144 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
available^24 end with a formal closure, though there is the occasional
greeting and mid-body naming. On the other hand, in a sample
of 200 personal contributions taken from several groups on the
LINGUIST list (that is, excluding circulars, conference announce-
ments, calls for papers, etc.) over 90% ended with some sort of
farewell, ranging from a casual ‘Thanks a lot’ to a formal affiliation
signature.^25 A great deal of variation in practice evidently exists.
The body of a chatgroup message does, however, display a few
typical features. Susan Herring identified a number of functional
macrosegments in her data, and concluded that ‘participants are
aiming at an ideal message schema comprised of three functional
moves: an introduction, a contentful message body, and a close’.^26
Within the body, she found three further elements to be typical: a
link to an earlier message, an expression of views, and an appeal to
other participants. So, a typical message might be:
Introduction:Good to see that people are worried about this issue.
Body: Link:Smith thinks that X is the case.
Expression of view:I disagree.
Appeal:Am I alone in this view?
Close:I look forward to hearing more on this.This, along with any epistolary conventions of greeting and signa-
ture, made a ‘balanced communicative unit’.^27
Also typical of chatgroup messages is their length, which tends
to be short. While I have seen contributions, especially to the
more in-depth discussions of professional groups, running to over
100 lines – or even reproducing whole articles – the vast major-
ity are very short indeed. A sample of 113 contributions – all the
contributions made to three WELL groups (each of which had
at least 30 members) – produced an average of 3.5 lines per
(^24) As of October 2000, there were two of these: Inkwell.vue and Point.vue.
(^25) A similar asymmetry between greetings and signatures was found by Herring (1996b:
87): in her discussion groups, only 13% of the messages were preceded by a salutation,
26 whereas 80% were followed by a signature.
27 Herring (1996b: 90–1).
The reference is to Halliday (1978: 187), who recognizes three functional components
within a language’s semantic system:textual(i.e. links to other text),ideational(i.e.
language as reflective content), andinterpersonal(i.e. language as action). In Herring’s
terms, the introduction to a message is a textual link, the expression of views is ideational,
and the closing is interpersonal.