A Study Of Netspeak English From Lexical And Syntactic Perspectives

The Internet has exerted great impact on various aspects of people's lives, among which the change of language is obvious. This thesis aims to explore the lexical and syntactic features of Netspeak English in Internet relay chatting.Based on the theories of lexical motivation, lexical formation rules, lexical changes and syntax, this thesis conducts a quantitative and descriptive analysis on a corpus of 150,000 words collected from various Internet chatting resources. The analysis is mainly conducted on the lexical features, lexical changes, syntactic features of Netspeak English, and the researcher also provides a tentative analysis of the causes for these features and changes.Through analysis, the thesis concludes that the word-formation of Netspeak English follows the traditional ways, but it has its unique properties as a result of its distinctive mode of communication. For neologisms in Netspeak English, the highly productive lexical formation means are abbreviation, compounding and derivation; for the deviant uses of Netspeak English, punctuation marks, figures and capitalization are mostly used; and over 98% of the neologisms in Netspeak English can find their motivation. On syntactic level, Netspeak English has the following features: omission of subjects; frequent use of first and second pronouns; large number of short and simple sentences; high portion of questions and exclamatory sentences.