Instant Messenger conversations in Spanish
Yolanda Pangtay-Chang
More and more people around the world communicate with others through the use of Internet (Crystal, 2001). Messages on Instant Messenger are written and sent to everybody participating in the communication. When we read and reply to those messages it seems we are having a conversation. Do these messages have written or oral characteristics? Writing and speech, each have different conventions. Writing conventions have to do with punctuation, capitalization, grammar, spelling, and organization of ideas. On the other hand, oral characteristics such as tone, intonation, silence, interjections, pauses, laughter, gestures, and facial expressions contribute to the interpretation of what is said.
The following Instant Messenger conversation shows punctuation marks, capitalization of some words, good spelling, and the use of standard Mexican grammar. We can also notice interjections, pauses, short answers, in other words an attempt is made to convey oral conversational features.
(1) A: ¿Qué tal tu día?
‘How’s your day?’
B: cansadón
‘tiring’
B: y el tuyo?
‘yours?’
A: Huy
‘oh’
B: mmmmh
‘mmmmm’
A: y eso que significa . . . bueno o malo?
‘what does that mean. . . good or bad?’
B: Bueno
‘Good’
With some exceptions (see Johnson 2007), there are almost no studies on the characteristic features of Instant Messenger speech, particularly in languages such as Spanish. The present paper will examine these features based on a corpus of MSN Instant Messenger.
The study focused on the use of connectors such as porque ‘because’, es por eso ‘therefore’, así ‘so’, y ‘and’, etc., as well as other discourse markers such as punctuation, entonation, gestures and/or representations of expressions such as laughter. Discourse markers help senders and receivers of a conversation to perceive the meaning or intention of the communication.
Twenty-five subjects participated in the research, all of them part of the researcher’s contact list on MSN messenger. All the participants are speakers of L1 Spanish, which they use to communicate with the researcher and with their family and friends in their own contact list.
Their ages range from 20 to 66 years old. The objective of this study was to observe grammatical and pragmatic phenomena and forms and functions of the language in the conversations. The researcher kept her MSN open, in order to be either contacted or to contact subjects. 273 conversations were analyzed, looking for: opening and closing, adjacent pairs, turn-taking, change of topics, use of irony or sarcasm, among other features in a conversation.
Results show how participants in an IM conversation follow oral strategies to understand their messages. The time of replication is done in seconds from one message to another. Certain words and expressions in the acts of speech seem to function as replacement of intonation and even facial expressions. In addition, whenever a message was not understood, users would ask for clarification or repair the misunderstanding..
Yolanda Pangtay-Chang
More and more people around the world communicate with others through the use of Internet (Crystal, 2001). Messages on Instant Messenger are written and sent to everybody participating in the communication. When we read and reply to those messages it seems we are having a conversation. Do these messages have written or oral characteristics? Writing and speech, each have different conventions. Writing conventions have to do with punctuation, capitalization, grammar, spelling, and organization of ideas. On the other hand, oral characteristics such as tone, intonation, silence, interjections, pauses, laughter, gestures, and facial expressions contribute to the interpretation of what is said.
The following Instant Messenger conversation shows punctuation marks, capitalization of some words, good spelling, and the use of standard Mexican grammar. We can also notice interjections, pauses, short answers, in other words an attempt is made to convey oral conversational features.
(1) A: ¿Qué tal tu día?
‘How’s your day?’
B: cansadón
‘tiring’
B: y el tuyo?
‘yours?’
A: Huy
‘oh’
B: mmmmh
‘mmmmm’
A: y eso que significa . . . bueno o malo?
‘what does that mean. . . good or bad?’
B: Bueno
‘Good’
With some exceptions (see Johnson 2007), there are almost no studies on the characteristic features of Instant Messenger speech, particularly in languages such as Spanish. The present paper will examine these features based on a corpus of MSN Instant Messenger.
The study focused on the use of connectors such as porque ‘because’, es por eso ‘therefore’, así ‘so’, y ‘and’, etc., as well as other discourse markers such as punctuation, entonation, gestures and/or representations of expressions such as laughter. Discourse markers help senders and receivers of a conversation to perceive the meaning or intention of the communication.
Twenty-five subjects participated in the research, all of them part of the researcher’s contact list on MSN messenger. All the participants are speakers of L1 Spanish, which they use to communicate with the researcher and with their family and friends in their own contact list.
Their ages range from 20 to 66 years old. The objective of this study was to observe grammatical and pragmatic phenomena and forms and functions of the language in the conversations. The researcher kept her MSN open, in order to be either contacted or to contact subjects. 273 conversations were analyzed, looking for: opening and closing, adjacent pairs, turn-taking, change of topics, use of irony or sarcasm, among other features in a conversation.
Results show how participants in an IM conversation follow oral strategies to understand their messages. The time of replication is done in seconds from one message to another. Certain words and expressions in the acts of speech seem to function as replacement of intonation and even facial expressions. In addition, whenever a message was not understood, users would ask for clarification or repair the misunderstanding..
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Copula omission in the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: a “transfer” account
A. Alba de la Fuente, University of Ottawa
R. Fernández Fuertes, Universidad de Valladolid
J. M. Liceras, Universidad de Ottawa
The debate on whether the omission of subjects in child language is to be accounted for syntactically (Hyams and Wexler 1993) or is the result of a processing deficit (Valian 1991, Valian and Eisenberg 1996) has been extrapolated to copula omission by Becker (2002, 2004). This author argues that the differences in the use of overt copula be versus null copula be in child English rather than being a product of sentence length are determined by the semantic nature of the predicate as in (1) versus (2).
(1) lady __ on that (Nina, 2;02) (2) this is lady (Naomi, 2;02)
Locative predicates, as the Prepositional Phrase in (1), are aspectual and it is their Aspectual Phrase that provides temporal anchoring to the sentence (Guéron and Hoekstra 1995). This results in the possibility of using null be with these types of predicates. However, Nominal predicates, like the Noun Phrase in (2), are not aspectual and, therefore, copula be must be explicit to ensure temporal anchoring.
As for copula be with adjective predicates as in (3) and (4), these predicates could be considered Locative or Nominal (Stage-Level or Individual-Level, following Carlson 1977 and Schmitt and Miller’s 2007 terminology) depending on the type of adjective and on the context, so that (3) would contain a Locative/Stage-Level predicate, while (4) a Nominal/Individual-Level one. In this case, even though the results were less clear-cut and individual differences occurred both quantitatively and qualitatively, the stage-level predicate (3) versus the individual-level predicate (4) dichotomy parallels the Locative/Nominal one.
(3) I __ hungry (Leo, 2;11) (4) Elmo is blue (Simon, 2;05)
In this paper, we provide an analysis of the copula in the developing English grammar of two English/Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the following issues: 1) whether a grammar-based or a processing-based approach best accounts for child omissions; 2) whether our data mirror the ones discussed by Becker with respect to the differences between Locative and Stage-level predicates versus Nominal and Individual level predicates; 3) whether the differences and similarities are shaped by the fact that Spanish copula is realized by two lexical items: estar (for cases like those in (1) and (3) above) and ser (for cases like those in (2) and (4) above); in other words, whether interlinguistic influence (Hulk and Müller 2000; Paradis and Navarro 2003) can be found in this specific area of grammar.
We have analyzed longitudinal data from the two bilingual children which cover the same age and MLU counts as in the four children in Becker’s (2004) study. An analysis of our data shows that: (i) a grammatical account is favoured over a processing one when the length of the utterances is measured as a word count; (ii) even though there are some similarities in the overall omission patterns with respect to the Locative/Nominal predicate dichotomy, the results are never significant. In the case of the Stage/Individual-level predicates, our data are even less transparent than the monolingual data: in fact our two children display opposite patterns of omission; and (iii) the lexical transparency of Spanish copula estar seems to play a role in the need to incorporate the inflectional level and, therefore, in the copula omission pattern, since our children’s rate of omission is significantly lower than the rate of omission displayed by Becker’s monolingual children.