Language and the Internet

148 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET

among others.^37 A very important feature is the use of rhetorical
questions or tag questions both to express a personal attitude and
to give extra emphasis to what one has just said. A typical strategy is
to make a statement and then query it oneself, as in these examples:

... we just can’t afford it. Am I right?
... a machine for every student. Does X live in this world?
... would give everyone a qualification. What has that got to do
with it?
... would mean that we would all have jobs. Can we believe this?
... this is just a waste of time, don’t you think?

Only occasionally do other members take such questions literally,
and respond directly to them.
The language of asynchronous messaging is a curious mixture
of informal letter and essay, of spoken monologue and dialogue.
Authors search for comparisons:

Conference discourse in our corpus was neither oral conversation

nor, usually, planned and edited exposition. Instead, with its heavy

contextualization and its extemporaneous keyboard composition,

it was more like a multiparty conversation among strangers who

are becoming acquaintances.^38

At the same time, it lacks some of the most fundamental properties
of conversation, such as turn-taking, floor-taking, and adjacency
pairing (p. 33). Reading through a conference log, we may get
the impression that such behaviours exist, but these are purely an
artefact of the corpus. As Davis and Brewer put it:^39

There is no real turn taking in electronic conference discourse.

Instead, there is an asynchronous exchange of messages about a

particular topic.... the contact is not with the other students, but

with the texts that the students have left behind.

There is moreover an element of tension between the motivation
to be spontaneously informal and the nature (and technological

(^37) Herring (1996b: 89). (^38) Davis and Brewer (1997: 161).
(^39) Davis and Brewer (1997: 28).