Dialogue in and between Different Cultures - International ...

Chat Behaviour Intercultural 143
Veilchen: Party in Munich, well, there is always something
going on […]
Axel_Schweiß: Nachtgalery or Kunstpark”
5.2.6 Nonsense talk
The predominant part of all conversation consists of what we called ‘nonsense
talk’. Even though and as mentioned before, the whole activity of chatting is
characterized by a pure desire to entertain or to be entertained and is therefore
neither informative nor leading up to anything, this nonsense talk marks a
different level of absurdity. Just by typing the activities, some chatters succeed in
creating a real party atmosphere in which they then pretend to drink, talk, smoke
and so on while actually they are just sitting in front of a keyboard. Runkehl et al.
(1998:113) mention the phatic function of the chat which is the only possible
function of this nonsense talk. They further mention that real conversations or
argumentations are rarely found in chat rooms. The party atmosphere that is
created and the involvement in this virtual party at least seems to give the chatters
enough satisfaction to make them stay for hours at a time.Cockerspainöffnet zwei
Flaschen Bier und gibt eine davon star1979
Star1979 kippt die Flasche runter und rülpst laut
Star1979: =)
Cockerspain holt lächelnd eine Falsche Wodka raus
Cokerspain: Willst weiter mit mir trinken Sternchen?!?
“Cockerspain opens two bottles of beer and passes one to star1979
Star1979 drains the bottle in one and burps loudly
Star1979: =)
Cockerspain smilingly takes out a bottle of Vodka
Cokerspain: Still want to drink with me little star?!?”
5.3 The nonverbal behaviour
As has been remarked before, the chat has a lot of the characteristics of oral
dialogue – briefness of the utterances, ambiguity, puns, rapid turn-taking to name
just a view. These also make the statements ambiguous insofar as the crucial signs
for deciphering the messages – that is facial expressions, intonations or gestures –
cannot easily be realized in a chat room. Chatters nevertheless developed creative
ways to compensate this deficits with their very own inventions – the most
famous of which is the smiley, either as a round-faced yellow (red, green etc.)
icon or the iconographic version =) in many variations (see examples 23-26).
Other means of expressing nonverbal signs are the iteration of letters or
punctuation marks (examples 27-30), the application of little pictures (example
31-32), the explicit declaration of a certain action (example 33-37), so called
comic strips or – found only in German chat rooms – the use of the principal part
of the verb in asterisks (inflectives) to mark an action (cf. Thaler 2003:8ff,
Runkehl et al. 1998:99ff). These nonverbal signs (nvs) can appear either at the