Modalități de contextualizare în comunicarea mediată de calculator

Abstract

The unique features of cyberspace and its time and space constraints led to the de-velopment of new ways to build context, adapted to the virtual environment. The gaps in computer-mediated communication are filled in by conventions aiming to describe sociologic, psychological and linguistic cues, thus compensating the lack of nonverbal and paraverbal language and the ambiguity of communication. This paper proposes a pragmatic approach and focuses on the core elements that compose computer-mediated communication context, which either reassess and change language to fit the medium, or choose to express meaning by using both text and image to code conversational im-plicatures. The corpus of this paper is made of instant messaging texts, which are the closest to face-to-face communication. In terms of linguistic conventions, the conversations reveal how certain abbreviations take on new meaning, becoming pragmatic markers (such as lol and btw). The analysis of the corpus also confirms the assumption that there are three basic types of relation between text and image: symmetry, amplification and contradiction, which are materialized through the use of emojis, gifs and memes. Moreover, as far as such electronically-mediated properties are concerned, the analysis shows how they are often employed as speech acts and tackles some of their pragmatic functions. Two key phenomena stand out when analysing emoji patterns: phatic mirroring and emoji inflation. Another finding is that emoji use is highly dependent on cultural background, as shown by comparing the frequency of certain emojis in different cultures (Chinese and Romanian). Consequently, computer-mediated context consists of linguistic conventions and electronically-mediated properties (emojis, gifs, memes) which use the relation between text and image in order to clarify and shape meaning. The pragmatics of the environment evolves and expands, by using abbreviations as pragmatic markers, and emoji, gifs and memes as speech acts.