Computer Talk

In the light of previous studies of features of spoken and written language, this study examined the opening months of an informal computer conversation among novice computer users who had not previously known each other. To establish the sequence of conversational utterances in the absence of physical and temporal proximity, participants used personal names and lexical referents. Linguistic features often found in oral conversation—indicators of personal involvement, disfluencies, and representations of paralinguistic elements—occurred frequently in this corpus. The graphic representation of normally oral language features may account in part for the participants' sense of intimacy and community with one another.