Re: 1st person vocative (was: Language universal?)

Eric Christopherson wrote:
>On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 09:08:52PM -0000, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>[...]
> > This reminds me of the style used on MU*s (realtime multiplayer text
> > games): By convention, all input from a player must start with the
> > name of the character played. And if people don't want to bother with
> > direct speech, you see stuff like
> >
> >        Joe says happily, "Tombraider 4 on PS/2 will really rule."
> >
> >        Bob chuckles and didn't know there was going to be a 4.
> >
> >        Joe oopses. He said too much already and will shut up now.
>
>I wonder if any real study has been done on this kind of "speech." It seems
>to show some interesting features not found in spoken English (or usual
>written English), such as using an eventive verb (chuckles) and a stative
>verb
>(didn't know -- and note it's even in a different tense!) in the same
>sentence, separated by a conjunction. But then eventive verbs seemingly
>aren't
>often used in the simple present in English anyway, the present progressive
>being preferred (or with things such as chuckling, just DOING it instead of
>saying it).
I saw an article based on a study on "Chat Swedish" in a local newspaper.
Unfortunately the article at least concentrated on various "graphic"
features of it, like the heavy use of abbreviations and the use of smileys.
Also, alot of the article was devoted to explaining that it isn't "bad
Swedish", merely "different Swedish".  But what more "fundamental" features
did they mention? Well, a tendency that may be Swedish-only to leave out the
word for "I", use of "descriptive" verbs like "chuckles" in your example
above and nothing else I can recall.

                                            Andreas
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