The language of chatgroups 143
you’. In a Stoppardian setting, I can imagine several lines of play
dialogue being taken up in this way.
Quotation is not the only way in which chatgroup messages are
linked, of course. All kinds of anaphoric cross-reference are also
found in opening sentences (p. 113):
Another good tool is...
The last time I tried it...
She does a good job...
Perhaps I should be clearer...And sentence connectivity is present, especially among members
who are monitoring the messages so frequently that the interaction
verges on the synchronous (see below):
Or you could just...
Exceptyoucan’t...
And it is easier to...General feedback or back-channelling reactions are also found as
opening sentences – ‘Yeah’, ‘Thanks’, ‘Wow!’, ‘Great idea’ – as well
as discourse features such as ‘Well’ and ‘Umm’. What is surprising,
of course, is that sometimes these close-binding links may appear
in messages separated by long periods of time. The impression is
always of a rapidly moving conversation – until we look at the
headers, to find that G wrote his message in April and H wrote her
reaction in December.
An interesting pragmatic asymmetry operates in some chat-
groups. They may not greet, but they do close. In some classroom
situations, virtually all the messages conclude with a farewell of
some kind – usually a simple name, but often preceded by a closing
formula, such as ‘Cheers’ or ‘Take care’, or an expression of affilia-
tion (‘All power to the Jeffs of this world’). Although the name of
the sender is clear from the header or directory listing, there is also
a strong tendency to add a personal signature, sometimes with all
the trimmings encountered in e-mails (p. 99). This is less likely in
a small group, or in one with closed membership (signatures were
not a feature of the Davis and Brewer corpus, for example). Hardly
any of the members of those WELL conferences that are publicly