OMG! L2SPELL ONLINE: THE CREATIVE VOCABULARY OF CYBERLANGUAGE s(~_^)--b Laura L. Christopherson A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Information and Library Science. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Dr. Connie Eble Dr. Stephanie W. Haas Dr. Jeffrey Pomerantz Dr. Brian Sturm Dr. Barbara Wildemuth © 2013 Laura L. Christopherson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract LAURA L. CHRISTOPHERSON: OMG! l2spell online: The creative vocabulary of cyberlanguage s(~_^)--b (Under the direction of Dr. Stephanie W. Haas) Increasing use of the Internet has led to a proliferation of online communication and information sharing media. These media, each with its own set of affordances and limitations, are thought to encourage new ways to communicate. Interlocutors refashion general English into abbreviated and often pictographic representations of existing concepts. Prior research has made suppositions about the effects these media have on communication; for example, that synchronous media (e.g., chat) encourage interlocutors to use more abbreviations (e.g., acronyms) than in asynchronous media (e.g., email). These suppositions, however, have not been fully tested because most studies focus on a single medium. Yet a more comprehensive understanding of this language—hereafter referred to as cyberlanguage—as it manifests across various online media is needed as users increasingly employ the Internet for communications. Furthermore, such an understanding may help information professionals improve information tools (e.g., search engines, summarization, surveillance) that currently rely on more standard forms of writing for their success. The research described here addresses this need by creating and linguistically analyzing a corpus of texts containing 136,529 tokens (23,912 types) that span multiple media (forums, email, text messaging, instant messaging, and chat) and communication situations (business, virtual reference, hobbies, health/well-being). Terms were classified iii according to linguistic feature (e.g., acronyms, emoticons). Chi-square tests were used to compare the frequencies of features across media and communication situation. Contrary to current thinking abut “technological determinism,” results show that cyberlanguage feature use varies based on medium and situation, which validates the notion that technology and other situational variables exert influence over communication behavior. New terms are being created all the time online and this suggests rapid language change and linguistic creativity. Interlocutors create new terms to bridge the physical distance between them, such as using surrogate face-to-face cues to make the text seem more like face-to-face speech. However, some cyberlanguage terms and features are quite ordinary and conventional, and may be considered online staples. The number of tokens that contained cyberlanguage features assumed a small portion of the language used online, so fears about cyberlanguage signaling the demise of “proper” English can be allayed. iv Acknowledgments Many people, both in and out of the doctoral program, supported me though this process, and I would like to extend my deepest gratitude for all they did for me. Stephanie Haas, my advisor and mentor, for shepherding me through this process, . Barbara Wildemuth, for advising and listening to me about methodological concerns, . Brian Sturm, for keeping me grounded, making me laugh, and sharing wonderful insights, . Connie Eble, for teaching me more about linguistics and slang, and sharing a love of “deviant” language, . Jeff Pomerantz, for showing support, providing the NCknows conversations, and questioning me, . Clifton Barnett, for programming most of the scripts for me and being so generous with his time, . Joshua Bert Purvis, for being my most excellent outside coder and “unknown” term disambiguator, . David R. Jackson, for writing a data collection script, . Eliah Hecht and Shayne Muelling for inspiring me to write about gaming language, . Pam Sessoms and the UNC University Libraries for providing IM conversations, . Susana Sotillo, for sharing her SMS corpus with me, . Caleb Tucker-Raymond for sharing the L-net conversations with me, v . Craig Martell, for sharing the NPS corpus with me, . AOL for granting permission to use their chat conversations (AOL is a registered trademark of AOL LLC), . Dan Piraro, for the use of his fabulous OMG! Cartoon in the Preface, . Elizabeth A. Evans (Libby), for inspiring me and being a sounding board, . Mike Brown, for helping me improve my writing, . Angela Murillo and Sarah Ramdeen, for picking me during a dark time, . Nancy Honeywell, for being an awesome mentor, . My RTP LB family: thank you for teaching me so much, making me laugh, helping me to remember not to take myself so seriously, holding me up, and walking with me through everything vi Preface Cartoon courtesy of Dan Piraro The title of this dissertation can be translated as follows: Oh my god! Learn to spell online: The creative vocabulary of cyberlanguage. The emoticon at the end is a winking face using a tilde for the wink, and giving a thumbs up, using the --b for the arm and thumb on the hand. vii Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................... xiv LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................. xvi Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1 II. LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................................................... 8 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 8 Cybermedia .............................................................................................................................. 9 Media characteristics ........................................................................................................... 12 Synchronicity ................................................................................................................................. 12 Participant scale ............................................................................................................................. 14 Message persistence ...................................................................................................................... 17 Privacy ........................................................................................................................................... 19 Anonymity / pseudonymity ........................................................................................................... 20 Message length .............................................................................................................................. 22 Compositional and viewing ease ................................................................................................... 23 Quoting and linking ....................................................................................................................... 24 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 25 Cybermedia descriptions ..................................................................................................... 26 Forums ........................................................................................................................................... 26 Email .............................................................................................................................................. 28 SMS ............................................................................................................................................... 32 viii IM .................................................................................................................................................. 35 Chat ................................................................................................................................................ 38 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 42 Theories about Communication in Lean Media ................................................................. 43 Social presence theory ........................................................................................................ 43 Media richness .................................................................................................................... 45 Lack of social context clues ................................................................................................ 46 Channel expansion theory ................................................................................................... 47 Social information processing ............................................................................................. 47 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 49 Other Situational Variables: Genre ....................................................................................