Digital English as a Lingua Franca: Shaping New Models through Question-and-Answer Websites

Today, the Internet has become a prime venue for social interaction through online services where people share aspects of their daily lives, talk about their interests with other like-minded people, and express their opinions without formality or constraint. Against this background, this book investigates the aesthetics of informal text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as question-and-answer websites conceived of as a distinctive medium of communication based on cosmopolitan brand communities that share the same field of expertise and a common interest in a particular topic. By adopting sentiment analysis in order to recognize the positive or negative semantic orientation of texts and their emotional style, the book demonstrates that the aesthetics of such informal texts written using Digital English as a Lingua Franca (DELF) is influenced by how we associate emotions and opinions with certain linguistic aspects, such as specific words or syntactic patterns, and how we can classify linguistic expressions according to the type of opinion that they convey.