Магистрант Тлеукеева Б.А., к.ф.н. Шингарева М.Ю.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

To the question of on-line cues classification

Over the past twenty years or so, the internet has become increasingly entrenched in the lives of millions of people across the globe. As with any new advance in technology, the spread of the internet has been closely followed by academic interest in how these new developments fit into and change our lives. Of particular note are studies into the linguistic facets of the internet, experiments and papers that investigate how communication is achieved in an environment that is largely text-based and lacking in most visual and auditory cues. Studies of many different kinds of online communities, from online text-based games to chatrooms, have proliferated, and there is even a journal dedicated to the field, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

In this paper we are going to give classification of so-called online cues, namely those marking systems that are used to denote action, facial expression, and nonverbal sounds when a person is conversing online. These particular forms could be closely related to nonverbal behavior These online cues are particularly interesting to study because they are prevalent in online social interaction, they can be interesting linguistically, and because of this potential to be compared with nonverbal behavior in face-to-face interaction.

As mentioned above, online action cues are particularly interesting for three main reasons: they are prevalent online, they can be linguistically interesting, and they can be compared to face-to-face nonverbal behavior. To address these points in turn, online action cues can be found regularly in e-mail messages, on message boards, in chatrooms, and in instant message conversations, and in some cases have spread to offline contexts, such as advertisements. Linguistically, some of the systems used to mark these cues can be interesting, such as when a verb is used in the third person singular (or a noun is used in plural; which form is underlying has not been examined) to mark a verbal cue (i.e. ‘::snickers::’ used to denote snickering), and these forms all seem to have some possible correlation to a face-to-face nonverbal behavior of some kind, but only a few, namely the use of differing typefaces, have a basis in printed text (such as the use of italics, capital letters, or boldfaced type for emphasis, all of which can be found in use in popular fiction and other print media).

The forms that are the focus of this paper are those that could be considered to have some relationship to face-to-face nonverbal behavior. I have divided these forms up according to the way in which they are realized in CMC contexts, giving the following 4 groups :

• Traditional text devices

As mentioned earlier, these include the use of all capitals, boldface, italics, underlining, and other font changes to convey emphasis, stress, or shouting. In this category we also include ellipses, used to convey a pause or trailing off of speech, hyphens, and other forms of punctuation, including exclamation points.

• Onomatopoeic words

Like the above group, these forms may be rooted in other forms of literature, but still convey vocal cues in text online. Forms include ‘meh’, ‘eh’, and ‘heh’ as well as ‘hee hee’, ‘pbbbt’, ‘shhhh’, ‘muahahahaha’, and ‘grrrr’.

• Internet Abbreviations (or Online Abbreviations)

These forms include ‘LOL’ (laughing out loud), ‘ROFL’ (rolling on floor laughing), and ‘LMAO’ (laughing my ass off). Many of these abbreviations (such as ‘IMHO’, or “in my humble opinion”) are less clearly connected with nonverbal communication, and so are not of interest here; only those abbreviations that describe an action are considered for now.

• Emoticons

Also called smilies, these are some of the more extensively studied online forms. How, exactly, they are used and what messages they convey is still being debated, but it is likely that there is some correlation to facial expression, even if there is not a direct link between how facial expressions are used in face-to-face interaction and how text versions of those facial expressions are used online. Some of the most well-known emoticons are ‘:)’ , ‘:(‘ , and ‘:P’, however there are many other specialized emoticons and other types of systems that are used in smaller communities. For example, some emoticon systems focus on the eyes rather than the whole face, resulting in emoticons such as ‘o.0’ (one raised eyebrow), ‘-.-’ (narrowed eyes, or a glare), and ‘b.b d.d’ (shifting gaze).

• Specially-marked cues

This last group is the most varied and the most versatile of the types of forms being considered here. These forms are used online to mark action of some kind, though the type of action could be anything, from snickering to grinning to hitting one’s shin on a coffee table. Systems for marking these forms can vary from online community to online community, but some of the most prevalent are:

a) Asterisks: e.g. ‘*grins*’, ‘*snickers*’, and ‘*hugs TV*’

b) Double Colons: e.g. ‘::shrugs::’, ‘::growls::’, and ‘::fries X with a quick gout of flame::’

c) Bare: e.g. ‘grin’, ‘snort’, and ‘poke’

Another system that can be found is the /me, in which the action to be conveyed is preceded by /me (e.g. ‘/me grins’ or ‘/me skips merrily around the room’). This does not currently seem to be common online, but likely hearkens back to online gaming, where /me is the way to signal to the program that your character is to perform some action. In this context, /me grins would show up on the screen as ‘X grins’, where X is the screenname of the speaker. The tendency for other systems to appear in third singular form might be related to this form, though that is currently speculation.

It is not yet clear if there is any difference in meaning between the different types of specially marked cues. In a small, informal study which was conducted in fall of 2005, a group of IM users were asked for their opinions of what these different forms meant (for example, what ‘grin’, ‘grins’, ‘/me grins’, ‘::grins::’, ‘::grin::’, ‘*grins*’, and ‘*grin*’ meant), and found that though some users had a very clear idea of how each form differed in meaning from every other form, some users saw every variation as equivalent. In addition, none of the users who had a clear grasp of different meanings among the forms agreed with each other. The only meaning that was generally agreed upon was that all of these forms denote action (e.g. typing ‘::grins::’ means the person typing is grinning).

Though all these forms exist online (and often they exist in many different kinds of online interaction and show up with high frequency), only a few have been studied, and many of them have not even been mentioned in the literature, let alone investigated. Online forms with influence from traditional print media could be said to be more closely related to their print counterparts, in which case there is literature on those cues, though there are very few studies that examine how these systems are used online.

Bibliography

1. Danet, B. (2001). Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online. New York: Berg.

2. Corley, M. and Stewart, O. W. (2008). Hesitation disfluencies in spontaneous speech: the meaning of um. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2.