the stylistic features of cyber language

With the development and popularization of the Internet, more and more people are added to the Internet communicative activities. Online chat is one of these increasingly popular forms. Since it is open and compatible, it draws the attention of people from all over the world and from every circle. Therefore, the study of cyber language has become a focus of attention. In this paper, under the theory of modern stylistics, the stylistic features of cyber language and its causes were discussed from vocabulary and grammatical levels. The author has demonstrated some lexical features of cyber language with a number of examples. Then, in the second part, the grammatical features have been discussed. And the third part is about the causes of these stylistic features.
1.1 Background of the Present Study
From 1990s, the Internet has gradually spread around the world and a networked, digital information revolution has penetrated into all areas of society. According to the data of U.S. research firm (Pew Internet and American Life Project [PIALP], 1999) the number of Chinese net citizens has reached 137 million and would be expected to surpass the United States in 2009, the world's biggest Internet market. Although the history of Network development is not long, it is sweeping across the world with incredible speed and unstoppable trend, and is gradually changing people's concept of survival, status, and mode. With the popularization of network technology, online exchange has become an important part of daily communication. Therefore, a new media has been produced during this process-cyber language. To a large extent, the great influence of social development has contributed a lot to this phenomenon. Many scholars no matter home or abroad have stepped into this area and suggested their own opinions from various aspects. This paper has analyzed the features of cyber language from the stylistic point of view.

1.2 Purpose of the Present Study
Cyber language is an open system of signs. Because of some political and economical factors, more and more English words will come into the field of Internet and play some necessary functions. To some extent, we may say that those English words serve as a complement and development of Chinese characters. As a main informational carrier of Internet media, cyber English reflects the impacts of lexical contact and spread on Chinese characters as well as the cultural influences from English-speaking countries in Informational Era. Research of cyber language has pushed the development of verbal and cross-cultural communication and has practical meaning in aspects of Language Standard, language teaching, the compile of new dictionary as well as the sound development of cyber language and so on. Therefore, it deserves the attention of language workers.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Definition and Explanation
2.1.1 Explanation of Online Communication
With the development and popularization of the Internet, more and more people are added to the Internet communicative activities. People type letters on keyboard and receive words on screen. Their communication breaks up the boundary of time and space. It is different from the face -to -face communication in general sense. Kiesler, Siegel, and Timothy (1984) think that such computer-mediated exchange activity has two interesting features: 1) lack of social contextual information; 2) lack of widely accepted principle of usage. The first feature prevents the participants from relying on hand gestures, body potential language, facial expressions and other non-linguistic information to explain the text and assist the exchange. The lack of rules makes the traditional communicative rituals broken and gradually a number of Internet specifications which were widely approved have been formed. But as a real-time communicative activity, it is very close to the daily face-to-face oral communication. In real-time communication, the communicator can both receive information and send a message. Receiving and transmitting information is a continuous, uninterrupted process. This allows the two communicators to exchange feedback in time, adjust and revise the direction and content of the next exchange. Obviously, cyber language has the features of both spoken and written language and it obscures the traditional distinction between oral and written language, forming its own unique style.
2.1.2 Definition of Stylistic Tags
This paper analyses the stylistic features of cyber language from two perspectives: description and context of language. In the language description, we use the system of stylistic tags to classify the language feature. According to Enkvist and Spenser (1964), stylistic tag is a prominent stylistic feature. Any language project with stylistic meanings can be regarded as a style tag which is the same as the concept of “salient”in functional stylistics. In his work, Zhang (1998) states:
Halliday, founder of Systemic-Functional Linguistics thinks that salient is a collective discourse for those protruding language features in some form of context. Then he classifies those features into two types: one is against the conventional prominent, negative; the other is consistent with conventional prominent, positive. (pp. 21-22)
In stylistics, language features are generally divided into four levels: phonology, word position, vocabulary, syntax / grammar. When chat in the net, visual text or punctuation is the only carrier to transmit information, so phonological style tags do not have stylistic sense. We only analyze the word, vocabulary, syntax / grammar style tags.