Lexical and Grammatical Characteristics of Communication in a German Language Chat Room and Forum

The paper addresses language variation in German language electronic communication. Rate of occurrence of ellipsis, abbreviations and inflektives in chat room and forum messages is shown to be correlated to situational characteristics of the genres. The authors maintain that type of communicative purpose, production circumstances, frequency of role switching, relations among participants are each associated with certain pragmatic functions of lexical and grammatical units, including the function of compression, demarcation, depiction, regulation and emotional expression.