Sociolinguistic Aspects of Discussion Forums

This work might be seen as one of the first attempts to research a relatively new kind of asynchronous computer-mediated communication - discussion forums on the Internet and focuses on sociolinguistic aspects of this communication. The corpus for this work was taken from real discussion forums representing the topic of health awareness; it consists of two equitable parts: materials from the English and the Czech forums. The aim of the book is to make an inquiry into group awareness demonstrated by occurrence of language devices of solidarity; opening and closing strategies, their frequency and (in)formality as well as respect of the rules of Netiquette by participants in discussion forums. More and more ways of computer-mediated communication as well as social networking websites are becoming popular nowadays and these new forms present new challenges for future study.