英语论文网

th specific facial or body behaviors (e.g. waving while taking leave.) Ritual or official occasions are often primarily marked by such factors as kneeling, or blessing. While SM only provides its recipient scores of characters (one short massage contains no more than 70 Chinese characters), the sender’s facial expression or even his attitude towards what he said only depends on the recipient’s personal imagination. The real meaning of SM and intention thus are often misunderstood. Besides, compared with traditional conversation, SM lacks proper stress and intonation. Stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. In transcription, a raised vertical like [ ′] is used just before the syllable it relates to. A basic distinction is made between stressed and unstressed syllables, the former being more prominent than the latter usually due to an increase in loudness, length or pitch. This means that stress is a relative notion. (Hu 2001:71) At the word level, it only applies to words with at least two syllables. Stress pattern in Chinese is easier, because we can just focus on sentence level, where a monosyllabic word may be said to be stressed relative to other words in the sentence. Sentence stress is often used to express emphasis, surprise, etc, so that in principle stress may fall on any word or any syllable. For example, a SM conversation begins with a sentence like this, “I went shopping around Jiefangbei the whole day. I bought nothing.” The sentence is quite clear, but which word does the sender emphasize? If this sentence is carried on a telephone or face-to-face conversation, it will not cause any puzzle. Intonation, and other suprasegmental features of language, performs a variety of different functions. (Crystal 1992: 173) The most obvious function is to express a wide range of attitudinal meanings---excitement, boredom, surprise, friendliness, reserve, and many hundreds more. Intonation conveys a great deal about what is referred to as the “information structure” of the utterance. Intonation can help to organize language units that are more easily perceived and memorized. IV The casualness of SM in contrast with written language However, we cannot simply say the written form of speech is less powerful in communication. One thing that differs SM language from letters, and E-mail is the casualness of SM. SM is often processed under a random condition. The user may do it while he is having lunch, taking a walk, reading books, talking to others, or watching TV, etc. He could not focus all his attention on writing what he wants to say. He has to do it with little thought. Besides, sometimes, one SM user may message three others or more at the same time. The overloaded user has to speed it up, and the quality of SM decreases. But when people write letters, they are much more considerate. Unlike SM, sending letters is demanding, since we cannot write letters wherever and whenever we like. Once a letter is sent, little chance left for the addresser to explain it. Thus, SM is more like a record of spoken language, and the number of its characters is quite limited (no more than 70, including punctuations). In the following parts, we focus on difference between SM language and written language. The permanence of writing allows repeated reading and close analysis. It promotes the development of artful organization and more concise, intricately structured expression. Units of discourse, such as sentences and paragr