Netspeak In Chat Rooms

The rapid development of the Internet has brought a new world that is quick, convenient, and colorful to the current globe. It has also created a new culture, namely, cyber culture, which is now deeply influencing people's life style and changing their concept as well. A great number of people communicate frequently in this virtual world with a new form of language, which is defined as Netspeak in this thesis. The new linguistic phenomenon has aroused concern from the society and people from all walks of life. Netspeak has also provided a new field for research in stylistics.In this thesis, I have made a relatively systematic and objective study of the special linguistic features and their stylistic effects of Netspeak in chat rooms, so that it will help netizens understand better the artistic use of Netspeak from a new perspective—stylistics. To study Netspeak, as a special variety, will provide a better angle of vision and will also be significant for netizens to arouse their interests and take active part in Netspeak communication.Based on the previous studies, this paper takes Netspeak in chat rooms as the object of study, chooses examples from different Internet chat rooms, and by means of stylistic approach: description, interpretation and evaluation, investigates those particular linguistic features and their stylistic effects of Netspeak at the four linguistic levels: graphology, phonology, lexicon and syntax. Phonological and graphological deviations, such as homophones, decapitalizations and emoticons are often seen in Netspeak to achieve special audio- visual effects,; lexically, some neologisms and polysemous words are striking, and humorous; syntactically, unusual sentence structures such as incomplete and elliptical sentences are common. Generally speaking, all these marked linguistic features are vivid, humorous and expressive, contributing a lot to the unique style of Netspeak. Meanwhile, I mainly discussed three functions of Netspeak in chat rooms, namely: referential function, interpersonal function and recreational function. It's noticed that more and more people are attracted by the chat rooms and Netspeak. Many people think that Netspeak enriches the traditional language and bring us a lot of joys. Although Netspeak is different in many aspects from the formal language, it is equal in its functions to meet the communicative demands of its users.However, with the development of computer technology, Netspeak used in chat rooms keeps changing so rapidly that this thesis is just an attempt to reveal some aspects of Netspeak used in chat rooms.