Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication

The present handbook provides a much-needed overview of the pragmatics of language and language use mediated by digital technologies. While the field of study is not yet large, a significant body of pragmatic literature, broadly defined, has accumulated over the past 20 years on computer-mediated communication (CMC), which is defined to include text-based interactive communication via the Internet, websites and other multimodal formats, and mobile communication. In addition to ‘core’ pragmatic and discourse-pragmatic phenomena as manifested in CMC, the chapters cover pragmatically-focused research on types of CMC and pragmatic approaches to characteristic CMC phenomena.

Susan C. Herring, Indiana University, USA; Dieter Stein, University of Düsseldorf, Germany; Tuija Virtanen, Abo Akademi University, Finnland.