Discourse structures in Instant Messaging: The case of utterance breaks

Both users of CMC and the popular press commonly assume that online platforms such as email and instant messaging (IM) mirror informal spoken language. The present study investigates the validity of this assumption by examining discourse structures in IM conversations between American college students. Linguistic features of spoken and written language were first compared both paradigmatically and empirically, drawing particularly on research on intonation units by Chafe (1980, 1994). A subsequent fine-grained analysis of the grammatical points at which subjects chunked their IM turns into multiple transmissions revealed that while IM conversations between male dyads tended to resemble spoken discourse according to this dimension, IM conversations between females bore more similarities to traditional written language.

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