Punctuation as Social Action:
The Ellipsis as a Discourse Marker in Computer-Mediated Communication

Joshua Raclaw

Abstract for paper presented at
The 32nd Annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Berkeley, CA
February 10-12, 2006

The following study applies traditional methods for analyzing sociolinguistic variation to synchronous text-based computer-mediated communication (hereafter SCMC). A number of familiar forms of discourse fall under this category, including those held in chat rooms, instant messages, and multi-player online games. Building upon previous research on styles and registers within SCMC (Baron 2002, Collot and Belmore 1996, Paolillo 2001), this paper serves to expand the current literature with an analysis of the pragmatic and grammatical functions of a CMC-specific discourse marker, the ellipsis (“...”).

The data that served as a basis for this paper were taken from the logfiles of 5 twenty-minute sessions of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), with a total of 39 speakers contributing to the corpus. It was found that these speakers made use of the ellipsis in ways that went beyond its traditional uses within writing: to indicate deleted material, to mark hesitation, or to suggest unfinished thoughts (Hacker 2003). This is not surprising, given that much of the research on computer-mediated discourse has already argued against the equation of the written standard to ways of speaking via text within Internet discourse (Baron 2005, Collot and Belmore 1996, Yates 1996). By and large an ellipsis is used grammatically within SCMC as a conjoining marker, and as such, can be used in place of standard punctuation (example 1) and conjunctions (example 2). It is also used in this capacity as a pragmatic marker to separate textual play (example 3, 4) and speaker referentials (example 4) from other non-meta forms of speech:

ex 1 <theraven> err...sorry, fishers...i was trying to MSG someone else

ex 2 <metonym> i was teaching all day...i’m tired. it was SUCH a long day.

ex 3 <macarena> aw...karen just kiddin...huggles

ex 4 <gemarasa> lol..you better kik Jamie out first...Megan.

It is of notable interest that these uses of an ellipsis are not the norm for all speakers in the chat, and that a number of users would employ more the traditional conjunctions and forms of punctuation in the examples above. I argue that this disparity is explained through ideologies surrounding the use of the ellipsis within online discourse, and that one of its functional uses is as a discourse marker that reflects a speaker’s chosen register or speech style. Based on a number of interviewers with speakers, it also seems likely that ellipsis use is indexical of a speaker’s attitude towards whether their speech is reflective of written text, spoken language, or a form of CMC- exclusive communication that falls somewhere in between the two. In exploring these notions, this paper aims to illustrate how forms of punctuation, such as the ellipsis, can take on the role of a unique linguistic variable within the text-driven environment of SCMC and constitute a notable feature of CMC- specific registers.

Joshua Raclaw is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at joshua.raclaw@colorado.edu.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 19, Issue 1 - June 2006