Specific Typographic and Lexical Means in the Internet Communication

Bc. Pavel Dašek

Master's thesis

Abstract:

The diploma thesis “Specific typographic and lexical means in the Internet communication” deals with the new components in messaging, especially the Internet one. The main studied features are emoticons and acronyms that have recently become an integral part of messaging. These are special signs for expressing ideas and feelings in an informal, funny and fast way. They are used by a majority of people in their short messages which proves their notion and popularity. These signs are studied in two transcripts – the Czech and the English one. These corpora are compared, emoticons and acronyms are counted and the results show the outcome of the frequency of use and familiarity with them. Internet chat offers the possibility to study nicknames, synchronous and asynchronous chat. The web site used for this purpose was the ICQ server (ICQ: icq-chatrooms) where the corpora were downloaded. The downloaded texts are without any modification, except added numbers in front of the lines. Extracts taken from the transcript are used in the practical part to support the results in the research. The theoretical part explains the key words needed for this thesis and some of them are explained by citations of established linguists. The practical part focuses mainly on the questionnaire given to two age groups. These two sets of questionnaires were later evaluated by the web page vyplnto.cz, compared, and used for the research in this thesis. The clear summary of the questionnaires results and both the transcripts are found in the practical part supported by graphs. This work supports the truthfulness of the fact that the language is still in progress and people like playing with the language.

Abstract:

The diploma thesis “Specific typographic and lexical means in the Internet communication” deals with the new components in messaging, especially the Internet one. The main studied features are emoticons and acronyms that have recently become an integral part of messaging. These are special signs for expressing ideas and feelings in an informal, funny and fast way. They are used by a majority of people in their short messages which proves their notion and popularity. These signs are studied in two transcripts – the Czech and the English one. These corpora are compared, emoticons and acronyms are counted and the results show the outcome of the frequency of use and familiarity with them. Internet chat offers the possibility to study nicknames, synchronous and asynchronous chat. The web site used for this purpose was the ICQ server (ICQ: icq-chatrooms) where the corpora were downloaded. The downloaded texts are without any modification, except added numbers in front of the lines. Extracts taken from the transcript are used in the practical part to support the results in the research. The theoretical part explains the key words needed for this thesis and some of them are explained by citations of established linguists. The practical part focuses mainly on the questionnaire given to two age groups. These two sets of questionnaires were later evaluated by the web page vyplnto.cz, compared, and used for the research in this thesis. The clear summary of the questionnaires results and both the transcripts are found in the practical part supported by graphs. This work supports the truthfulness of the fact that the language is still in progress and people like playing with the language.

Keywords

Internet chat, acronyms, emoticons, written and spoken language, nicknames

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 9. 4. 2013

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 10. 6. 2013
• Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Martin Adam, Ph.D.
• Reader: Mgr. Radek Vogel, Ph.D.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Education

Master programme / field:
Teacher Training for Primary and Lower Secondary Schools / Lower Secondary School and Language School Teacher Training in English Language