Paralanguage

Definition of Paralanguage

Paralanguage or commonly known as vocalics, is a component of communication. The use of this paralanguage can change the meaning, give a specific, nuanced meaning, and convey emotions by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, and others. Meanwhile, paralinguistics is a study of paralanguage. According to Crystal (1975), though it is called a paralanguage, it does not make it a language. Paralanguage is a connector between non-linguistic forms of communicative behavior and verbal-linguistic studies such as grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Paralanguage is also a non-lexical component of communication by speech like intonation, pitch and speed of speaking, hesitation noises, gesture, and facial expression.

Sometimes without realizing it, people will come up with different types of intonation, pitch, and facial expressions when involved in a communication. Thus, Crystal (1975) also adds that these kinds of elements seem to have important role to play in the communication of meaning. Furthermore, it could be concluded that paralanguage is an element such as pitch, intonation or facial expression which is employed by the sender to express their emotion in communicating the messages. With the proper use of paralanguage, whenever people are communicating, they can transfer the meaning of each message they want to convey. This clearly shows that paralanguage plays an important role in communication, especially in spoken communication.

Paralinguistic in CMC

As stated before, paralanguage is commonly related to oral communication such as intonation, pitch, gesture or facial expression. Thus, they are a non-verbal element that could be exploited when they communicate orally or face-to-face. On the other hand, NetSpeak is actually text-based which means that it is lack of prosody and paralanguage. Because CMC does not occur directly, it is clear that the internet users could not use intonation, pitch, gesture, and facial expression since the conversation they have is in written form. This situation is quite new in the field which people could not easily acknowledge with. Therefore, there are only a few people have started observing it. It also could be hard enough to observe since nowadays there is no fixed theory and rules used on Internet. Internet somehow a place where people could create any kinds of new words, new terms of using punctuations, or even new way in expressing their feeling freely.

Seeing this condition, internet users are required to be more creative in using internet language. They decided to use emoticons, punctuation marks, and other things; thus, their messages were conveyed according to the context they wanted to talk about. Nevertheless, NetSpeak or CMC users could still express their facial expressions or give the intonation into their text. Furthermore, Thurlow (2001) stated that communication nowadays, as the emergence of the Internet is highly interactive, demands speed, spontaneity, and often brevity. Therefore, he has categorized the most common strategies used by the user of Internet language to keep up the paralinguistics features in written form. He classified it into eight groups, which are:

1. Abbreviations.
   The abbreviation is simply a letter or a group of letters as a short form of one or more words. Abbreviations are also included letter homophones, acronyms and a mixture of both. Letter homophones that are usually found on the Internet are Slang, e.g. ‘noob,’ which refers to an inexperienced new player of a game. In addition, Crystal (2001) explained that a few words could diminish or be abbreviated into only two or three letters. Crystal (2001) stated that some individual words could be reduced or shortened into two or three letters, e.g., ‘PLS’ for ‘please’ and ‘OK’ for ‘okay.’ Acronyms are also included in types of abbreviation, e.g., ‘ASAP’ for ‘as soon as possible and ‘CMIIW’ for ‘correct me if I am wrong).
2. Punctuations.
   It is of spacing, conventional signs and specific typographical devices as aids to understanding and correct reading of handwritten and printed text whether read silently or aloud. Punctuation that is commonly found on Internet language is the use of multiple periods (....), multiple question marks (????), or multiple exclamation marks (!!!!).
3. Capitalization. 
   It is the action of using capital letters in a sentence, phrase, or word. e.g. ‘I DON’T UNDERSTAND YOUR POINTS THOUGH,’ and ‘PLEASE GET OUT FROM THIS ROOM.’
4. Symbols.
   Definition of a symbol is a mark or character that could represent or stands for something else.
5. Onomatopoeic.
   It is the formation of words with their associated sound, and the whole words should imitate the sound that is described. It is commonly used to describe animal sounds, such as “meow’ to describe the sound of a cat or “moo” to imitate the sound of a cow. Moreover, onomatopoeic is popular on internet language, which is more or less quite the same with the interjection, such as the ‘hahahaha’ of laughing sound, the ‘zzzz’ that represents someone sleeping or snoring, and etcetera.
6. Emoticon.
   It is a typographic writing represents facial expressions, ranging from smiling, crying, laughing, sad, angry, and etcetera. It is usually constructed from some punctuation marks, numbers and even letter. For example, [ : ( ], [ : ) ], [ : P], and [ : D ].
7. Direct requests.
   The direct request is an acronym com used to ask for the identity or more personal information about the users in the conversation. Mirc (Massive Internet Relay Chat) is a site where a direct request is commonly used. For instance, ‘A/S/L’ for asking ‘age, sex, and location.’ This type of paralinguistic feature is actually hard to find on K-pop roleplayers on Twitter.
8. Colored and special graphic.
   A typical example of this type of paralinguistic feature on the Internet is emoji, kaomoji, and messletter. Unlike emoticons, an emoji is a form of an image representing various things, such as facial expressions, animals, food, fruits, etcetera. Kaomoji is a communicative pictorial representation of symbols and letter characters that resemble facial expressions. The expressions used are usually happy, sad, surpsrised, angry and many more expressions. Kaomoji cover all types of facial expressions to complement text messages that are limited to words. Furthermore, messsletter is a website that provides any kinds of fonts, whether bold, italic, or both, and many more.