中国网上聊天室中英语语言特征

Linguistic features of English on Chinese IRC

中国网上英语聊天室中的英语与英语国家聊天室中的英语相比较 ,在某些方面 ,如缩写的使用、句首字母少用大写、句尾少标点等有一些共同的特征。但由于受本族语的影响 ,中国人网上聊天的语言有其独到之处。中国人用英语聊天的目的主要是为了练习语言 ,使英语语言的交际功能减弱。受语言水平所限 ,中国聊天者的会话语言更接近书面语体 ,聊天的内容狭窄且缺乏连续性。网上聊天 ,作为一种新的语言交际方式 ,为英语学习者们提供了另一种学习途径 。

This paper discussed some linguistic features of English on IRC that are found both in a Chinese chat room and a native speaker's chat room. It also discussed some particular features in the Chinese chat room, which are specific to Chinese chatters only. Authentic utterances copied from two chat rooms, one from a Chinese web site and another from an English web site, will be used as the data for the discussion. It is found that both the Chinese chat room and the native chat room share common linguistic features in aspects of abbreviation of words, less capitalization and less punctuation, non verbal information and language play. It is also found that in the Chinese chat room, the chatters are coming to chat mainly for practicing English, but their use of English is strongly affected by their first language and is much less colloquial than the native speakers. Moreover, since English is listed as the topic in the chat room, and there is no special topic for chatters, it is hard for chatters to concentrate on one topic and keep the chatting coherent in content.