A Stylistic Approach To English Netspeak

The birth of the Internet marks a milestone in the development of computer science. The Internet makes the whole world cyberspace. It has been sweeping into people's life, changing people's thoughts, concepts, and even lifestyles unconsciously. All these inevitably have effects on the language. In fact, the language used in computer-mediated communication (CMC) has developed into a new language variety-Netspeak, which is in its infancy of evolution as the Internet is still very young. The present thesis attempts to analyze Netspeak from the perspective of stylistics.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter one is the introduction, which presents a general view of the brief history of the Internet, definitions of Netspeak and relationship between the Internet and Netspeak.Chapter two provides stylistic and register theories needed for the analysis of Netspeak. In addition, literature review is covered.Chapters three and four constitute the main body of the thesis.Chapter three analyzes its linguistic features in terms of style markers that fall into four categories, namely, graphology, lexicon, grammar and discourse.Chapter four discusses the effects of the style markers and the future of Netspeak. The effects are novelty and casualness in style, succinctness and convenience in expression, vividness and prominence in vision, diversity in form, and nonstandard in punctuation and spelling.Chapter five summarizes the whole thesis and gives the author's personal suggestions on further Netspeak research.