Question

David Crystal's "Language and the internet "What is the main idea in chapter 4 ?

Answer 1

Chapter 4 : The language of e-mails .

At one level, it is extremely easy to define the linguistic identity of e-mail as a variety of language while at another level, it is surprisingly difficult. The easy part lies in the fixed discourse structure of the message – a structure dictated by the mailer software which has become increasingly standardized over the past twenty years or so. Just in the same way as we can analyse the functionally distinct elements that constitute a newspaper article or a scientific paper, so we can see in e-mails a fixed sequence of discourse elements. They will be so familiar to likely readers of this book that they need only the briefest of expositions. The difficult part, to which the bulk of this chapter relates, lies in the range of opinions about the purpose of e-mail, as a communicative medium, and about the kind of language which is the most appropriate and effective to achieve that purpose. At the same time, it ought at least to be possible to identify what the parameters of disagreement are, to develop a sense of the range of linguistic features which any characterization of e-mail would have to include.