Speech in written form? A corpus analysis of computer-mediated communication

This paper investigates the nature of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and examine whether CMC more closely resembles written or spoken language in its structure and organization. The CMC in this paper refers to messages posted on the BBC's Have Your Say website over a two year period, and begins by describing how the 1.5 million word corpus was constructed from these postings. It then discusses how the characteristics of the corpus can be analyzed, with reference to research undertaken by Biber et al. (1999) into lexical bundles. Biber et al. compared the distribution of lexical bundles across typical written discourse (academic writing) with typical spoken discourse (conversation) and found there to be a marked contrast in the form and function of the most predominant chunks of language in these two registers. This study uses a similar methodology to determine the degree to which each kind of discourse more closely matches the CMC corpus by examining the statistical composition of various lexical bundle types in the CMC corpus. The paper concludes that while CMC shares several characteristics of both written and spoken language, it is in fact far more formulaic in its structure than either, and so properly deserves to be considered as having a register type of its own. (J. F. Oberlin University)