An Analysis Of English Conversation In Internet Chat Room

With the development and popularity of Internet, more and more people take part in the communication activities mediated by it. The special characters of the medium make the language employed in these activities different from written and spoken languages, forming a new variant. It is said by many linguists, such as David Crystal, that a new branch of linguistics—Internet linguistics is now emerging and booming. Ever since Internet was open to common people, CMC has attracted the attention from the scholars of all fields. At present, one form of CMC, conversation in chat rooms, has become the heated focus. Concerning with the studies in China, features in the aspects of lexicon, graphology and syntax are widely and detailedly studied, but most of the studies in respect of discourse features are brief and descriptive, so there is the necessity to have a close examine of the conversations in chat room.By employing the theories of conversational analysis put forward by Sacks and his associates, this thesis aims at analyzing the conversations produced in synchronous textual conversations in chat rooms, focusing on the features in the categories concerning with turn-taking, adjacency pairs and overall organization, with the purpose of figuring out the generally accepted features of the chat room conversation in these categories.Based on the analyses of the record copied directly from several chat rooms, conclusions can be drawn that new features of conversation in chat rooms lie in the following aspects: (1) more turn-constructional components and violation of the rules in turn-taking; (2) disruptive and unpaired adjacency pairs; (3) unbalanced and incomplete overall organization with frequent topic shifting and multi-topics paralleling.The conclusions are of certain referential significance to the future study. While limited by the practical condition and the researcher's competence, there are several deficiencies in the research. With the popularity of the communication via internet chat rooms, more studies should be performed to make tracks for the development in this new and challenging field. The thesis also provides several implications of the study to the computer aided learning and teaching in the end.