Attribution Study of Netspeak of Microblogging

Chapter 1 Introduction
    It is said by Crystal that “the Internet is one of the most remarkable things human beings have ever made.” (2001:8) The increasingly pervasive use of Internet has revolutionized our ways of living. Nowadays, a great number of people, including scientists, computer programmers, teachers, students, artists and many others, are finding themselves working and playing on the Internet. According to a study done by Internet World Statistic in June 2010, the number of Internet users worldwide has reached up to 1,966,514,816. This indicates that the Internet has already been extensive used locally, regionally and internationally.
    The advent and global use of information technology has resulted in the emergence of a new discourse – Netspeak. Generally speaking, the concept of Netspeak can be divided into two categories. On one hand, Netspeak refers to the technical terms in the field of information technology, such as hardware, software, explorer, hacker and so on. On the other hand, with the popularity of the Internet, the meaning of Netspeak has been extended. It is a type of language that netizens create and regularly employ it on email, chatgroups, blogs and World Wide Web for informal interaction. Because the latter one is the most dynamic and frequently used, it becomes the focus of this paper.
    Since the emergence of the Internet, people are fascinated by the wonderful social network. Scholars aboard and home have already investigated the netlanguage in many aspects such as IRC (Internet-relay chat), SMS (short message system), BBS (bullet board system) from different angle say colleting the e-discourse vocabulary, analyzing the linguistic features and its impact on the traditional language. So far, rare linguistic research about the netspeak of microblogging leaves a room for us to explore it.
    This dissertation tries to explore the language style of the Netspeak of micoblogging. The purposes of the present research are...