Linguistic Characteristics of Digital Communication: A Cohesive Analysis
Point-B: Linguistic Characterization
Beyond a pragmatic approach, analyzing the linguistic elements that support cohesion and alignment reveals fundamental characteristics of this text as an act of communication.
A. Policy
At the morphological level, the correct use of alignment morphemes is evident between elements at the phrase and sentence levels. There’s also proper use of coordinated and subordinated bonds (e.g., “a computer thing,” line 1; “email and Internet,” line 3).
Cohesion is intensified by discourse organizers and connectors, emphasizing consistency. These vary in type: “as if” (line 3) signifies modal character; “at first” (line 4), temporal; “but” (line 7), counterargument; “even” (line 5), summative and focused; and “but perhaps” (line 7) introduces doubt, while “de facto” (line 11) confirms, as does “certainly” (line 11).
Semantically, lexical elements reinforce links between discourse units through deixis. Textual deixis is present in nouns like “thing” (line 1), an example of pro forma. However, the most common deixis is supported by pronouns, especially those in an anaphoric relation (e.g., “when which,” line 4). The indefinite pronoun “any” also plays this role cataphorically, as does the neutral “what” (“what lies…,” line 7).
Importantly, deixis establishes a text-to-context relationship, connecting with the extra-textual communicative situation. The relationship with “one” remains stable for both sender and receiver, given the impersonal nature of the semantics. The same can be said for the determiner “our” (line 23), which also implies sender and receiver involvement. Spatial deixis is present in terms like “Babel” and references to smaller spaces: “airport,” “bathroom,” etc. Similarly, “Babel” carries a temporal reference, contrasted with the recent era of computing. Notably, personal-collective deixis, signaling the receiver, is present in terms like “people-mail” and “God,” representing an entity monitoring humanity, with social connotations.
The lexical relationship, in form and content, is perhaps most crucial for textual cohesion. Numerous phenomena are noteworthy. For instance, we find enumerations (lacking accents, capitalization, and conjunctions, line 2). This list recurs several times, demonstrating recurrence and its deictic value. There are also cases of derivation (“think-thought,” “syntax-syntactic”), hierarchical relationships (e.g., the hypernym “misuse” and its hyponyms “all together, without accents, etc.,” line 20), synonymy (“bathroom, toilet,” lines 10-11), and antonymy (“know-confused,” line 13).
The relationship between real and imaginary terms, established through tropes or lexical substitutions, is of significant importance. Though not overly poetic, these resources are effective: “Dadaist rant” (line 17), “seem aphasics” (line 3), and “God strikes again” (line 24) carry a strong ironic charge. “Our Babel is the computer” (line 23) offers broad interpretative possibilities, highlighting the real-imaginary relationship.
In conclusion, the keywords or nuclear terms are “computer” and “linguistic improprieties.” Based on the analyzed traits, the text demonstrates clear cohesive correctness.