A Study Of The Stylistic Features Of E-mail In Everyday Communication

With the development of personal computer and the Internet technology in the last two decades, e-mail, as the most popular and extensively penetrated Internet-based application, is becoming an increasingly important modality in people's daily communication activities. In this whole new space, we see language use and language itself is adapting to e-mail, the new computer-mediated communication, and presenting a notable set of linguistic features that show a "hybrid-nature" of both spoken and written discours. Applying the theories of General Stylistics, the present thesis attempts to analyze email messages exchanged in everyday communication activities from the perspectives of contextual factors and linguistic features with the facilitation of 30 e-mail samples selected randomly from open-access e-mail groups. As such, this thesis is helpful for those who wish to understand the broader background of email use and the stylistic features of language used to create email.The paper falls into five chapters. The first chapter serves as a general introduction. The second chapter briefly introduces the development of e-mail and various CMC forms and reviews the previous research on CMC and e-mail, intending to introduce the development of this new communication modality and explain the significance of the stylistic study of e-mail language. In the third chapter the paper examines the contextual factors of e-mail from perspectives the topics concerned in e-mail, the role of e-mail users and the medium of communication. The detailed linguistic description of email language, serving as the fourth chapter of the thesis and also the main part of this paper. analyzes email texts from four levels, phonology, graphology, lexis and syntax, and distinctive features that reveal the hybrid nature of both written and spoken language are described and illustrated with extracts from the sample e-mails. The fifth chapter is the closing part, summarizing the thesis as a whole and provides suggestions for further research to fulfill the limitations of this thesis.