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"Should Be Fun—Not!"Incidence and Marking of Nonliteral Language in E-MailUniversity of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, jwhalen{at}ucalgary.ca
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois According to Kreuz's principle of inferability, speakers tend to employ nonliteral language when it can reasonably be perceived by their conversational partner. In a computer-mediated communicative setting, such as e-mail, this suggests that the e-mail writer might use discourse tools that facilitate comprehension on the part of the recipient. The present study examined rates of usage for various forms of nonliteral language in 210 e-mail messages written by young adults. In 94.30% of all e-mails there was at least one nonliteral statement, and participants used an average of 2.90 nonliteral statements per e-mail. Results showed that forms of nonliteral language that are typically deemed to be riskier, such as sarcasm, were used much less frequently than other less risky forms, such as hyperbole, and were marked with discourse markers more often. This indicates that e-mail authors are sensitive to the risky nature of nonliteral language use in e-mail, yet are savvy to the tools available to them in this communicative medium.
Key Words: nonliteral language • irony • computer-mediated communication • e-mail • discourse analysis • pragmatics.
This version was published on September
1, 2009 Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 3,
263-280 (2009) |
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