Spoken and Written Discourse in Online Interactions. A Multimodal Approach

Common patterns of interactions are altered in the online world and new patterns of communication have emerged, challenging previous notions of what communication actually is in the contemporary age. Online configurations of interaction, such as video chats, blogging, and social networking practices demand profound rethinking of the categories of linguistic analysis, given the blurring of traditional distinctions between oral and written discourse in digital texts. This volume reconsiders underlying semiotic frameworks of analysis of spoken and written discourse in the light of the new paradigms of online communication, in keeping with a multimodal and corpus linguistics theoretical framework. Typical modes of online interaction encompass speech, writing, gesture, movement, gaze, and social distance. This is nothing new, but here Sindoni asserts that all these modes are integrated in unprecedented ways, enacting new interactional patterns and new systems of interpretation among web users. These "non verbal" modes have been sidelined by mainstream linguistics, whereas accounting for the complexity of new genres and making sense of their educational impact is high on this volume’ s agenda. The book analyzes other new phenomena, ranging from the intimate sphere (i.e. chats, personal blogs or personal profiles on social networking) to the public arena (i.e. global-scale transmission of information and knowledge in public blogs or video-sharing communities), in light of the rapidly changing global web scenario. The book makes use of video and verbal corpora for each domain of discourse (i.e. videochat, blogs, video sharing communities) and explores written/spoken variations, which are embedded within multimodal environments.