2.DESCRIPTION OF PECULIARITIES IN LANGUAGE USAGE IN INFORMAL E-MAIL MESSAGES5 2.2.2.Abbreviations and Acronyms10 2.2.4.Spoken Inarticulations12 2.3.SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION13 3.GENDER DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE USAGE IN INFORMAL E-MAIL MESSAGES17 Computer mediated communication is a relatively new usage of language, and has a great potential for linguistic researches. Millions of people are playing with their computer keyboards, with such humble means as commas, colons, and backslashes. Not only hackers, computer addicts and children but even serious adults are playing with identity, frames of interaction, and typographic symbols – language.On the computer keyboard, creative individuals sometimes produce amazing effects. Some of these peculiarities have become conventions of computer mediated conventions and will be described in the paper.One might call digital writing “poor taste” or consider it being in conflict with standards of good writing associated with literate culture, however, for many of us it is a reality, a new cyberspace culture.Computer mediated communication includes synchronous and asynchronous form of communication. This paper concentrates on the asynchronous form represented by e-mail messages. Only informal messages were considered, since they more differ from the traditional letter writing style and are closer to chat rooms or synchronous communication.Informal e-mail communications is an active interaction, and its language reminds oral communication more than a written document.In order to describe peculiarities of language usage in e-mail messages, a random selection of messages is analysed. The paper looks for differences between traditional writing and e-mails regarding sentence structure, vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation. Since there are researches on whether the language usage peculiarities differ according to gender of the writer in computer mediated communication, it was decided to inc...
