用语言学的方法分析短消息语言和行为(2)

And the most important sociological use of language is the interpersonal function, by which people establish and maintain a comfortable relation in a society. SM is a medium whose function is rather confusing. People use it to convey information, keep in touch with each other, share jokes, express emotions or even pass anger. But the recipient cannot tell which from which, he might deal with his short messages with an attitude that is unexpected by its sender. Let’s see the following example.
A: “I played football this afternoon, how tired I am.”
B: “Oh, really? You’re energetic!”
The conversation ends here. A feels tired after playing football, and sends a SM to one of his friends B to express his excitement. But this confuses B as to how to respond appropriately, or he may simply brood about it for quite a long time.
Secondly, the recipients of SM make their own interpretations based on situational effects and schemata. The first and the second sort of misunderstandings can be somewhat overlapping. Because function of SM language is not clear, people began to interpret messages with their own experience. Besides, the quantity of information conveyed is often inadequate, SM leaves a lot of blank spaces in what people say, which the recipient tends to fill with the most negative interpretations.
Thirdly, how to end SM conversation and when is the right time to end it also bother SM users a lot. No matter how people enjoy SM, writing it is very time consuming. If one wants to end it and the other does not, at least one will be unpleasant. It is unlikely that both of them are ready for SM conversation at the same time, because two people are in two environments.
III The deficiency of SM in contrast with face-to-face conversation and Tel call
People can hide themselves behind the tiny screens, and therefore, they are braver and they can tell whatever they like. So many people are now abusing it. But is it superior to face-to-face conversations and telephone calls? The answer might be no.

Firstly, SM lacks body language and facial expressions. The communicative use of the visual and tactile modes is often referred to as “nonverbal communication”, especially in academic discussion. In everyday terms, it is the area of “body language” (Crystal 1997: 403). Most people may not be aware of the importance of it when they message each other, because they do it subconsciously. The field of non-verbal visual communication, kinesics, can be broken down into several components: facial expression, eye contact, gesture, and body posture. Each component performs a variety of functions. Movements of the face and body can give clues to a person’s personality and emotional state. The face, in particular, signals a wide range of emotions, such as fear, happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, interest, and disgust. Many of the expressions vary in meaning from culture to culture. In addition, the face and body send signals about the way a social interaction is proceeding. Patterns of eye contact show who is talking to whom; facial expression provides feed-back to the speaker, expressing such meanings as puzzlement or disbelief; and a body posture conveys a person’s attitude towards the interaction (e.g. relaxation, interest, boredom).
Several kinds of social context are associated with specific facial or body behaviors (e.g. waving while taking leave.) Ritual or official occasions are often primarily marked by such factors as kneeling, or blessing. While SM only provides its recipient scores of characters (one short massage contains no more than 70 Chinese characters), the sender’s facial expression or even his attitude towards what he said only depends on the recipient’s personal imagination. The real meaning of SM and intention thus are often misunderstood.
Besides, compared with traditional conversation, SM lacks proper stress and intonation. Stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. In transcription, a raised vertical like [ ′] is used just before the syllable it relates to. A basic distinction is made between stressed and unstressed syllables, the former being more prominent than the latter usually due to an increase in loudness, length or pitch. This means that stress is a relative notion. (Hu 2001:71) At the word level, it only applies to words with at least two syllables. Stress pattern in Chinese is easier, because we can just focus on sentence level, where a monosyllabic word may be said to be stressed relative to other words in the sentence. Sentence stress is often used to express emphasis, surprise, etc, so that in principle stress may fall on any word or any syllable. For example, a SM conversation begins with a sentence like this, “I went shopping around Jiefangbei the whole day. I bought nothing.”

The sentence is quite clear, but which word does the sender emphasize? If this sentence is carried on a telephone or face-to-face conversation, it will not cause any puzzle.
Intonation, and other suprasegmental features of language, performs a variety of different functions. (Crystal 1992: 173) The most obvious function is to express a wide range of attitudinal meanings---excitement, boredom, surprise, friendliness, reserve, and many hundreds more. Intonation conveys a great deal about what is referred to as the “information structure” of the utterance. Intonation can help to organize language units that are more easily perceived and memorized.
IV The casualness of SM in contrast with written language
However, we cannot simply say the written form of speech is less powerful in communication. One thing that differs SM language from letters, and E-mail is the casualness of SM. SM is often processed under a random condition. The user may do it while he is having lunch, taking a walk, reading books, talking to others, or watching TV, etc. He could not focus all his attention on writing what he wants to say. He has to do it with little thought. Besides, sometimes, one SM user may message three others or more at the same time. The overloaded user has to speed it up, and the quality of SM decreases. But when people write letters, they are much more considerate. Unlike SM, sending letters is demanding, since we cannot write letters wherever and whenever we like. Once a letter is sent, little chance left for the addresser to explain it.
Thus, SM is more like a record of spoken language, and the number of its characters is quite limited (no more than 70, including punctuations). In the following parts, we focus on difference between SM language and written language.
The permanence of writing allows repeated reading and close analysis. It promotes the development of artful organization and more concise, intricately structured expression. Units of discourse, such as sentences and paragraphs, are clearly identified through layout and punctuation. (Crystal 1992: 181) By contrast, the spontaneity and rapidity of SM minimize the chance of complex preplanning, and it also lacks repetition, rephrasing filler phrases (such as you know, you see, think) that assist speakers to “think standing up”, and there is no use of intonation and pause to pide an utterance into manageable chunks.

The participants in written interaction cannot usually see each other, and they thus cannot rely on the context to help make clear what they mean, as they would when speaking. As a consequence, writing avoids words whose meaning rely on situation (such as this one, over there). Writers also have to anticipate the effects of time lag between production and reception. This is out of the question in SM. SM users assume that the other side is always ready for reception of SM (actually, it is quite normal that the recipient is very busy), and that the feedback would come immediately. But SM is not time-bound, and the situation in which both participants are present is rare.
Written language tends to be more formal than SM language and is more likely to provide the standard that society values. Different people have developed their own SM habit or style. Some people frequently use punctuations, such as “:-)”, “:-(”, “:-=”, “:-*” ; some use capitalized word for example “Oh, TMD”, “I’ll T you” to express special meanings. These words, on one hand, make SM language vivid, but on the other hand, language barrier is formed. Not every body could understand these fashionable words, and it is being updated. People, especially those who seldom message another, find themselves trapped by these personally coined words and expressions.
V Conclusion
Mobile-based SM is not bad itself. Like the emergence of television, SM is also strongly criticized for its disadvantage. If we use it appropriately, it makes our life better. Here, several solutions are suggested.
In the absence of immediate feedback, available in most speech interaction, care needs to be taken to minimize the effects of vagueness and ambiguity.
⑴Before messaging, thinking about the recipient’s situation is helpful, e.g., is the recipient still at his work? If time is not right, SM might bother the recipient.
⑵The language of SM must be well chosen. We can use fashion words or coined words when we message an intimate friends, because we share the same environment, and these words will work perfectly in communication. But if the recipient is not so familiar, we’d better use formal words. In other words, how we message should be based on the specific recipient.

⑶In terms of the contents of SM, it should not be used to discuss bad news. Never criticize somebody and never discuss if there’s any chance that what we say might be taken to a wrong way, we should pick up the phone or walk out to discuss it in person.
For the recipient, there are some other suggestions which might be helpful.
⑴If we are doing something very important, such as giving a lecture or having a conference, in which disturbance is not allowed, we had better shut off our mobile phones. Once a person tries to send us a short message, he or she may quickly find that the recipient is not available at that moment. Thus, waiting and further guessing can be avoided.
⑵However, it is inevitable to come across unpleasant words in SM, in terms of both language and content. We should bear this in mind that most people would send SM with little thoughts. If we do feel quite bothered, we should call the sender and make the matter clear as quickly as possible.

Bibliography

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Grice, H. P. Logic and conversation. In P.Cole&J.L.Morgan(eds) Speech acts. New York:

Academic Press, 1975.

Halliday. M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold, 1985.

Hu, Zhuanglin. Linguistics.A couse book. Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2001.