The aim of this thesis is to describe the language of electronic communication ('netspeak') as one of the present trends of the development of English. The thesis is based on the hypothesis 'netspeak' represents an independent multimodal linguistic variety sharing some features with informal face-to-face conversation. For this purpose, the language of selected samples of the texts of English-speaking students of British universities obtained from the social network Facebook was studied. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of these data and their comparison with spoken form of standard English, namely with the spoken demographically sampled part of the British National Corpus, confirmed the hypothesis. ! Key words: netspeak, CMC, Facebook, emoticons, face-to-face communication, informal conversation

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T19:33:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcelo da Silva.pdf: 1059291 bytes, checksum: b2af93ed50a912f586fe68d8f0e247a1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-11-01 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This study sought to establish relations between the emoticons used in chat text and figures determinative of cuneiform and hieroglyphic, through the linguistic historiography, which (re) constructs the linguistic knowledge, identifying their context and their influence in producing the document, in a particular historical time and geographical space. When we make a historical overview of writing, we rescued the main features of ideographic writing of the Sumerians and Egyptians with their signals determinative that served to help readers understand the meanings of texts and also to avoid possible ambiguities. Historically, the writing of Semitic, Greek and Roman, was instrumental in shaping our current alphabet. At the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the XXI came the Internet as a communication vehicle that offers new ways of relating to chat in an open space for interaction in digital media. Thus, this research found that there are both similarities and differences between the emoticons used in chat rooms and signals determinative of the Sumerians and Egyptians. As for similarities, both have ideographic value, or transmit ideas and words with accompanying phonetic value. While the determinative signs were intended to help the reader in understanding the words, emoticons have the role to complement the written message / O presente trabalho procurou estabelecer relações entre os emoticons utilizados no chat de texto e as figuras determinativas da escrita cuneiforme e hieroglífica, por intermédio da Historiografia Linguística, que (re) constrói o saber linguístico, identificando seu contexto e suas influências na produção do documento, em um determinado tempo histórico e espaço geográfico. Ao elaborarmos um panorama histórico da escrita, resgatamos as principais características da escrita ideográfica dos sumérios e egípcios com seus sinais determinativos que serviam para ajudar os leitores a entender os significados dos textos e também para evitar possíveis ambiguidades. Historicamente, a escrita dos semíticos, gregos e romanos, foi fundamental na formação do nosso atual alfabeto. E no final do século XX e início do XXI surgiu a Internet como veículo de comunicação que oferece novas formas de relacionamento como o chat, em um espaço aberto à interação na mídia digital. Deste modo, a presente pesquisa constatou que há tanto semelhanças como diferenças entre os emoticons utilizados nos chats e os sinais determinativos dos sumérios e egípcios. Quanto às semelhanças, ambos possuem valor ideográfico, ou seja, transmitem ideias e acompanham palavras com valor fonético. Enquanto os sinais determinativos tinham a finalidade de ajudar o leitor no entendimento das palavras, os emoticons possuem o papel de complementar a mensagem escrita

<p><p>The Internet is in many cases our primary source for communication. As more communicative options online are introduced and become a part of our life, the language of the Internet, so called Netspeak, becomes a part of our language. The aim of this paper was to find out whether there is a difference in the use of Netspeak between teenagers and adults. The investigation was based on two message boards, one where the majority is teenagers and one where the majority is adults. Four different features of Netspeak were studied: exaggerated use of punctuation; exaggerated use of capital letters; abbreviations; and emoticons. All features are substitutes for paralanguage.</p><p>The results show that teenagers are more likely to use features such as exaggerated use of punctuation and capitals, and abbreviations. Adults are, however, more likely to use emoticons than teenagers.</p></p>

<p>The aim of this study is to examine the language from a small sample of texts from the chat channels of World of Warcraft and analyze the differences found between World of Warcraft English and Standard English. In addition, the studywill compare the language found in World of Warcraft with language found on other parts of the Internet, especially chatgroups. Based on 1045 recorded chat messages, this study examines the use of abbreviations, emoticons, vocabulary, capitalization, spelling, multiple letter use and the use of rare characters. The results of the investigation show that the language of World of Warcraft differs from Standard English on several aspects, primarily in the use of abbreviations. This is supported by secondary sources. The results also show that the use of language is probably not based on the desire to deliver a message quickly, but rather to reach out to people. In addition, the results show that the language found in World of Warcraft is more advanced than a simple effort to try to imitate speech, thereby performing more than written speech.</p>

There is high demand for computational tools that can automatically label tweets (Twitter messages) as having positive or negative sentiment, but great effort and expense would be required to build a large enough hand-labeled training corpus on which to apply standard machine learning techniques. Going beyond current keyword-based heuristic techniques, this paper uses emoticons (e.g. ':)' and ':(') to collect a large training set with noisy labels using little human intervention and trains a Maximum Entropy classifier on that training set. Results on two hand-labeled test corpora are compared to various baselines and a keyword-based heuristic approach, with the machine learned classifier significantly outperforming both. / text

In this paper I tried to take a closer look at the topic of social networks, electronic communication and the way they influence the spoken and written speech. The modern communication in general is mentioned in this paper as well. I tried to find and focused on particular aspects of electronic communication, especially parts of internet slang as chat abbreviations, emoticons and also the stylistics. I compared the gathered information to the pupils? language and proved some influence by the modern ways of communication. As a part of a research pupils filled in a questionare and a further research on spoken and written speech took place. I came up with several statements which i managed to prove right, couple of them have been proven wrong, though. A conclusion on the contemporary situation has been made that both the spoken and written speech is influenced by modern way of communication.

This thesis explores how a computer could facilitate emotional support, focusing on the user group of informal carers. Informal carers are people who provide regular mental or physical assistance to another person, who could not manage without them, without formal payment. They save the UK £132 billion per year. However, many carers find themselves isolated by their caring commitments and may suffer from mental and physical health problems. Good emotional support can help reduce the negative effects of stress. We explore how an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) could provide suitable emotional support to carers; how this emotional support should be adapted to the situation and personality of the carer; and how to add emotional context to support messages. To do this, we create a corpus of emotional support messages of different types and devise an algorithm that selects which type of emotional support to use for different types of stress. We investigate whether to adapt emotional support to personality, developing a novel method of measuring personality using sliders. We explore the identity of the support-giver and find that this affects the perceived supportiveness of an emotional support message. We investigate how emoticons add emotional context to messages, developing a proposed set of emoticons that depict core emotions that people use online. We find that gift emoticons can be used to enhance emotional support messages by representing an effort to 'cheer up' the carer. Finally, we explore how emotional support messages could be used by an IVA in six interviews with carers. Overall, we find that an IVA that helps a carer keep in contact with their personal social network and offers emotional support messages would be well-received by carers, but further work needs to be done to implement it within the framework of existing social media.

Emojis are colorful pictorial icons used in day to day conversations via SMS and on plenty of different platforms, available for everyone today, but not yet studied to an extent even though they they are highly ambigous. The aim of this study is to find which semantic meanings emojis can have, if gender or age is a causing factor and if any norm for when and how emojis should be used exists among the users. Through a digital survey uploaded on different platforms and sent to different companies, the results show that misconceptions do happen, and that they happen often. However, gender does not seem to matter to the same extent as age. There is also evidence pointing to the users following some rules when it comes to what emoji should be used when and when no emoji should be used at all.

The Internet is in many cases our primary source for communication. As more communicative options online are introduced and become a part of our life, the language of the Internet, so called Netspeak, becomes a part of our language. The aim of this paper was to find out whether there is a difference in the use of Netspeak between teenagers and adults. The investigation was based on two message boards, one where the majority is teenagers and one where the majority is adults. Four different features of Netspeak were studied: exaggerated use of punctuation; exaggerated use of capital letters; abbreviations; and emoticons. All features are substitutes for paralanguage. The results show that teenagers are more likely to use features such as exaggerated use of punctuation and capitals, and abbreviations. Adults are, however, more likely to use emoticons than teenagers.

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