Lise Fontaine

Lecturer, ENCAP, Centre for Language and Communication, Cardiff University, Wales

Nominal Group Structure in Personal Email Texts: an index of email literacy

Nominal group structure in personal email texts: Considering the effects of low e-mail literacy on nominal group structure

E-mail literacy as used in this paper is meant to attempt to isolate literacy in E-mail use from other related literacy types such as computer literacy (Mitchell, 2003), electronic literacy (Kaplan, 1995), and screen literacy (Selfe, 1999). Following Kaplan's definition of literacy and E-literacy (1995), E-mail literacy is defined here as the knowledge and skill required to proficiently record semiotic acts using E-mail software.

This paper does not attempt to describe E-mail literacy, but looks at its linguistic impact on text: Does a low level of E-mail literacy have an impact on linguistic choices and the resulting structures that are realized? To answer this question, the analysis focuses on the nominal group.

The nominal group has shown itself to be an effective index in two main areas: text type and style (Hudson-Ettle and Nilsson, 2001; Nilsson, 2000; and Quirk et al, 1985); and target language acquisition (Fontaine and Perry, 2003; Martín Úriz, Hidalgo, and Whittaker, 2001). This paper will examine the degree to which a low level of E-mail literacy affects the structure of the nominal group. The corpus for this study is comprised of five years of personal email messages from one Speaker who was not initially E-mail literate. Nominal group structure will be analysed at stages over the five years.