Orality in Dialogic Computer-Mediated Communication

The subject of this thesis is orality in informal dialogic computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC). This type of communication is represented by internet discussions, discussion fora, and Facebook posts. All these three genres are compared with informal spoken face-to-face dialogues. The data are covered by the Koditex corpus, which contains the CMC genres, and the Ortofon corpus of spoken language. The term orality can refer both to the realized communication form - spoken or written (so- called media orality) and to the summary of linguistic characteristics associated with the prototypical informal spoken dialogue (so-called conceptual orality). This thesis focuses only on conceptual orality, which is based on nine language features divided into the three following areas: dialogicity, spontaneity, and fulfilment of pragmatic needs of communication participants. The analyses show significant similarity between the functional use of features in both spoken and written communication. This applies primarily to the features associated with spontaneity (repetition of the same words, the presence of word fragments, typos and misspellings) and the fulfilment of pragmatic needs (discourse markers, pronoun non-dropping, iteration of graphemes). It follows that the selected CMC genres appropriately..