http://tags.library.upenn.edu/tag/dialog+chatroom PennTags Feed http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/1106 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/1106 <p>Krolokke begins her essay by recapping recent research in gender and language in cyberspace, including the role of &quot;grrrls&quot; who specifically resist male domination.&nbsp; She then describes her study of 5 MSN channels of Internet Relay Chat (IRC): gay chat, lesbian chat, transgender/transsexual chat, politics2000 chat, and African-American chat for what she calls &quot;playful chat&quot;.&nbsp; She analyzes the transcribed speech for 4 types of language play: abbreviations, paralinguistic cues, hybrid language, and insulting speech. Krolokke uses performance theory to explain gender play online such that she considers &quot;linguistic gender&quot; to mean performing a speech pattern that follows social and cultural expectations or stereotypes associated with the speech of that gender.&nbsp;She explains that in some cases, &nbsp;&quot;IRC provides a space for participants to play out their most convincing performances of parodic linguistic identities.&quot;&nbsp; As such, she provides an argument away from earlier linguists who argued about the inherent differences in male/female communication and towards later &quot;third wave&quot; linguists who see all communication and all contexts as marked for gender, not the speaker him or herself.<a name="abstract" /></p> http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/1530 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/1530 In this study, Fahy analyzed written texts from on online conference of graduate students in a distance learning exercise.&nbsp; He and his team hypothesized that the women's speech would be more &quot;epistolary&quot; in participation style as previously described by other researchers, and would most likely contain more hedges, qualifiers, first and second person pronouns, and parenthetical constructions with the intent of reducing any potential conflict and sustaining ongoing dialog.&nbsp; He likewise hypothesized that the men's speech would be more &quot;expository&quot;, using less of the aforementioned forms as well as being more declarative.&nbsp; They also predicted that the men would use a greater number of linguistic intensifiers and would be more prone to flaming and/or rudeness.&nbsp; While their results were not overwhelmingly strong, the numbers did support the base hypotheses of inherent differences in men's and women's discourse.&nbsp; Fahy goes on to discuss what the potential effect upon distance learning may be if professors do not take into account the differences between epistolary and expository styles regardless of the participants' gender.