Introduction

     "People seem to have begun to sense that they are dealing with something new, as far as their linguistic intuitions are concerned. They are realizing that their established knowledge, which has enabled them to survive and succeed in spoken and written linguistic encounters hitherto, is no longer enough to guarantee survival and success on the Internet. Perhaps they have encountered the 'painful and awkward lessons' in social interaction (...). Perhaps they have been misunderstood, misperceived, or attacked (flamed) because they have failed to notice the differences between this new medium of communication and the old."

Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet.

The Internet and constantly emerging new technologies have brought into existence new linguistic situations, unique communicative functions and distinctive language usage; previously well-established rules of languages and communication have been challenged by this new technology, but the analytical description of the new features is still in its infancy.

Recently, scholarship in the field has called for an investigation about the general rules of this linguistic medium, as well as an exploration of various situational manifestations of CMC in order to understand its effect on individual languages and on language in general.

To address these issues, I synthesise a range of linguistic methodologies, some of which have already been applied in the analysis of CMC (such as CA, the analysis of coherence, cohesion and speech acts, and sociolinguistic approaches) and some of which have not, such as those that address the acquisition of competences.