Sumary

NEW TECNOLOGY TEXTS

Websites

Some websites only differ from traditional texts in that printed material is presented on a screen rather than on a page, but others have features that make websites a distinctive from of text:

• The way material is organised and presented.
• 

  Much of the text is non-linear. There may be a main body text, but additional material, such as advertisements and links to other pages or sites, is also usually present.
• Partly because of the size of the screen, information is broken down into manageable segments.
• Graphological features are important, with the use of colour, animation and visual images.
• Websites are much more interactive than traditional written texts.

E-mail

As with websites, not all e-mails differ significantly from their traditional written equivalents, so some are very similar to letters. In many cases, e-mails do have a distinctive linguistic characteristics. In particular, the informality of e-mail, together with the interactive relationship between senders and receivers, makes it a form of written communication that is in many ways close to spoken language. Some features of e-mail language include:

• Lexis is often conversational, with the frequent use of colloquialisms and contractions. There is more tolerance of spelling errors than in traditional texts.
• Greetings and farewells illustrate the informality of the medium.
• Grammatical features include loosely constructed sentences, which resemble the natural flow of speech.
• Some punctuation marks may be omitted, and lower case letters used where standard grammar would usually require capitals.
• Various methods are used to suggest the prosodic features of speech, such as stress and tone of voice.
• A large number of abbreviations are used in e-mails, Internet chatrooms and mobile phone text messages.
• Emoticons, that are also known as smileys, are graphical simbols used to represent facial expressions and body language.

Text messages

The main influence on text messaging style is the need to keep messages as short and concise as possible. The small size of cell phones encourage compression, and shorter messages also take less time to compose. In addition to abbreviations and emoticons, linguistic features found in text messages include:

• Words are shortened, as TXT(text) and TLK(talk).
• Phonetic spelling, as LU(love) and NE(any).
• Letter homophones, as C(see) and U(you).
• Number homophones, as 2(to) and 4(for).
• Grammatical compession, as determiners and auxuliary verbs.