LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF INTERNET COMMUNICATION (BLOGS)
Akhmetova G.S., Seidakhmet N.A.
The Internet opens large opportunities for work, leisure, communication, and sharing diverse information. It has changed the world and society consistently, because the creation of internet and its growing popularity contributed to the consistent change in the life of people. They have opened the new, virtual world and a new effective means of communication- internet - which have started to replace the traditional means of communication, to the extent that online communication has started to replace the live, real, physical communication between people.
Every year the role of Internet communication increases in various spheres of life of the present society, becoming an integral part of our being. In this regard, there is a need to define and describe the linguistic features of the Internet communication. Awareness of the main provisions and structure of the communication process, the description of the internal system and linguistic means, plays an important role in the formation of rules of communication in the communicative space of the Internet. The actuality of this study lies in the need to describe the linguistic and stylistic characteristics of Internet communication particularly blogs. It is aimed to comprehensively study the linguistic features of blogs and chats as a form of Internet communication.
Among the various forms of Internet communication, it was decided that the most popular
are blogs (online diaries).There are several definitions of the blog, it is a website containing dated multimedia records in reverse chronological order, with the possibility of leaving comments on
the records and viewing any of them on a separate web page . Generally speaking, a blog, the abbreviated form of weblog (or web log) is a type of personal column posted on the Internet. It allows a user or a group of users allows the user to enter, display, and edit posts at any time. Blog was declared ‘word of the year’ by the dictionary publishers Merriam-Webster in 2004. Other terms
that came into use with the introduction of blogs include:
- bloggers – those who blog
- blogging – an activity carried out by bloggers
- blogstorm or blogswarm – blog attracting a considerable amount of online
- attention
- blogsite – a web site providing web log services (Blogger, LiveJournal etc)
- blogroll – a listing of favorite links to other blogs
- bleg – short of begging blog is a blog that contains a request to readers
- blogosphere – the totality of all blogsites
- moblog – a blog which consists chiefly of posts sent by mobile phone
- audioblog – a blog that includes adding and downloading music
- photoblog – blog including digital photographs
- vlog – short of videoblog is a blogs that allows adding video clips.
It should be noted that initially the bloggers were engaged in the analysis of blogs. One of them is R. Blood. We are absolutely in agreement with it that the main characteristics of blogs are frequent renewability, a large number of links to external sites or other blogs and a high level of social interactivity, which means blogs often refer to each other and that in many blogs readers can leave comments to posts. [1]
Blood identifies three types of blogs:
-topical (or filter) blogs
-personal journals (or diaries)
-the so-called knowledge blogs (or notebooks)
Topical blogs and their features
Topical (or filter) blogs are exemplified by the news-based and political blogs that have figured prominently in the popular media’s discussion of blogging. In this type of blog, the blogger is said to “pre-surf” the Web and direct readers to selected content. The content of filters is external to the blogger (e.g. world events, onlinehappenings, etc.). From the example (taken from www.blogs.telegraph.co.uk), Paul Ryan “On Benghazi: 'I Don't Know' If There Was A Cover-up”
simply illustrating a topical blog we can define that there is almost no difference between this blog and an online newspaper column. Therefore, the blog in question closely resembles written language found in newspaper articles. Language is quite formal and follows the patterns of Standard English, with correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. The only issue where this blog differs from a newspaper column is the use of hypertext links. Blogs are very important in this matter in a way that they allow users to post raw material online that has not been previously edited.
Personal journals and their features
Personal journals or diaries, following the earlier lead of web diary sites such as LiveJournal. This genre also might include travel blogs, lifestyle, health blogs. The content of personal journals is internal to the blogger (the blogger’s thoughts and internal workings). Below is an analysis of a personal journal blog, taken from www.escnation.com/blog: “I was right and you were wrong”by Samm B. The style of writing resembles a stream of consciousness, as it seems that it expresses the author’s thoughts and feelings, just as they pass through their minds. Most importantly, there are several distinguishing features of Netspeak that can be found in the extract. Some of these features are:
- subject ellipsis (Been here 5 days…, Not skiing., Too nervous I might…),
-omission of auxiliary verbs have and be (Been here 5 days…, Not skiing., Too nervous I might…),
-deviant spelling (gotta, gonna),
-contracted forms (I’m, hasn’t, haven’t, she’s),
-use of capital letters to refer to shouting (BUT),
-beginning a sentence with a coordinating conjunction (BUT, I did…, But I was so…)
-replacing a word by a number (5 days, 2 weeks, 2 hours),
- omission of punctuation (missing comma).
It is identified that this style of writing as the one that has never been seen in a public, printed form, outside of literature, and even there it would take an ingenious novelist indeed to capture its innocent spontaneity and unpredictable thematic direction. Personal journals are likely to provoke a number of replies from other readers in
the form of comments. The result is often a discussion which resembles an
asynchronous chatgroup.
Knowledge-blogs (or notebooks) and their features
The so-called knowledge blogs (or notebooks), are the type of blogs where individuals
share their skills or expertise on particular issues. Notebooks may contain
either external or internal content, and are distinguished by longer, focused essays.
Crystal answers a query from another linguist in a form of an online lecture, thus replacing the classroom with a blog. Making an uncountable noun countable with the introduction of partitive expressions is discussed. The lecture is given in writing, however the language used closely resembles speech, which brings us back to the inevitable question, and one of the most intriguing and interesting things about Netspeak, as a form of communication – the extent to
which it relies on the features of both speech and writing. As in the case of topical
blogs, it can be said that knowledge blogs share very few typical Netspeak features, given their form and nature. Netspeak is the name that has been given to the long list of acronyms and smiley faces that have evolved with the internet. [2] Netspeak is a Web service which assists authors in writing English texts. Writing is an everyday task and sometimes everyone finds it difficult to put something into the right words, e.g., if one misses a word or wonders which wording is more common. In such and similar cases Netspeak offers help: the customariness of a wording in written language can be determined, and alternative wordings can be retrieved. Linguistically, the most interesting feature of Netspeak is its morphology. Acronyms and abbreviations make up a large part of Net jargon. FAQ (Frequently Asked Question), MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon), and URL (Uniform Resource Locator) are some of the most frequently seen TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) on the Internet. General abbreviations abound as well, in more friendly and conversationally conducive forms, such as TIA (Thanks In Advance), BRB (Be Right Back), BTW (By The Way), and IMHO (In My Humble Opinion.) These abbreviations can be baffling to new users, and speaking in abbreviations takes some getting used to. Once users are used to them, though, such abbreviations are a nice and easy way of expediting communication.
With the advent of a new type of communication, the question of genre formation has become one of the most urgent. There is a growing interest in the identification of genres on the
World Wide Web. Herring, Scheidt claim that, as a type of web document, blogs are related to – and some would claim, replacing – personal home pages: both are typically created and maintained by a single individual, and their content tends to focus on the creator or his/her interests. While theirs is the first systematic genre analysis of blogs, personal home pages have received considerable attention from Web genre analysts.[3] Over the past 20 years, the blog as an Internet genre, its popularity is growing diametrically with a weakening of interest to the media, is of great importance. A blog is called this discourse "as far as a person". Therefore, the author of the blog mostly writes non-literary language, although it should be borne in mind that there are general rules of media discourse, which every author should know and use. With all the diversity of design, any blog includes a profile, a tape of entries, pages of individual records and a "tape of friends."]The blog is diverse in terms of the degree of creole, the hypertext of the blog is divided into external and internal levels. In addition, the blog implies a lively interest, attention and response of the reader, and, usually, not simultaneous with the moment of creating the text-stimulus. The number of participants in communication can be extremely broad: a blog entry can be read by any user of the network, but in reality around each blog a more or less wide circle of interested readers is created [4].
Overall, the Internet is an integral part of modern life. It becomes not only the most complete and operative source of information about the world, but also an important means of communication.
Foremost, communication on the internet is carried out in the conditions of mass communication and, therefore, has its own characteristics in contrast to the traditional direct communication in life.[5] In this research it is investigated linguistic features of internet communication on the materials of blogs. We defined the types of blogs according to Blood’s classification, selected topics and distributed by types. In order to examine we used such Analysis of blogs shows that users often use various language tools in their speech such as interjections, abbreviations, phraseological units, slang, informal vocabulary, unfinished sentences, epithets, comparisons, and others. Also, the use of various graphic tools by blog authors makes their speech emotional and understandable for milestones. All these language tools make the speech of bloggers bright, diverse and interesting for readers. There are widely held anxieties about the effect of the Internet on language and languages. This primarily relates to various issues of social concern, such as politics, economy, privacy, security, crime, intellectual property rights etc., where authors draw attention to the dangers of the Internet, buton the other hand, there are authors who are primarily concerned with linguistic issues.[6]
Literature:
1. .Blood R. Weblogs: A History and Perspective / [интернет ресурс] .Guardian. co/uk - The 50s Most Powerful Blogs
2. Crystal, David (2004). A Glossary of Netspeak and Textspeak. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press
3. Herring, usan C., Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus, Elijah Wright (2005). Weblogs as a
bridging genre. Information, Technology & People 18.2: 142–171.
4.26. Баженова Е. А., Иванова И. А. Блог как интернет-жанр Вестник Пермского Университета Российская и Зарубежная Филология Вып. 4(20) УДК 81’38: 81’42 – 2012
5. Полат Е.С. Интернет на уроках иностранного языка // Иностранные языки в школе. - 2001. - № 2. - С.17-28.
6. Baron, Naomi (2008). Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York:
Oxford University Press.
