Me, myself and I: A corpus-based, contrastive study of English and German computer-mediated communication from a Systemic Functional perspective

Use of the Internet has opened countless possibilities to access information and to connect with other people. In earlier days, contact was limited to people in the immediate surroundings. New media, like paper, radio or telephones, have opened new channels for communication, and so has the Internet. We no longer need to move our physical bodies in order to see and speak to people who live elsewhere. Physical borders are not relevant for Internet communication. What impact does this have on the language people use? Can we still find differences in the use of two closely related languages, English and German, even though Internet communication may have blurred boundaries? As the language model against which to compare English and German the author chose Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The main assumption in SFG is that any option in a language system serves a certain function for the language user. SFG speaks of three broad functions in human communication, called metafunctions: the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction. With the experiential metafunction, we describe the world around us and inside us; this is realized by the system of transitivity, i.e. process types and participant roles. With the interpersonal metafunction, we establish a relationship between us and our listeners or readers. This is realized by the two systems of modality and negation. Finally, the textual metafunction serves to produce cohesion and is represented by the theme-rheme structure. The aim of this contrastive study is to show the similarities and differences of language use in a bilingual corpus of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The Englische und deutsche Newsgroup Texte – Annotiertes Korpus (EDNA) holds 2 x 10,000 words of newsgroup texts in which people write about either eating disorders or relationship problems. The entire EDNA cor-pus is manually annotated; the annotation was carried out with the help of the UAM corpus tool. The manual annotation covers all four systems representing the three ...