New Media - New English? An Investigation into Lexical, Textual, and Pragmatic Developments in English in the Age of the Internet.

It seems axiomatic that we are living in a period of rapid and accelerating change. Not only technological innovation, but also quick social and economic developments are perceived as normal and inevitable, even if sometimes far from welcome. Newspapers and other media like to comment on these changes, giving us a commentary to help in following the altering nature of our daily lives, and reaffirming the idea that we are participant-observers in a worldwide transformation that merely takes us further and further on the ill-defined but confidently asserted ‘way forward’. Language is seen as playing its part in this ever accelerating process. New words are spotted, heralded and added to authoritative dictionaries, while internet slang is proffered as the exotic and dynamic dialect of the newer generations. However, there are severe difficulties with this picture. Is language really changing so quickly and significantly? Is technology having such a profound effect on communication? And is the role of English really so easily defined and understood? This study attempts to address these issues with regard to the English language as it is currently written and spoken. This task is made daunting by the plethora of sources for ‘current English’, but this very complexity and the sheer quantity of language realisations also presents an opportunity, as we have the potential for contact with a wider source of usage of English (and other languages) than perhaps ever before, and this with the added benefit of ease of data collection. New media offer the relatively simple collection and storage of substantial quantities of data with comparatively little effort on the part of the researcher. The research is made all the more pressing by the present state of thinking in linguistics. As in most fields of thought, linguistics has undergone a period of crisis in which the grand-scale, generalised analyses of structuralism, Chomskyan linguistics, Systemic Functional Grammar and discourse have all been questioned and found wanting, most especially in the area of understanding the effect and roles of language in society. Tentative approaches in sociolinguistics, rhetoric and conversation analysis have all raised valid questions but have, hardly surprisingly, failed to resolve the issue of the relationship between language and society, and thus to understand exactly how it is that language means something. This study thus finds itself simultaneously attempting to observe and comment on developments in language realised in English in new media settings while at the same time trying to provide some suggestions as to a more effective approach to language study in general after the passing away of modernist, sweeping analyses and doubts surrounding the effectiveness of applied linguistics. Thus, the aim is to arrive at a balanced method for the analysis of language which is at once tightly based on observation of linguistic practice, and at the same time intimately driven by theory. Close reading of data, collected from two contrasting discourses (sport and geopolitical in content), is presented in concert with a synopsis of the present state of thinking in linguistics and discourse theory in order to attempt to marry instances of language and ideas about language.