Domande e risposte per orale: Lingua Inglese e comunicazione multimediale

Differences with Speech

The most important difference is the lack of simultaneous feedback. In a conversation, speakers modify their speech in accord to feedback. The lack of these features is one of the reasons why so many Internet interactions are misperceived (mal percepito).

Awareness of the dangers of ambiguity which led to the development of emoticons. The new symbols were intended to remove attitudinal ambiguity. However, an individual emoticon can still allow many readings, and these can be disambiguated only by referring to the verbal context.

Multiple conversation: messages are posted to a screen linearly, in the order in which they are received by the system. There is a different lag, because of the way packets of information are sent electronically through different global routes. The intervening utterances may cause ambiguity because they are grammatically and semantically unrelated. The relevant reply is signposted through the use of response grammar and by lexical items.

The description of internet text uses the notion of facets: technological facets characterize the medium (Synchronicity, Length, Identity, Audience, Persistence) and social facets characterize the relationship between users, norms of language, and participant characteristics.

15) David Crystal? Why is the Internet defined as a mixed medium by 15) Internet language has similarities with speech and writing. Web: many of its functions are no different from traditional situations that use writing. In contrast, email, chat, instant messaging display several of the core properties of speech. Instant messaging can approximate to the dynamic conversation, though lacking the property of simultaneous feedback.

At one extreme, we find the web, which displays the same range of written constructions and graphic options as would be found in the corresponding texts of traditional print (online government reports, newspaper editions have a great deal in common with their offline equivalents). At the other extreme, tweeting

reduces the grammatical and graphic options (some blogs are highly crafted, others are wildly erratic).

synchronous

What are some of the features of

16)and asynchronous outputs?

16) asynchronous

Discussion forums are like email, but they are open, public spaces. Forum tend to be interest-based: although one’s post might to be read by complete strangers, they are likely to have at least one interest in common.

Because discussions are open, there is a moderator that monitors the language use. When someone joins a forum community, it is common practice to have to agree to same general rules of behaviour.

synchronous

Real-time writing, also called writing or interactive writing, relies on participants beings logged in and working at their screens at the same time. Real-time writing is composed on the hook, line speech and participants need to be able to compose at speed and to abbreviate like SMS.

17) now we have texts with no counterpart

What does it mean that in the offline world?

17)In the Internet

communication we may have different intentions and effects…

• messages intended to cause irritation in a chat group (trolls);
• unwanted information (spam), inactive participation in a chatroom (lurking)
• aggressive or threatening messages (flaming)
• advertisements (persuading) on a site
• Webpage (or different sections within it) = a range of purposes, e.g. to inform, educate, entertain, or ‘to be acted upon’:

• ask for action (log in, provide pass, confirm id)
• give assistance (help buttons, netiquette guidelines, ‘contact us’)
• evaluate product (consumer reviews)
• obtain feedback about online content (forum/blog and comment boxes)
• enable a purchase (‘go to basket’, payment methods), etc

• Texts whose aim is to defeat spam filters
• Unconventional graphological variations (V i a g r a, Viarga, Viaggra, Vi*agra) in email junk folder; to ensure that they avoid the word-matching function in a filter
• Texts whose aim is to save time and energy (e.g. text messages, twitter,

Emails - Texts whose aim is to guarantee higher rankings; To ensure that a website appears in the first few hits in a search. informal

What are the typical trades of an 18)register? In which types of situations can you use them? 18) informal register

Typical trades of an 18)register are:

• Contracted forms (I'm, wt, sry..)
• Coordinated sentences
• Nonsense vocabulary (e.g. thingamajig or thingummy)
• Obscenity
• Slang (Used from people to feel part of a certain community - BLOCK - THING-A-MAJIG: when you don't remember at the moment something you always know)
• Idioms (An idiom is a common word or phrase which means something different from its literal meaning but can be understood because of their popular use. Because can mean something different from what the words mean it is difficult for someone not very good at speaking the language to use them properly, for example "take a shower")
• Phrasal verbs ("verb + preposition" or "verb + adverb": the

Two terms together change the meaning of the original verb, for example "put something off=rimandare" or "put someone out=rimandare". You can use it in contexts such as conversations or letters between friends.

What are some of the technological and social facets that can be used to describe different Internet genres or outputs?

Technological facets characterize the medium (Synchronicity, Length, Identity, Audience, Persistence) and characterize relationship between users, norms of language, participant characteristics.

Technological:

• Synchronicity: +/- real time
• Granularity: nature of units/messages as lines/strings...
• Persistence: on the system
• Length: n. of characters in a message
• Channels: animated graphics, video/audio
• Identity: +/- anonymous
• Audience: publicly or privately accessible
• Adaptation: possibility of filtering, quoting...
• Format: appearance on screen, i.e. order and location vis-à-vis
othermessagesSocial:
➢ Participation structure: number, amount/speed of interaction
➢ Participant characteristics: age, gender, background…
➢ Purpose: game, ad, teach…
➢ Activities: using text, photos, videos…
➢ Topic: appropriateness
➢ Tone: jocular, aggressive, persuasive
➢ Norms of organisation: moderator, admission…
➢ Norms of social appropriateness: behavioural standards.
➢ Norms of language: recognized conventions
➢ Code: languages/varieties used morphological

Can you provide any examples of
20) processes or other types of processes for the creation of new vocabulary items in English?
➢ steal from another language (LOANWORDS), for example: opera, coupon, karaoke, ketchup, utensil…
➢ compound words are formed when two or more words are joined to create a new word that has an entirely new meaning, for example: smart card, search engine, web portal, clipboard …
➢ blend words are formed by combining two separate words with differentmeanings to form a new one, for example: blog(web and log), smog(smoke and fog), chunnel(channel and tunnel), brunch(breakfast and lunch)... ➢functional shift/conversion is a shift in the use of a word from one grammatical function to another, such as when a noun becomes a verb, for example The police gained access (N) to the premises; The programmer can access (V) the files on her PC: to IMPORT (V) > IMPORT (N) ➢back-formation: a word loses part of itself to generate a related word in a different word class, for example: "Babysitter (n) > to babysit" or "Word processor (n) > to word process". ➢first letters of each word together: Abbreviations that use the first letter of each word in a phrase are sometimes referred to as initialisms, for example: CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), BBC (British Broadcasting Cooperation), UK (United Kingdom). In what ways can software with technology change the way in which we use the language? 21) One of the most important

One characteristic of the Internet language is the distinction between the onscreen features that are automatically introduced by the software, over which the user has no control, and those features which are the result of linguistic choices made by the user. For example, in a tweet, the first word (the nickname) and the final line (replay, view tweet) are introduced by the software and only the rest is from the user.

Do you remember the case of the prompt on Twitter? Twitter uses a prompt to elicit a user response. Indeed, in 2009 Twitter asked you "What are you doing?", now ask "What's happening?"

What is the effect of new technologies on English so far? New technologies have a cumulative effect of informality on English:

• Pressure to convey information within the length constraint
• Variety of shortening techniques such as:
• Nonstandard spelling (n for and, u/ur for you/r, dat, ppl, wen, wat, dnt, thx, dropped final -g, as in doin)
• Contractions
• Abbreviations
(lol)➢emoticons➢logograms (&, +, 3)➢elliptical sentences (subject omission), sentential fragments, minorsentences (cf. interjections, e.g. wow, hey, haha…)➢ 'avoidance principles' (leave out unnecessary words, omit unnecessary punctuation marks) What is the aspect of the English language that 24) has changed the most due to the influence of the Internet in David Crystal's view? 24) Vocabulary It's the area of language that most m