The interaction of generic structure and interpersonal relations in two-party e-chat discourse

On the basis of a corpus of e-chat IRC exchanges (approximately 10,000 words in total) between Greek- and English-speaking speakers, the paper establishes a typical generic structure for two-party IRC exchanges, by focusing on how participants are oriented towards an ideal schema of phases and acts, as well as on how their interpersonal concerns contribute to the shaping of this schema. It is found that IRC interlocutors are primarily concerned with establishing contact with each other, while the (ideational) development of topic seems to be a less pressing need. The signaling of interpersonal relations is pervasive throughout e-chat discourse, as seen both in the range of devices developed and the two free elements of the generic schema, that is conversation play and channel check. It is also found that the accomplishment of the generic schema in each IRC exchange crucially depends on the acts of negotiation performed by the initiator and the responder.

Disrupted Turn Adjacency and Coherence Maintenance in Instant Messaging Conversations

This article reports on a study of coherence in text-based log files from 120 two-party Instant Messaging (IM) conversations among a group of international students at a design school. The goals of the study were to investigate whether disrupted turn adjacency was an obstacle to coherence and to identify the linguistic strategies employed to maintain coherence. Additional signs of problematic coherence creation were also investigated, focusing on explicit signs of miscommunication. In this particular context, disrupted turn adjacency was not found to be a problem. Whereas devices for textual cohesion can be important, links between utterances can also be identified based on timing and distinctions between different types of feedback, as well as sequencing. The additional signs of miscommunication were all related to different aspects of problematic grounding. The article concludes with suggestions for design improvements to the IM tool.