A Stylistic Comparative Study Of Two Netspeak Varieties In CMC

Since its opening up to the public in 1993, the Internet has become a buzzword worldwide. With the Internet's global penetration and intensity of application, the influence brought along by the information technology has affected many aspects of people's lives and has, at the same time, drawn attention from different spectrums of the community, including those in linguistics.This thesis will focus on the language component most often employed on the Internet or in other words, in this Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). By that it is in this thesis referred to the English language, while the graphic element is discussed when it is interwoven with texts. The term "Netspeak" will be often cited for quick reference to the English language used in CMC.Due to the characteristic of the CMC, it can be broadly divided into two categories, e.g. asynchronous and synchronous communications according to the instantaneity of the communication. This characteristic casts great influence on the language used under these two circumstances. Therefore, within the Netspeak, one language variety of English as a whole, there are actually two sub-varieties. This thesis tries to compare and analyse these two Netspeak varieties from a stylistic perspective. Stylistics, then, is the major theoretical basis of this thesis.This thesis adopts a descriptive approach, supported by statistical analysis on the samples selected, on the stylistic features of the two Netspeak varieties. In this thesis, there are two resources for collecting samples and materials, namely offline resources and online ones. Offline resources cover a wide range of Netspeak-related books, newspapars, magazines, etc. Samples collected from online resources mainly refer to those randomly selected from Websites worldwide in the process when the writer surfed the Internet. Specifically, the samples and materials used for the analysis on synchronous Netspeak are mainly dialoguesdownloaded from 18 chatrooms of Yahoo! Chat. 200 pieces of dialogues in each chatroom are randomly downloaded for analysis and comparison.The two Netspeak varieties are mainly compared from four aspects, namely lexical comparison, graphic one, orthographic or graphological one, and grammatical one. Through these four levels of comparison, this thesis reveals the stylistic distinctiveness of the two Netspeak varieties, With the further development of information technology and the Internet, Netspeak is bound to grow and change constantly. What this thesis reveals is some stylistic features cunently distinctive in Netspeak. There are surely more aspects to be defined and analyzed in Netspeak for future study.