An Adaptation-based Study Of The Internet Language

The Internet is the greatest invention of the 20th Century. It is one of the most important ways of communication in the people's life. It influences people's language greatly. Therefore, it has attracted more and more people's attention. However, the research of the Internet language is a new aspect in the linguistic field. In terms of the whole situation of the Internet language, the studies in China are fewer than those abroad, and the systematic theories are fewer than the simple perceptual collections, classifications and introductions. There are still theoretical blanks to fill.Therefore, the present study focuses on the Internet language and the conceptual framework is constructed on the basis of Jef Verschueren's (2000) Linguistic Adaptation Theory. This thesis adopts a qualitative research method based on the data. It aims to test whether the Adaptation Theory can well explain the Internet language, i.e. whether the Internet language possesses the property of the adaptability.On the basis of the Linguistic Adaptation Theory and the fresh data which are collected from websites, this thesis analyzes the reasons for the Internet language users' choice-makings at four linguistic structural levels (the level of language, codes and styles, the level of utterance-building ingredients, the level of utterances and utterance clusters and the level of utterances-building principles) and finds that these choice-makings are the results of adaptation to such context as the mental world which includes the multitude-followed mentality, the mentality of pursuing the individuality and the fashion, the desire of shortening the mental distance, the desire of relaxation, the unhealthy desire of giving vent to others, the mentality of pursuing the high efficiency of communication, and the mentality of longing for expressing netizens themselves freely, etc., the social world which includes netizens' levels of education and the political forces and the ideological forces, etc., and the physical world which includes the space on the net and the material conditions of speech, etc After that, the present study gets the conclusion that the Internet language possesses the property of adaptability.This conclusion is helpful to build more appropriate language policies, such as being tolerant to most of Internet language and adopting stern legal methods to request the managers of the websites to filter the obscene words and reject the users. Thus, people can utilize the Internet language more effectively.