (explicit), which are formulated by Bousfield (2008). ...
Este volumen cuenta con once capítulos que muestran los avances de la lingüística aplicada y de qué forma distintos investigadores plantean soluciones a diferentes cuestiones que nos surgen tanto en el ámbito del uso como del aprendizaje de las lenguas. Son reflejo de las inquietudes actuales de la lingüística aplicada, cómo se aborda y qué cuestiones no están aún resueltas. Este volumen refleja el gran interés actual por la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de lenguas, así como en los rasgos orales y la comunicación en las redes sociales.
... Although frequencies of punctuation marks have been considered as features on AP models [49], as far as we know, gender studies tended to focus mainly on question and exclamation marks [50] or on non-standard orthography [51], and thus further research needs to be conducted on other punctuation marks, such as dashes, commas, double quotation marks, parentheses, and full-stops, which were correlated with male-authored messages according to our results. However, refs. ...
Within the area of Natural Language Processing, we approached the Author Profiling task as a text classification problem. Based on the author’s writing style, sociodemographic information, such as the author’s gender, age, or native language can be predicted. The exponential growth of user-generated data and the development of Machine-Learning techniques have led to significant advances in automatic gender detection. Unfortunately, gender detection models often become black-boxes in terms of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a tree-based computational model for gender detection made up of 198 features. Unlike the previous works on gender detection, we organized the features from a linguistic perspective into six categories: orthographic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, digital, and pragmatics-discursive. We implemented a Decision-Tree classifier to evaluate the performance of all feature combinations, and the experiments revealed that, on average, the classification accuracy increased up to 3.25% with the addition of feature sets. The maximum classification accuracy was reached by a three-level model that combined lexical, syntactic, and digital features. We present the most relevant features for gender detection according to the trees generated by the classifier and contextualize the significance of the computational results with the linguistic patterns defined by previous research in relation to gender.
... Eine Studie, die Carol Waseleski 2006 zum Thema E-mail-Kommunikation im Rahmen der Gender Studies durchgeführt hat, zeigt auf, dass die Verwendung des Ausrufezeichens nur selten dem Ausdruck von positiver oder negativer Aufregung dient. Stattdessen soll das Zeichen wichtige Aussagen betonen oder aber ehrliche Freundlichkeit vermitteln(Waseleski 2006(Waseleski : 1018. Um das Motiv der Freundlichkeit näher zu untersuchen, habe ich in meiner Studie die Teilnehmer darum gebeten, eine vorgefertigte E-mail durch Interpunktion zu ergänzen.Aufgabe: Du hast dich gestern mit einem alten Freund getroffen und schickst ihm folgende Nachricht in einer E-mail. ...
... Punctuation marks, according to past studies, serve a range of socio-pragmatic functions in online discourse (Kalman and Gergle 2014;Ong 2011;Vandergriff 2013;Waseleski 2006). ...
This research aims at investigating the use of cyberspace utterance-final expressions (CFUEs) on BBS in Taiwan. Over the past decades, an increasing number of studies all point to the considerable influence of the Internet over language use and languages structure cross-linguistically (Crystal 2011; Dresner and Herring 2010; Su 2007, among others). While most of the related research in Chinese linguistics approaches the topic from a sociolinguistic perspective (Chiang and Tsai. 2007; Su 2007, among others), relatively few explore the structural, cognitive and interpersonal motivations of the Internet language in Chinese. It thus leaves a gap for the present study to fill in. Cyberplace utterance-final expressions (IUFE) here refer to a set of particular non-conventional expressions recurrently found toward the end of utterances on the Internet, such as emoticons. By scrutinizing the use of CUFEs on BBS, an asynchronous online platform that has created a special sub-culture in Taiwan and popularized many innovative usages of Chinese, this study intends to present a taxonomy of these expressions and to propose a comprehensive account for their use. Based on data retrieved from PPT, the biggest BBS site in Taiwan, I divide CUFEs into five categories: punctuations (e.g.‘…’), emoticons (e.g. XD), onomatopoeia (e.g. keke 顆顆for laughter), parenthesized expressions (i.e. (抖) ‘(trembling)’), and others. Despite this diversity, they mostly share the same structural characteristics, cognitive motivations and interactional functions. This study not only highlights a particular linguistic phenomenon characteristic of the Internet language in Taiwan, but relates it to a more general propensity of human cognition and interaction. Furthermore, it also advances the research of Internet linguistics (Crystal 2011) in Chinese and provides a framework for future explorations.
... Morris and Anderson (2015) Discourse analysis approaches pay attention to the detailed nuances of naturally occurring language, in their endeavour to uncover the social implications of speech and writing, for example, power struggles, sexism and racism. In the context of social media, discourse analysis has repeatedly been employed in studies of identity construction (Kapidzic & Herring, 2011;Marciano, 2014;Waseleski, 2006). Interestingly, there is a noticeable majority of these type of discourse studies that have focused on analysing forums, messaging boards and chat rooms. ...
Social media users combine semiotic resources like writing, speech, still image, moving image, layout and colour when communicating online. The complex nature and forms of social media use have clear correspondences with the concerns of multimodal theory - a social semiotic theory which looks beyond speech and writing to focus on the multiple modes of meaning making and communication that constitute contemporary life. This thesis aims to explore the potentials and limitations of researching social media interaction with a multimodal approach, with a focus on how users’ textmaking choices create social media styles that express their individual and social interests. The empirical work is carried out by a multimodal social semiotic microanalysis of digital content. In particular, the thesis examines multimodal text-making practices of users from three different social media platforms – Pinterest, Twitter and Tumblr. By accounting for resources of image, colour and layout in addition to language, this thesis attempts to respond to some of the challenges of social media research, in that it pays attention to all modes of communication appropriated by social media users. This study finds, that through nuances in style work, from linguistic resources of pronouns and modal verbs, to image resources of content placement and colour palettes, social media users not only present themselves to the online community, displaying their interests, values and beliefs. Users also highlight their intended audience and their membership in online communities through their multimodal compositions. As such, the thesis contributes to our understanding of self-presentation and audience management online, highlighting the importance of accounting for the multimodal character of social media use
... Internationally, there have been analyses of a wide variety of aspects. As examples, some studies have analysed their informational potential and current relevance as against other media in certain professional environments (Punjar, Mahesh & Jayakanth, 2014), the content of messages sent to the lists (Waseleski, 2006;Tonta & Karabulut, 2010), and their use as an effective means of conducting studies in different professional sectors since their subscribers are concentrated in specific disciplines (Mushtaq et al., 2014.;Zonfrillo et al., 2014). ...
The appearance of telematic networks such as Bitnet, Internet, etc., gave rise to the emergence of diverse applications that allowed users to communicate with each other. Email distribution lists were one such application. The possibility of creating open or closed forums, with very specific themes, aimed at people dispersed around the world, who could come into contact at a much lower cost than other communication systems-for example, postal mail or telephone-revolutionized systems of collaboration. However, the arrival of the so-called Web 2.0 with its new category of social media applications which make it easy for users to insert information on Web platforms seems to have called into question the interest of those mailing lists. This paper analyses the validity of such lists through a study of all the email lists managed by the RedIRIS network (Red Española para Interconexión de los Recursos Informáticos-Spanish Network for Interconnection of Informatic Resources) through the information provided by the network's log file that indicates the activity of its lists and the public information on its website. The results include the number of lists created, their permanence, a study by year of their creation, their professional topics, and activity levels. They show that mailing lists are still used effectively as communication tools by the scientific and academic community despite the rise of the aforementioned Web 2.0 social media.
... In addition to using more emoticons (e.g. Baron and Ling 2007;Tossell et al. 2012) and exclamation points (Waseleski 2006 Alongside difference, disparity also persists. On Twitter, men's tweets are retweeted more often, especially by men, even though women post more tweets overall (Mashable 2012). ...
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) on the Internet has been claimed to possess a degree of anonymity that makes the gender of online communicators irrelevant or invisible; this purportedly allows women and men to participate and be recognized for their contributions equally, in contrast with patterns of male dominance traditionally observed in face-to-face communication. This chapter surveys research on gender and CMC, including textual, multimodal, and mobile communications, published between 1989 and 2013. The body of evidence taken as a whole runs counter to the claim that gender is invisible or irrelevant in CMC, or that CMC equalizes gender-based power and status differentials. In concluding, the notion of anonymity is critiqued, and the question of difference vs. disparity is addressed.
... Kucukyilmaz et al. (2006: 282) besluiten op basis van een stylometrische analyse in een onderzoek naar auteursdetectie zelfs dat emoticon-en smileygebruik "onderscheidende kenmerken van de vrouwelijke schrijfstijl" zijn. In het licht van de assumptie dat meisjes meer emotie uiten in hun communicatie, is dat natuurlijk geen verrassende vaststelling (zie ook Waseleski (2006), die beschreef dat meisjes online meer uitroeptekens produceren dan jongens). Varnhagen et al. (2010: 729) concluderen dat meisjes ook in het algemeen meer "new language"-features in hun chattaal integreren, al wordt die bevinding enigszins genuanceerd door Baron (2004: 415) ...
Prototypical CMC features in Flemish teenagers’ chat language. The influenceof gender, age and medium
In the present study, the use of allegedly typical and mostly universal, genrebound chatspeak features is examined, such as leetspeak, acronyms, abbreviations and other shortening mechanisms. We investigate how common they actually are in a large written chat corpus (more than two million words),
produced by Flemish teenagers between 2007 and 2013. Moreover, we investigate whether their frequency correlates with the social variables gender and age and whether it depends on the medium in which the conversation takes place (synchrous Instant Messaging vs. asynchronous CMC). The quantitative analysis reveals no major impact of gender, despite it
receiving ample attention in recent CMC research. Age en especially medium, however, are pointed to as two significant determinants. Furthermore, the results call for a distinction between merely creative and playful chatspeak forms on the one hand and highly functional features on the other.
... Perhaps surprisingly, people, in general, are typically quite good at inferring gender from text-based communication (Thompson & Murachver, 2001). Witmer & Katzman (1997), among several early studies of gender and language online, point to conventional descriptions of gender variation in language to explain this, which in digital discourse translates to, among other things, the typical finding that women tend to use more 'graphic accents' (e.g., emoticons) and punctuation (e.g., Waseleski, 2006, Tannen, 2013 and are generally more expressive than men (e.g., Fox et al, 2007). Fullwood and Martino (2007) confirmed that higher levels of emoticon use are generally associated with female gender, and McAndrew & De Jonge (2011) similarly supported the contention that email readers tend to interpret the increased use of expressive punctuation as an indication of female gender. ...
This draft is an exploration of the roots of digital media interaction studies, or digital pragmatics, tying together linguistics, semiotics, information theory, cybernetics, functional approaches to communication, and, finally, multimodality theories. It includes an extensive review of pragmatic and interactional approaches to digital media communication, including digital paralinguistics and metacommunication, that, unlike other such reviews, is not bound by linguistic or sociolinguistic assumptions and constraints. A better contextualized (and citable) version of this review is available in my dissertation, A Gesture Theory of Communication.
... Buna göre liste üyelerinin kataloglama dışında mesleki konuları tartışmak amacı ile de listeyi kullanma eğiliminde oldukları belirlenmiştir. Mesajların gönderim amaçlarına göre analizinde ise soru veya tartışma başlatma amaçlı inisiyatifli mesajların %12, cevaplama amaçlı dönüşlü mesajların %78, duyuru mesajlarının %8 ve hata bildirimi mesajlarının %1 oranında olduğu görülmüştür.Bilgi yönetimi alanındaki dig_ref ve JESSE tartışma listelerinde şaşkınlık ifadelerinin (ünlem işareti) cinsiyetlere göre farklılıkları araştırılmıştır(Waseleski, 2006(Waseleski, , s. 1016.Çalışmada listeye üye olan ve listeye mesaj gönderen kullanıcıların toplam 4036 mesajlı örneklem üzerinden incelenmesi sonucunda liste üyelerinin %30"unu oluşturan erkek üyelerin toplam mesajların %38"ini gönderdikleri görülmüştür. Kadınlar ünlem işaretini daha fazla kullanmaktadırlar. ...
... Females are generally more likely than males to use emoticons (or their equivalent, e.g., Japanese kaomoji, emoji or de-mo -Okuyama, 2009) and exclamation marks, both in online communication (e.g., Baron, 2004;Colley & Todd, 2002;Colley et al., 2004;Herring, 2003;C. Lee, 2003;Waseleski, 2006;Witmer & Katzman, 1997) and in text messaging (e.g., Ling et al., 2010;Miyake, 2010;Scott et al., 2009). ...
There is concern that the violations of conventional grammar (both accidental and deliberate) often seen in text messages (e.g., hi
how is ya?!!) could lead to difficulty in learning or remembering formal grammatical conventions. We examined whether the grammatical violations made by 244 British children, adolescents and young adults in their text messages was related to poorer performance on tasks of grammatical knowledge, including translating grammatically unconventional text messages into standard English. We found that variance in the production of grammatical violations in naturalistic messages was inconsistently predicted by grammatical task performance. Specifically, primary school children who made poorer grammar-based spelling choices were more likely to make more grammatical violations in their everyday messages, and university students who failed to correct more grammatical errors in a given set of messages were also more likely to make such errors in their own messages. There were no significant relationships for secondary school students. We conclude that using unconventional grammar when texting is not a consistent sign of poor grammatical abilities, although there may be links between some aspects of grammatical skill and grammatical violations in text messages.
... Fred launches the update by imagining four increasingly serious situations (in which a colleague is disliked by others) and lecturing on what that colleague could or should do in each situation (lines 1–5). The consecutive use of exclamation marks even indicates a strong imperative tone (cf.Waseleski 2006) (line 5). Since this talk is inherently face threatening to those troublemakers, not to mention the unambiguous and concise wording, he starts the update with the strategy of bald on-record impoliteness. ...
This paper examines how colleagues of an Italian restaurant in Hong Kong perform core business and relation-based talk in Facebook Status Updates beyond working hours and outside the workplace. Adapting Wenger's (1998) framework of Communities of Practice and Culpeper's (1996) model of impoliteness, we particularly concentrate on how they employ impoliteness strategies to get things done, and how power is negotiated in the three mechanisms of doing power as suggested in Wodak et al. (2012). Based on the analysis of 200 Status Updates collected from the research site, we find that such colleagues' talk outside the workplace can be conducive (or at least influential) to professional tasks and their relationships in the workplace. As our participants infuse their impoliteness strategies with Netspeak, they tend to employ the impoliteness strategies of "disassociating from others," "being unsympathetic," and "not treating others seriously." Simultaneously, their impolite participation displays a tendency to challenge or subvert institutional authority and official status, typically by some normative mechanisms of doing power. We argue that Status Updates blur the line between "in the workplace" and "outside the workplace," and that they become an alternative collocation of workplace talk which allows repositioning of work matters and renegotiation of power by impoliteness strategies.
... Pour Welser, H. T. et al. (2009), il s'agit d'évaluer l'apport des forums type Questions/ Réponses, c'est-à-dire sur lequel des personnes supposées rencontrer une difficulté technique viennent soumettre leur problème auquel d'autres personnes supposées expertes apportent des réponses : leur codage vise à faire la distinction entre des réponses appuyées sur des éléments tangibles, des opinions, voire des réponses sans rapport avec la question. À côté de ces travaux qui visent plutôt le contenu des messages, d'autres approches, principalement linguistiques, s'attachent plutôt à la forme : nous avons mentionné le travail de Mondada (1999) sur l'utilisation de moyens techniques propres au media pour créer ou rendre visibles des formes d'interactivité dans le message lui-même ; on peut voir aussi Waseleski (2006) qui s'intéresse à l'utilisation des points d'exclamation : cet auteur procède à un codage de messages – issus de deux listes de discussion pour les professionnels des bibliothèques et de la documentation – basé sur une description d'actions génériques (action ou appel à l'action, excuse, challenge, coalition, faits, opinion, préférences personnelles, sarcasmes, remerciements) afin de contextualiser l'usage des points d'exclamations et d'en spécifier la signification ; il s'interroge sur la dimension genrée de cet usage, mais peu sur la spécificité éventuelle des usages dans les listes qu'il étudie. En fait, ce « terrain » linguistique nouveau lui permet de relativiser l'interprétation habituelle du point d'exclamation comme marqueur d'excitabilité et de mettre en valeur un usage qui indiquerait plutôt des intentions amicales. ...
Presents the results and methodology of a set of investigation on mailing lists and online forums.
... The communication accommodation theory literature suggests that people may subconsciously adapt their language styles to converge with their communicative partners' styles to gain social approval (Giles and Coupland, 1991). Gender accommodation behaviors have been observed in online forums and listservs where one gender predominates (Waseleski, 2006;Yu, 2011). For example, emotional expression has been seen as a signature characteristic of feminine language. ...
This study draws from a large corpus of Congressional speeches from the 101st to the 110th Congress (1989–2008), to examine
gender differences in language use in a setting of political debates. Female legislators’ speeches demonstrated characteristics
of both a feminine language style (e.g. more use of emotion words, fewer articles) and a masculine one (e.g. more nouns and
long words, fewer personal pronouns). A trend analysis found that these gender differences have consistently existed in the
Congressional speeches over the past 20 years, regardless of the topic of debate. The findings lend support to the argument
that gender differences in language use persist in professional settings like the floor of Congress.
... ions. According to Shaver et al. , emotions are divided into 6 major types: love, [16] joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear, so future researchers might want to be more specific as to the exact emotion. Fourth, it is likely that demographic and personal characteristics influence both the usage and interpretation of affective information in CMC . [34] Thus, there is a need to investigate these variables in future research. Finally, in order to increase the external validity of the results, the study should be conducted using a field study or field experiment technique rather than a lab experiment. More specifically, the large majority of subjects in this study were college students, ...
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is one of the most widely utilized communication techniques in the business world. However, little is known about the effectiveness of CMC in communicating affective information (i.e., emotions). A primary objective of this paper is to investigate whether CMC can transfer affective information and, if so, the extent to which CMC transfers such information. This paper proposes a conceptual model and investigates the impact of emotional message cue, emotion words, linguistic markers, and paralinguistic cues. The research design involved 225 students who participated in a 2 x 3 x 3 laboratory experiment. The results indicate that affective information can be transferred through CMC. Message receivers were able to detect the sender's emotion by (1) associating the message content with positive or negative emotions, (2) using emotion cues such as emotion words, linguistic markers, and paralinguistic cues, and (3) through the combination of these techniques. The results further indicate that message receivers indicated a higher degree of senders' emotions when the number of emotion cues in the message increased. The paper concludes with implications for practitioners and directions for future research.
... This post is filled with exclamations and demonstrative and effusive language, not the style of the rational, value-driven intelligent investor. As Waseleski (2006) noted, ''exclamation points do more than function as markers of excitability; they can also function as markers of friendliness'' ({ 31), two identifications of a more feminine form of speech. ...
This article investigates the discursive practices of company stockholders in one financial cyberspace, the Berkshire Hathaway Board on The Commodity Stand 1 website. After a review of relevant research on gender and investing in computer-mediated communication and the history of the site chosen for examination, I analyze how members of the site create and maintain identity and community through their discursive performances, with particular emphasis on aspects of gendered practices. This investigation found that participants performed roles as admirers, intelligent investors, and mentors. The discursive practices are reified and gendered masculine. Feminine forms of talk were subjugated overtly and through the homogeneity of the masculine form. This research is one step toward a communicative foundation for researching the gendered manifestation and perpetuation of economic discourses in everyday life.
... Fourth, it is likely that demographic and personal characteristics influence both the usage and interpretation of affective information in CMC . [34] Thus, there is a need to investigate these variables in future research. Finally, in order to increase the external validity of the results, the study should be conducted using a field study or field experiment technique rather than a lab experiment. ...
Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. Mode of access: World Wide Web. Advisor: Dr. David B. Paradice, Florida State University, College of Business, Dept. of Management Information Systems. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 22, 2004). Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. Includes bibliographical references.
This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018. The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas: 1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation. 2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language. 3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This iii iv analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis. By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing.
Although the field of impoliteness research has greatly expanded in the last two decades, it has mainly focused on the western world while ignoring other regions such as India. The present study addresses this gap by examining impoliteness strategies employed in comments on two Indian YouTube videos that differ in level of controversiality. The data are 199 comments, written primarily in English. They are analysed as either off-record impoliteness or on-record impoliteness. Findings indicate that the controversiality of the topic influences participants’ choice of strategy: the on-record strategies of challenging or insulting others or making gender-based remarks occur significantly more in comments on the more controversial video than in comments on the less controversial video. In addition, female users employed fewer instances of impoliteness, as well as fewer on-record strategies, such as insulting others and using taboo language, than male users. These findings not only reflect gender-based norms in Indian society, where women are expected not to use taboo language, but also suggest that norms of offline communication carry over to online communication.
With unprecedented transformations taking place in the landscape of what to say and how we mean, interactions in the digital age take on various new forms of doing and being . To make sense of “what it is that is going on” requires an understanding of the context wherein the computer-mediated communications take place. Focusing on a burgeoning online video commenting discourse in mainland China called Danmaku (a media feature that projects viewer comments in the form of “bullet chains” overlaid on the video), the present study applies the schematic construct of context of situation and its paradigmatic representations developed in Systemic Functional Linguistics to a functionally-driven discussion of Danmaku context. Drawing on a corpus of comments from 18 well-received videos on Bilibili.com (a major Danmaku site in mainland China), the study provides a fine-grained analysis that highlights emergent technological and semiotic variables in the Danmaku Mode, such as anonymity, invisibility, dynamicity, and pseudo-synchronicity. It then discusses how these variables mediate the properties of Field and Tenor and further impinge upon the experiential and interpersonal meanings made in Danmaku communication. The analysis has also highlighted the carnivalesque nature of Danmaku which makes it an increasingly popular social media platform in mainland China.
While early CMC research already mentioned the repetition and omission of certain punctuation signs as salient features of digital interactional writing (cf. Crystal, 2001; Runkehl et al., 1998; Werry, 1996), the theoretical perspective on punctuation was mostly limited to noting down these phenomena in their deviations from an orthographic norm and interpreting them as emulation of spoken language features. In contrast, this paper adopts a graphocentric approach and argues for investigating digital punctuation with regard to its emergent interactional principle: While the rhetorical principle (marking intonational structures) and the grammatical principle (marking syntactical structures) of punctuation are well known in the history of writing (cf. Parkes, 1992), digital punctuation appears as an innovative extension to these functional realms in that it is used by co-participants to shape and organize their mediated interactional order. When punctuation is deployed in an interactional mode, it structures primarily neither intonational patterns nor grammatical patterns, but interactional patterns such as shaping sequential organization and stance-taking. Drawing on a data set of 47 text-messaging threads by German adolescents, the paper investigates the interactional principle of punctuation by frequency analyses as well as by in-depth sequential analyses of <.>, <:>, , <?>, and <…>. The findings suggest that even punctuation signs whose codification in descriptive and prescriptive grammars is based on pure syntactic criteria are utilized to achieve interactional goals. It shows that by following the interactional principle, punctuation establishes collaborative interactional management and serves participants as a graphic means of communicative and social contextualization in digital interactions.
It is a fact that the Internet has turned into a unique form of communication nowadays. The language of communication of the internet resembles both the written and oral varieties of speech, however, it must be viewed as a new manifestation of language use which can be defined by a number of spelling, grammatical and semantic features. Despite the existence of common features applying to the electronically mediated language, the internet is a domain of diversity and freedom. The variety of language means used is conditioned by the individuality, sex and even the character of the users. The language of the internet is characterized by the use of abbreviations and clippings, subordinate clauses resembling “stream of consciousness”, a unique spelling, etc. These means aim to speed electronically mediated communication and enhance the emotional-expressive impact.
This study investigates gender differences in linguistic features of communication styles in the context of mixed public discussion groups in asynchronous, text-based CMC. The study evaluates gendered communication and language styles in situational contexts of CMC. A sample of 3000 messages from 30 Internet discussion groups was content analyzed. Results revealed gender differences in stylistic features used by discussion group participants and partially support the expectation that women’s online communication style is gendered. The data did not reveal an online communication style that significantly discriminated men’s communication. Findings point to the important role of gender enacted through language in the construction of social identity in the context of public discussion groups in CMC. Implications of this investigation and directions for the development of future research on gender in CMC are discussed.
There has been considerable recent debate regarding proposed policies that would allow foster care administrators to discriminate on the basis of the sexual orientation of the foster parent. To date, however, we know very little about the level of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the foster care system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation to ask whether foster care agencies, the public, and nonprofit firms that facilitate foster care placements respond similarly to e‐mails sent by fictitious same‐sex and heterosexual couples who inquire about becoming foster parents. Our results suggest that, while foster care agencies respond at somewhat similar rates to gay male couples, gay female couples, and heterosexual couples, responses sent to gay males are of lower quality. Gay males receive much shorter responses that take longer to receive. Responses to gay male couples are also less likely to include essential information about the process of becoming a foster parent, such as details about informational sessions or being given an application. We do not find any evidence of differential treatment towards same‐sex female couples.
Tho , the nonstandard spelling of though which was proposed by American spelling reformers in the 19th century, is making a comeback. In 2013, internet memes such as that backflip tho gave a boost to the shortened form. This sociolinguistic study investigates the use of tho in RedditGender, a 19 million-word corpus of comments posted by 1044 Reddit users. First, concordance lines generated from the whole corpus were analyzed in order to compare the use of tho with the meme and the standard spelling. Then, regression analysis was conducted with a sample of the corpus, containing only complete cases. Results show that tho is rarely used in the meme construction that contributed to popularize it, and that it appears more often as an adverb than as a conjunction. They also seem to indicate that the use of tho is correlated with gender and race. Most frequent users are black males. This suggests that the shortened spelling is not simply a way to save time when typing, and that it is not semantically equivalent to though . It seems to be a marker of affiliation with a social group and of familiarity with internet subcultures.
This paper examines the use of punctuation in digital language practices among young people. Innovative uses of punctuation marks are often mentioned in the CMC research literature since the 1990s but have rarely been studied in their own right. This paper examines the usage of this and other punctuation marks in various genres of written digital interaction in German. The paper sketches out a framework for the sociolinguistic study of digital punctuation that consists of three levels, i.e. graphemic variation, pragmatic functions, and social indexicality. Punctuation marks that show variability and variation patterns of omission, iteration, and novel distribution are identified. Novel pragmatic meanings of punctuation signs are discussed in terms of pragmaticalization as well as the semiotic principle of iconicity. Examples from public discourse are used to illustrate how particular punctuation marks are given new indexical meanings and are enregistered with specific social types. The paper also offers a case study of the message-final period in a WhatsApp group conversation, and discusses how existing approaches to punctuation research can be adapted to deal with digital punctuation. Overall, digital punctuation is viewed as a stylistic resource for digital interaction, on the one hand, and a feature of written language that undergoes sociolinguistic change, on the other. From the perspective of sociolinguistic research on youth language, variation and innovations in punctuation usage constitute both an age-grading feature and an instance of generation-specific language change in progress.
The mission of the English Project (
www.englishproject.org
) is to explore and explain the English language in order to educate and entertain the English speaker, and 2015 was the year of punctuation for the Project because 6 February 2015 was the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldus Manutius. Aldus was a Venetian printer who shaped the comma, invented the semicolon and created italic fonts. He may have been the greatest punctuator of all time. We ‘punctuated’ the year by looking in turn at the full stop, the semicolon, the colon, the comma, the slash, the hyphen, the parenthesis, the exclamation, the apostrophe, the quotation mark and the question mark. Those twelve provide the fundamentals of English language punctuation, and all of them do more than one job. If we had a complete and unambiguous set of punctuation marks, we might need as many as 50, but the writing world does not want the trouble of such precision. In just same way, the writing world has never accepted the need for 44 separate letters to match the 44 separate sounds of the English language. Providing a separate grapheme (letter) for every phoneme (sound) is the linguist's business. Punctuation marks are ambiguous therefore. They suggest rather than define. They rely on context and the quick wittedness of the reader. If precision is needed, there are proofreader's marks. Merriam-Webster lists 42 of them, but proofreading is a special practice. Punctuation marks are a special set of symbols, and of symbols and signs there is no end. Punctuation marks are regularly appropriated by the devisers of computer languages. Punctuation marks can become logotypes – ‘a single piece of type that prints a word’. The exclamation mark can be made to work like &, $, or @. There are fuzzy edges to the subject of punctuation.
More than any other feature, computer-mediated communication (CMC) cues such as emoticons and other typographic markers are associated with digital communication, including text-based chat. Using transcripts from college classroom discussions, this study adopts a pragmatic perspective to analyze how advanced foreign language learners use CMC cues, including emoticons (“:-)”), nonstandard/multiple punctuation (“…”, “!!!”), and lexical surrogates (“hmmm”) in a quasi-synchronous computer-mediated consensus-building discussion. Rather than taking form-meaning pairings for granted (e.g., smiley “:)” means “happy”), I adopt a microanalytic approach to show systematic, empirically grounded correlations between CMC cues and their interpretations in different contexts. I argue that the results must be interpreted and viewed alongside the large body of research on emotive communication in offline modes to better understand the pragmatics of online relational work.
As an information and communication technology, the Internet has contributed to structural changes in social life. This technology has opened up new social spaces for people to communicate across time and space, explore interests and interactions, and form and maintain relationships. Gender is a social structure that matters, but how it matters online is a topic that has intrigued researchers for the last 20 years. Research in the area of online gender interactions is multidisciplinary and addresses a variety of online forums including discussion groups, chat, instant messaging, blogs, virtual worlds and social network sites. Patterns are identified in the literature and examples of gender fluidity, gender reproduction, and a blending of gender fluidity and reproduction are presented. This paper provides a framework for understanding the multidisciplinary research on this topic and discusses how changes in online demographics and recent developments in information and communication technologies, such as social network sites, present new forums in which to explore the role of gender in online interactions.
The collection of representative corpus samples of both child language and online (CMC) language varieties is crucial for linguistic research that is motivated by applications to the protection of children online. In this paper, we present an extensive survey of corpora available for these two areas. Although a significant amount of research has been undertaken both on child language and on CMC language varieties, a much smaller number of datasets are made available as corpora. Especially lacking are corpora which match requirements for verifiable age and gender metadata, although some include self-reported information, which may be unreliable. Our survey highlights the lack of corpus data available for the intersecting area of child language in CMC environments. This lack of available corpus data is a significant drawback for those wishing to undertake replicable studies of child language and online language varieties.
The sociolinguistic literature has frequently noted differences in how males and females communicate face-to-face and in writing, and more recently, through information and communication technologies. This article reports on gender patterns identified in a cross-national study of mobile phone use by university students in Sweden, the US, Italy, Japan and Korea. Data were analyzed with respect to the purpose of communication, politeness issues, contact management and volume of use (along with user complaints about dependency and reachability). Results indicated a number of gendered usage and attitudinal patterns. However, in some cases, cultural variables may prove more explanatory than gender.
Are established methods of content analysis (CA) adequate to analyze web content, or should new methods be devised to address
new technological developments? This article addresses this question by contrasting narrow and broad interpretations of the
concept of web content analysis. The utility of a broad interpretation that subsumes the narrow one is then illustrated with
reference to research on weblogs (blogs), a popular web format in which features of HTML documents and interactive computer-mediated
communication converge. The article concludes by proposing an expanded Web Content Analysis (WebCA) paradigm in which insights
from paradigms such as discourse analysis and social network analysis are operationalized and implemented within a general
content analytic framework.
N French Résumé Arab Americans’ Motives for Using the Internet as a Functional Media Alternative and Their Perceptions of U.S. Public Opinion This exploratory study employed uses and gratifications theory to understand Arab Americans’ salient motives for using the internet and whether the internet served as a functional alternative to other media to satisfy Arab Americans’ information-seeking and interpersonal needs. Spiral of silence theory also was used to investigate the relationship between Arab Americans’ perceptions of U.S. public opinion and their motives for using the internet. Results from an online questionnaire survey (N= 124) indicated that information seeking was the most salient motive for using the internet and that the internet did serve as a functional alternative, with a significant percentage of the internet sources used being foreign based. There was, however, no relationship between Arab Americans’ perceptions of U.S. public opinion and their motives for using the internet. The findings are discussed with respect to the use of the internet by members of this marginalized cultural group.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Over the past fifteen years, the Internet has triggered a boom in research on human behavior. As growing numbers of people interact on a regular basis in chat rooms, web forums, listservs, email, instant messaging environments and the like, social scientists, marketers, and educators look to their behavior in an effort to understand the nature of computer-mediated communication and how it can be optimized in specific contexts of use. This effort is facilitated by the fact that people engage in socially meaningful activities online in a way that typically leaves a textual trace, making the interactions more accessible to scrutiny and reflection than is the case in ephemeral spoken communication, and enabling researchers to employ empirical, micro-level methods to shed light on macro-level phenomena. Despite this potential, much research on online behavior is anecdotal and speculative, rather than empirically grounded. Moreover, Internet research often suffers from a premature impulse to label online phenomena in broad terms, for example, all groups of people interacting online are “communities”; the language of the Internet is a single style or “genre.” Notions such as community and genre are familiar and evocative, yet notoriously slippery, and unhelpful (or worse) if applied indiscriminately. An important challenge facing Internet researchers is thus how to identify and describe online phenomena in culturally meaningful terms, while at the same time grounding their distinctions in empirically observable behavior.
This study investigated ways in which gender identity is enacted within written language. Participants first supplied a self-descriptive letter that might be filed with a dating service. Next, they responded to a fabricated personal ad posted by a potential dating partner. Contextual factors in this study were writing task (self-description or response to a personal ad) and the gender role “bid” (either instrumental or expressive) of the hypothetical personal ad writer. Individual difference variables were biological gender and measured gender role orientation. Texts were coded for frequency of seven gender-typed language features (e.g., hedges, first-person pronouns). Writers’ own gender role schemata affected their language use, as did their biological sex. Contextual factors were more potent than the writers’ gender in affecting these stylistic features. Overall, writers altered their styles to complement (rather than converge toward) the apparent gender role orientations of their interlocutors.
Our use of language embodies attitudes as well as referential meanings. ‘Woman's language’ has as foundation the attitude that women are marginal to the serious concerns of life, which are pre-empted by men. The marginality and powerlessness of women is reflected in both the ways women are expected to speak, and the ways in which women are spoken of. In appropriate women's speech, strong expression of feeling is avoided, expression of uncertainty is favored, and means of expression in regard to subject-matter deemed ‘trivial’ to the ‘real’ world are elaborated. Speech about women implies an object, whose sexual nature requires euphemism, and whose social roles are derivative and dependent in relation to men. The personal identity of women thus is linguistically submerged; the language works against treatment of women, as serious persons with individual views.
These aspects of English are explored with regard to lexicon (color terms, particles, evaluative adjectives), and syntax (tag-questions, and related aspects of intonation in answers to requests, and of requests and orders), as concerns speech by women. Speech about women is analyzed with regard to lady : woman, master : mistress, widow : widower , and Mr : Mrs., Miss , with notice of differential use of role terms not explicitly marked for sex (e.g. professional ) as well.
Some suggestions and conclusions are offered for those working in the women's liberation movement and other kinds of social reform; second language teaching; and theoretical linguistics. Relevant generalizations in linguistics require study of social mores as well as of purely linguistic data.
Sara Mills is Research Professor in Linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University. She has published mainly in the areas of feminist discourse analysis and text analysis and also in the area of feminist postcolonial theory. Her main publications are Gender and politeness (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Discourse (Routledge, 2001), Feminist stylistics (Routledge, 1997), Gendering the reader (Longman, 1994), Language and gender (Longman, 1994), and Discourses of difference (Routledge, 1991); with Lynne Pearce, Feminist readings/feminists reading (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); and with Reina Lewis, Feminist postcolonial theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
Gender scholars have argued that existing social structures play an important role in the development and diffusion of technology. They have also suggested that technology is a multifaceted construct and that gender is implicated in all facets. As part of a larger and still-ongoing investigation, the research presented here focuses on one of the facets of a particular form of technology, namely, the practice of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The analysis of two subscription lists with a combined total of over 830 personal subscribers and 855 messages sent to the Library/Information Science Education Forum (JESSE) over a 20-month period suggests that gender has important implications in the practice of CMC. Males are more active than female subscribers and their contributions exceed their proportional representation. These findings add support to previous research on gender in electronic discussion lists.
Gender scholars have argued that existing social structures play an important role in the development and diffusion of technology. They have also suggested that technology is a multifaceted construct and that gender is implicated in all facets. As part of a larger and still-ongoing investigation, the research presented here focuses on one of the facets of a particular form of technology, namely, the practice of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The analysis of two subscription lists with a combined total of over 830 personal subscribers and 855 messages sent to the Library/Information Science Education Forum (JESSE) over a 20-month period suggests that gender has important implications in the practice of CMC. Males are more active than female subscribers and their contributions exceed their proportional representation. These findings add support to previous research on gender in electronic discussion lists.
Previous research has found gender differences in the style of language used in both written communication and face-to-face interaction. Such differences have also been found in electronic interactions with strangers. This study examined the style and content of emails describing a recent holiday written by men and women for male and female friends. In line with traditional gender stereotypes, some gender differences were found in the topics covered, in the form of greater coverage of the social and domestic topics of shopping, night life, and cost by women; and the impersonal, external topics of the location, journey, and local people by men. The e-mails from female participants contained a higher incidence of features associated with the maintenance of rapport and intimacy than those from male participants, and this was more pronounced in the e-mails from female participants to male friends.
This book maintains that, because male critics have evaluated feminine writing according to the standards of masculine style, women have received biased criticism in the past. This study attempts an objective analysis of possible differences in the published writings of men and women by considering certain critical stereotypes that have been applied to feminine writing. One hundred books are considered, 50 by men and 50 by women, and the sampling includes both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a wide spectrum of styles. With the aid of a computer, the books are scrutinized for use of similes, adverbs, exclamation points, dashes, and other stylistic devices that might prove women's writing to be more emotional than men's. Sentence length and the balance of sentences are considered, to determine conciseness and precision in the two styles. Many tables of computer data are included, as well as numerous samples from the books used in the study. A lengthy appendix accompanies the book. The book concludes that there are basic differences in the feminine and masculine styles but that the study overturns many of the pejorative stereotypes of women's writing. (MAI)
In feminist linguistic analysis, women's speech has often been characterized as “powerless” or as “over-polite”; this paper aims to challenge this notion and to question the eliding of a feminine speech style with femaleness. In order to move beyond a position which judges speech as masculine or feminine, which are stereotypes of behavior, I propose the term “discourse competence” to describe speech where cooperative and competitive strategies are used appropriately.
This study focuses on group gender composition and the seeming relatedness between gender roles and group process functions described as task and maintenance, as found on the Internet. The sample was drawn from randomly selected set of 27 online discussion groups from both the Internet and from commercial information services (e.g. Compuserv) using the ProjectH dataset. The 2692 valid messages were coded for language content (fact, apology, first person flaming, status, etc.) that has been related to gender role in other research. Each message was also coded regarding the gender of its author. Results held with the conventional impression that men far outnumber women as participants in online discussion groups. However, results were mixed in regard to the relation of language patterns and group gender composition. Gender composition was related to patterns of computer mediated communication in this context. However, there were an unexpectedly high proportion of participants of indeterminate gender in this dataset, it is difficult to test the hypotheses with precision. However, the sample is comprised of “real-life” groups, so what is lost in experimental control is compensated for in generalization to other uncontrolled settings.
The aspects related with networked interactivity which is considered as an important perspective of computer-mediated communication (CMC) are discussed. Interactivity is indicated as a useful concept for mapping group CMC because it is a hybrid construct. The concept of interactivity directs the focus to the intersection of the psychological and the sociological, the gap between mass and interpersonal communication, and the meeting of mediated and direct communication. Interactivity is found to be the condition of communication in which simultaneous and continuous changes occur, and these exchanges carry a social, binding force.
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