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Names on the Internet: Towards Electronic Socio-onom@stics Katarzyna Aleksiejuk PhD Thesis University of Edinburgh 2015 2 Declaration of Authorship I declare that this thesis has been written by me and has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signature ________________________________ Date _________________________________ 3 4 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Dr Lara Ryazanova-Clarke and Dr Alan Macniven, for their engagement and always valuable feedback. Thank you for sharing your priceless time and knowledge with me. I would like to thank Chris Tolland, my manager at work, who helped me greatly to accommodate working and studying. My warm thanks go to my family, friends and colleagues for their understanding and support. I would also like to take this opportunity to pass my special thanks to Prof. Leonarda Dacewicz, my MA supervisor, the person who sparked my interest in names. 5 6 Abstract The Internet represents an abundant source material for linguistic research, which continues to pose new challenges and opportunities on how language is used by its speakers. Its personal naming system, for example, has remained largely unexplored. Of the many facets of names on the Internet awaiting closer scrutiny, the phenomenon of usernames is perhaps the most fundamental. This thesis investigates the role they play in online life, the most suitable methods to approach them, and how they compare with the names used offline and where their place is in onomastics in general. With people’s names inevitably connected with one or another aspect of identity, this work focuses on the relationship between usernames and online identities. The data has been gathered from a forum on the Russian-speaking sector of the Internet (RuNet) and comprises all registered usernames (676 at the time of collection) as well as an extensive and methodically selected sample of users’conversations. As a general analytical framework, it utilises Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology, which conceptualises identity as a result of the ongoing interaction that people negotiate and achieve in everyday life rather than a set of inherent inner qualities. More specifically, the following methodological tools devised by Sacks (e.g. 1995, 1984a, 1984b) have been used to perform the analysis: Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to categorise the usernames of the forum participants, and Conversation Analysis (CA), to observe how usernames contribute to the construction of individual identities. Finally, the concept of Stance, as presented by Du Bois (2007), has been used as a lens to identify relevant evidence in the conversation samples. The analysis has demonstrated the need for a systematic categorisation of usernames. The way in which they associate sets of attributes, facilitates the allocation of named entities as members of certain categories of persons. Both linguistic and typographic elements of usernames contribute to how they are perceived and what impression they create. It is also argued that usernames have an important role to play in the active and ongoing construction of individual identities. The study concludes that CMC participants operate their usernames as meaningful linguistic devices to construct and co-construct each other’s identities. CA and MCD are confirmed to be relevant methods to analyse onomastic data. This study has generated a reliable body of evidence for the assertion that usernames are far from meaningless, and demonstrates, moreover, how their meanings are established. In so doing, it constitutes an important contribution to onomastic theory with the potential to shed new light on personal naming in general. 7 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration of Authorship………………………………………………….…………3 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………..………….5 Abstract.........................................................................................................................7 Table of contents………………………………………………………..…………….9 INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................13 Objectives and research questions………………………………….…………….17 Research ethics online............................................................................................19 I ONOMASTICS: THEORETICAL QUESTIONS.................................................21 1. Terminology and definition of names.................................................................22 1.1. The meaning of names.....................................................................................25 1.2. The function of names.....................................................................................33 1.3. Classification of names....................................................................................39 1.3.1. Usernames in the classification...............................................................40 1.4. Usernames: terminology..................................................................................45 2. Usernames as an onomastic class.........................................................................46 2.1. Are usernames just other pseudonyms?...........................................................46 2.2. Are usernames new nicknames?......................................................................53 2.3. Is a username a ‘second first name’?...............................................................59 2.4. Summary..........................................................................................................64 II IDENTITY.................................................................................................................67 1. The concept of identity……………….………..………………………………..69 1.1. Essentialist approaches…………………………..…………………...………70 1.2. Constructionist approaches…………………………………………………...73 2. Ethnomethodology................................................................................................76 2.1. Ethnomethodology in CMC.............................................................................79 3. Virtual identity......................................................................................................80 3.1. Identities on RuNet..........................................................................................81 4. Membership categorisation analysis...................................................................82 4.1. Membership categories in CMC......................................................................85 5. Usernames and identity........................................................................................85 5.1. Gender identity.................................................................................................88 5.1.1. Gender identity in ethnomethodology....................................................89 5.1.2. Concepts of femininities and masculinities............................................90 9 5.1.3. Gender and MCA...................................................................................91 5.1.4. Names and gender................................................................................. 92 5.1.4.A. Gender in Russian names..........................................................93 5.1.5. Gender identity construction in CMC....................................................94 5.1.5.A. Usernames and gender identity.................................................95 5.2. Forum Posidelki..............................................................................................99 5.2.1. Names in Posidelki...............................................................................103 5.3. Gender identity construction in Posideki......................................................105 5.3.1. Gender as MCD in Posidelki................................................................111 5.3.2. Summary...............................................................................................123 5.4. Classification of usernames..........................................................................124 5.4.1. Classification ideas...............................................................................126 5.4.2. Usernames and membership categorisation..........................................133 5.4.3. Usernames in Pasidelki as terms of categorisation...............................134 5.4.3.A. Language choice in usernames................................................144 5.4.4. Summary...............................................................................................145 5.5. Usernames and relational categories.............................................................147