LINGUISTIC INNOVATIONS IN COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

It is justified to claim that the processes of the computerisation of everyday life, the creation of the information society and the public acquisition of the Internet led to the emergence of a new variety of language abundant with linguistic innovations used in numerous forms of computer mediated communication. The arrival of the Internet is regarded by some researchers as a revolutionary event in linguistic terms and its significance is even compared to the appearance of the media of speech and writing. Texts existing in the Internet have been classified into three categories according to the criterion whether they existed in a pre-Internet era and if so whether they have been subject to a noticeable modification. The first group comprises genres that have exactly the same counterparts in print versions. The second category includes types of texts that have undergone a substantial transformation in relation to their traditional equivalents, such as electronic mail, internet forums and mailing lists. The last category consists of new genres that were not known before the appearance of the Internet and evolved together with the emergence of computer mediated communication, such as synchronous chat. The paper is an attempt to describe characteristic features of the language used in texts representing the last two abovementioned categories: electronic mail, internet forums, mailing lists and synchronous chat. Particular attention is focused on novel linguistic mechanisms that can be observed in these genres.