A Stylistic Study On Netspeak Used In Chat Rooms

In the last decade, with the widespread use of computer and Internet, more and more people prefer to communicate on Internet through chat rooms, and the appearance of computer mediated communication (CMC) has generated a new variety of language -Netspeak used in chat rooms. It refers to those written codes on computer screen, which are mixture of Chinese characters, English words, letters, punctuation marks, algebraic marks, and Arabic numerals, etc.Previous studies in this field are typically lacking in descriptive adequacy. One reason for this fact is that these special parlances have been considered to be nonstandard language, which in a sense might uglify the Mandarin or standard English. As a result, they have not attracted the same amount of attention as the varieties of regional and social dialects. Another reason has been the fact that the linguists who conducted research on them would each concentrates on certain specific aspects, like the phonological changes, the semantic changes and the grammatical changes. Moreover, analyses before are limited to one kind of language, such as Chinese or English. Therefore, this thesis makes an attempt to offer a comprehensive analysis of language used in Internet chat rooms by focusing on its particular stylistic characteristics in order to extend the scope of its discussion.Based on theories of modern stylistics, the thesis will analyze the obvious stylistic features of Netspeak used in chat room communication. The analysis will be carried out from the linguistic description, which will cover four levels: graphical level, graphological level, lexical level, and grammatical level. Through these analyses, a clear picture of stylistic features of language used in Internet communication is provided.However, with the development of computer technology, Netspeak used in chat rooms keeps changing so rapidly that this thesis is just an attempt to reveal some aspects of Netspeak used in chat rooms.