Collister, LB
(2012)
The discourse deictics ^ and <-- in a World of Warcraft community.
Discourse, Context and Media, 1 (1).
9 - 19.
ISSN 2211-6958
Abstract
In the written English variety used in a community of World of Warcraft players, two iconic lexical items created from symbols have undergone semantic change. The words analyzed are ^ and <--, which have shifted from iconic deictic items used for discourse reference to non-iconic epistemic meanings. ^ shifted from a discourse deictic to an affirmative of a previous utterance, and <-- shifted to a self-identifying meaning similar to a pronoun. The existence and evolution of these lexical items are related to the medium in which they were created, as their meanings are associated with a visual-spatial environment created by textual chat in the virtual world. The different meanings of ^ and <-- currently exist in polysemy in the community, and the continuum of meanings are documented using data from natural language use spanning three years. A statistical analysis is performed on the data, and a diachronic change in meaning is found; furthermore, the observed change follows the path of semantic shift processes previously documented in spoken language. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
Share
| Citation/Export: |
|
| Social Networking: |
|
Details
Metrics
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Altmetric.com
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[img]](https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png)
![[img]](https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/style/images/fileicons/text_plain.png)
![[feed]](/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}