Re. Internet discourse

[Lise Fontaine]

Hello and

Thank you for your response and thank you for the references

>There is also, if you are not already aware of that, a discussion List
>devoted to online research; if you are interested in it, I can send you
>details about it off-list.

yes please, I would be very interested in this List

>I agree that electronic discourse includes, like many other types of
>discourse if carefully investigated, many features associated with orality.
>However, I think the conclusion you arrived at would apply to the kind of
>data you investigated rather than to discourse in general.

I agree completely. In fact, the text I analysed is a personal email between
two close friends.  I discuss this point in my assignment, that email messages
can certainly cover a wide range of styles, from formal written to casual
speech-like.  The casual speech-like ones interest me most and my
conclusion is
in reference to this specific type of email text.

>I am not sure I understand "embedded dialogue" the way you mean it.

Of course I am such a beginner that I really don't know what I am talking
about, but I ran into some problems doing my text analysis and this led me to
rethink dialogue.  When two friends are exchanging emails, are they exchanging
monologues? is it a straightforward dialogue? I had problems defining
dialogue.  I decided that it was indeed a form of dialogue, but each speaker
embeds his or her turns into the other's.  For example, I have chosen to embed
this after your sentence above.  Now in a personal, ongoing email, and I give
what I think is a good example of this in my assignment, it happens often only
to maintain a conversational style, or perhaps it is more involved that even
that.  As an example, I might write to a friend "oh I had a rough night last
night, the baby woke up crying several times" and then I continue writing
about
something else that I'm doing, and in my friend's response, she will embed
something like "oh that's too bad" and then later on, type something else that
is really something we find in live conversation rather than in written
dialogue, *especially* since there is often a time lag.   Further what we are
left with is no longer a chronological, linear order of utterances, which is
another problem I encountered in doing my assignment.  The first speaker's
utterance is in fact chronologically after the second speaker's utterance
(which has been kept in the current message).  It gets intricately interwoven
rather quickly.

>"embedded dialogue" the thing I am doing now to reply to the particular
>point I am selecting? Or, is it the fact that electronic discourse is
>inherently dialogic?

I think it's important to remember that electronic discourse means many
things,
and so electronic discourse is no more inherently dialogic than any other form
of discourse, but again it depends on how one defines dialogue.  Is it a
synchronous exchange/interaction? (and please fogive me because I don't have
enough experience or knowledge to be using the right terminology).  I give an
example in my assignment of something I would consider to be essentially
monologic. It's the example of the system administration people sending out an
email message saying "the server will be down Friday night from 2 am to 5 am"
or something like that.  There is no intended exchange except the
communication
of information Sender > Receiver.  I am on a List at work that is only for
information, no one posts replies, it is simply a forum to announce
information, seminars, etc.  But if we move outside these examples into
personal communication, we find that things are less straightforward. I have
been saving my personal email messages for some time now for two reasons. One
is that I realized I was creating a sort of diary or journal of my life and
reflections and I wanted to keep that. The other is that I noticed a lot of
interesting things going on linguistically. I would certainly say that
personal
email discourse is inherently dialogic. I would go further to say that it
naturally evolves into a recursive text.

When I analyse an email text coming from a friend, it usually contains 'clips'
from other messages that allow the flow of communication to continue
uninterrupted, it also saves time.  I really don't know how to treat the
utterances.  In a normal conversation between Bill and Sue, Bill speaks, then
Sue, then Bill, and so on.  Now, I have Bill speaking a long time, then Sue
answering him throughout his utterance while keeping parts of his speech in
her
messages, and so on.  So, how should each email text be treated?  I think
there
are three possibilities.
One is that each writer is treated independently, so when Sue sends her
message, only what she said in her turn is analysed.
Another is that each email message is treated as is, analysing the content
even
though some of it is a quote of an earlier message.
Thirdly, we could reconstruct each person's utterances, thereby reconstructing
utterance by utterance and topic by topic.  This would be a good amount of
work, but I am certain it would be very interesting. There are many choices
(linguistic, personal, physical-typing) that go into the make-up of any single
personal email message.
Again, I just don't have enough education or experience to begin to know the
direction to take on this issue.

> If this is what you mean, what is the link between
>electronic discourse as dialogic and unconscious language? Is everyday
>language always unconscious? Is it unconscious in the Freudian sense or in
>the sense that it is beneath the level of cognitive awareness? If
>discussions on this and other lists were so, then nobody would ever be taken
>seriously in whatever they say.

I agree, and you can be absolutely certain that I have tried to be very
conscious of what I am saying here, knowing that I am taking risks as a
beginner.  However, I would say that personal email messages are just as
conscious/unconscious as the equivalent conversation I would have face to
face.  In fact, I have experienced 'slips of the type' while typing, (rather
than slips of the tongue), and with friends I usually have kept them in the
message rather than deleting them so that my 'Listener/Reader' can share in
the
laugh.  The interesting thing is that with email, I could just as easily
delete
and restart.  I think that the conscious/unconscious degree is relevant in
speech as well, my conversation with my good friend over coffee is far less
conscious than my job interview is.  There are many parallels between online
and offline discourse, but email messages differ, and I am speaking of
personal
conversational style messages only, in the degree of embedding, the recursive
nature of the resulting text, and the efforts made to capture an
conversational
'turn-taking' style.

I don't even know if any of this raises any interesting questions for
linguistic research, but I would appreciate some further understanding on the
notions of dialogue. I have read some of what Peter White has written and I
found it really interesting (Dialogue and inter-subjectivity:
reinterpreting the
semantics of modality and hedging, to be specific).  I would like to add
that my
assignment is long since submitted and so I am pursuing this for my own
personal interests now.

I apologize for the length of this message, this is a personal interest of
mine, and I get carried away.

good cheers to all,

Lise
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