Dimensions of variation across Internet registers

Sardinha, Tony Berber

doi:10.1075/ijcl.15026.ber

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…Our results contribute to the growing body of evidence that online registers are a different form of communication, and not a hybrid mode somewhere between speech and writing. Studies of Twitter ( Clarke and Grieve, 2019 ), Reddit ( Liimatta, 2019 ), and other online platforms ( Hardy and Friginal, 2012 ; Titak and Roberson, 2013 ; Pavalanathan et al, 2017 ; Berber Sardinha, 2018 ), point to a new type of communication, including individual variation within the various platforms and communication channels. For instance, Liimatta (2019) found the now-familiar informational style in Reddit posts, but also, similar to the present analysis, an instructional focus.…”

Section: Online News Comments Compared To Other Online Registersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An ever-growing body of research analyses online language in general (e.g., Crystal, 2011 ; McCulloch, 2020 ), specific online registers, such as email ( Frehner, 2008 ; McVeigh, 2020 ), blogs ( Herring et al, 2004 ; Peterson, 2011 ), reviews ( Taboada, 2011 ; Vásquez, 2014 ), Facebook ( West, 2013 ; Farina, 2018 ), Twitter ( Zappavigna, 2012 ; Clarke and Grieve, 2019 ), or online and social media language in general ( Giltrow and Stein, 2009 ; Titak and Roberson, 2013 ; Page et al, 2014 ; Biber and Egbert, 2016 ; Berber Sardinha, 2018 ; Biber and Egbert, 2018 ). Little attention, however, has been paid to the linguistic characteristics of online news comments, a register now ubiquitous in our interactions with news, whether on the pages of newspapers or through platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Characterising Online News Comments: A Multi-Dimensional Cruise Through Online Registers

Ehret

Taboada

2021

Front. Artif. Intell.

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News organisations often allow public comments at the bottom of their news stories. These comments constitute a fruitful source of data to investigate linguistic variation online; their characteristics, however, are rather understudied. This paper thus contributes to the description of online news comments and online language in English. In this spirit, we apply multi-dimensional analysis to a large dataset of online news comments and compare them to a corpus of online registers, thus placing online comments in the space of register variation online. We find that online news comments are involved-evaluative and informational at the same time, but mostly argumentative in nature, with such argumentation taking an informal shape. Our analyses lead us to conclude that online registers are a different mode of communication, neither spoken nor written, with individual variation across different types of online registers.

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Section: Online News Comments Compared To Other Online Registersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterising Online News Comments: A Multi-Dimensional Cruise Through Online Registers

Ehret

Taboada

2021

Front. Artif. Intell.

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“…The dimensions of such genres are being actively investigated by quantitative methods. For example, Sardinha (2018) highlights the expression of stance and its two varieties that are important for online communication genres-interactional evidentiality and interactional affect. Thus, when expressing a position, the dominant role of the pragmatics of online communication and main role of the communicative intention leading to speech impact is again justified.…”

Section: Relevant Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragma-Semantic Relations in the Structure of a Business Microblog

Radyuk¹,

Ivanova²,

Badmatsyrenova³

et al. 2019

IJEL

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The article considers the business microblog as a new business communication register and studies its structural and semantic properties. The relevance of the work is determined by the fact that at present the microblog register in the context of business communication and its semantic structure are not fully studied. The authors aim to find out what pragmatic, structural and semantic features are peculiar to business messages in social network Twitter. Using the methods of discourse analysis, semantic and linguosynergetic analysis, we identified such structural properties of business microblogs as hypertextuality, interactivity, spontaneity, business context, dialogism, situationality and expressiveness. Semantic properties include most frequent pragma-semantic relations between propositions in microblogs (explanation, expansion, causation, pragmatic commentary). The language material shows that the genre of business microblogging is the result of mixing and contamination of oral and written registers of business discourse, as well as the emergence of new technical means of communication. A linguosynergetic analysis of propositions showed that the semantic structure is determined by the communicative intention of the addressee and, due to the small volume of messages, is based on two or three propositions connected by certain logical relationships. Further research on this topic can be carried out in the field of studying other genres and the influence of addressee factor in online communication.

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“…In particular, the variety of language use and users as well as the extreme sizes of data available online have attracted the attention of natural language processing (NLP), where online data have been used to improve the performance of automatic syntactic analysis (Zeman et al 2017) and machine translation (Tiedemann et al 2016;Srivastava et al 2017), for example. Similarly, in corpus linguistics, online data have been applied, among others, to analyze the new text varieties that have emerged in online settings (Titak and Roberson, 2013;Berber Sardinha 2018) and to examine rare expressions and constructions that are difficult if not impossible to study in traditional language resources (Schäfer 2016;Huumo et al 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the role of lexis and grammar for the stable identification of register in an unrestricted corpus of web documents

Laippala

Egbert

Biber

et al. 2021

Lang Resources & Evaluation

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The Internet offers great possibilities for many scientific disciplines that utilize text data. However, the potential of online data can be limited by the lack of information on the genre or register of the documents, as register—whether a text is, e.g., a news article or a recipe—is arguably the most important predictor of linguistic variation (see Biber in Corpus Linguist Linguist Theory 8:9–37, 2012). Despite having received significant attention in recent years, the modeling of online registers has faced a number of challenges, and previous studies have presented contradictory results. In particular, these have concerned (1) the extent to which registers can be automatically identified in a large, unrestricted corpus of web documents and (2) the stability of the models, specifically the kinds of linguistic features that achieve the best performance while reflecting the registers instead of corpus idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, although the linguistic properties of registers vary importantly in a number of ways that may affect their modeling, this variation is often bypassed. In this article, we tackle these issues. We model online registers in the largest available corpus of online registers, the Corpus of Online Registers of English (CORE). Additionally, we evaluate the stability of the models towards corpus idiosyncrasies, analyze the role of different linguistic features in them, and examine how individual registers differ in these two aspects. We show that (1) competitive classification performance on a large-scale, unrestricted corpus can be achieved through a combination of lexico-grammatical features, (2) the inclusion of grammatical information improves the stability of the model, whereas many of the previously best-performing feature sets are less stable, and that (3) registers can be placed in a continuum based on the discriminative importance of lexis and grammar. These register-specific characteristics can explain the variation observed in previous studies concerning the automatic identification of online registers and the importance of different linguistic features for them. Thus, our results offer explanations for the jungle-likeness of online data and provide essential information on online registers for all studies using online data.

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Dimensions of variation across Internet registers

Cited by 13 publications

References 40 publications

Characterising Online News Comments: A Multi-Dimensional Cruise Through Online Registers

Characterising Online News Comments: A Multi-Dimensional Cruise Through Online Registers

Pragma-Semantic Relations in the Structure of a Business Microblog

Exploring the role of lexis and grammar for the stable identification of register in an unrestricted corpus of web documents

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