Page 50 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 41
______________________________________________________________
relates it will not apply a pronoun in reference to the non-textual element;
pronouns are strictly referents for linguistic content.
The general formula for determining pronoun usage is simply the
percentage of words in a corpus that are pronouns. No doubt, a larger corpus
is necessary to determine this more authoritatively, and we might keep in
mind that some text genres are bound to use more pronouns than others. In
the present case, the text corpus was comprised entirely of fiction works; if
we used scientific monographs, the resulting pronoun usage would likely
differ greatly. Nonetheless, as a starting point for discussion, these results
induce some speculation. In particular, we might infer that blogs, addressed
to a general audience, are more “impersonal” than email messages, directed
at specific individuals, and both are less personal than speech, which is as we
might expect, since speech is more improvisatory; and email is easier to
compose than blogs. In the Enron sample, many emails were of a highly
personal nature whose appropriateness in a blog format may not be evident.
Further research should statistically probe the comparative degree of personal
reference in blogs and emails.
The final measure of potential communicative differences, lexical
density, shows the differences divided into three groups – Speech (6%);
Blogs (9%) and Emails (10.7%); and Texts (17.2%). In keeping with its
primary standing as a communicative structure, text possesses a higher
lexical density than speech, and, in support of the hypothesis relating to the
interstitial status of conversational writing, blogs and emails lie between
both.