Style, personalization, and negotiation in internet conversations

Abstract

This paper analyses internet discourse — in particular, texts of internet forums. Its subject matter is stylistic variation and the role of socio-cultural components in these texts, with special emphasis on the phenomenon of personalisation, on the one hand, and language users’ active and negotiation-based role in creating style, on the other.

The author studies stylistic variance with respect to behaviour (attitudes), situation, value, time, and relation to particular (e.g. institutionalised) language varieties, and discusses the role of personalisation, a rarely studied but important aspect ofstyle, too. She analysesthe connection between text types and style, as well as language users’ active and negotiation-based style creating performance that underlies the stylistic variation of texts. It is furthermore shown how negotiation may be made explicit in discourse in various forms and to various degrees and how it is often manifested in metastylistic reflections that reveal major aspects of style and categorisations performed by the participants and highlight the importance of style itself