e-Language: communication in the digital age

This chapter examines how we can start to build better descriptions of e-based discourse through the analysis of real-life examples of mixed source e-language, as evidence by corpora. Discourse is defined here as language-in-use in digital contexts, observed from both a micro (i.e. word-by-word, sentence and text-by-text level) and macro (i.e. ‘beyond the text’, considering the more socio-ideological factors influencing language choice and use) perspective. This chapter focuses specifically on exploring the incidence and frequency of modal verb usage in CANELC, and compares this to written and spoken samples of language taken from the BNC3 (British National Corpus). Based on these analyses, questions as to whether e-language appears more or less (in)direct and/or (im)polite than spoken and written discourse are explored