Morphosyntactic Developments in Internet English: Statistical Analysis

Abstract

Internet English emerged and established itself during the final decade of the 20th century and it has been evolving into a universal means of communication on the world wide web. It has acquired a number of features generally common in pidgin languages, such as simplification of grammatical phenomena and regularisation. However, it manifests numerous specific elements such as a novel interpretation of word building processes, which emphasize a higher level of morphological complexity and thus tend to show differences from the patterns established in Standard English. On the other hand, simplification of syntactic structures within sentences is observed. Internet English is showing signs of logically-oriented developments as standardization of morphological structure, elimination of redundancies as well as meaningless elements together with simplification of syntactic patterns contribute to the facilitation of language mode acquisition by users who are not English native speakers. Multiple layers of contribution to the Internet language mode lead to extensive lexical innovations which nevertheless rarely deviate from the forms previously existing in the English language.