An Analysis of Expressive Speech Acts in Online Task-oriented Interaction by University Students

Abstract

This study explores the use of Expressive speech acts in a corpus of online interaction involving three groups of university students in the area of English Linguistics. The analysis focuses on the relative frequency of occurrence of different subtypes of Expressives across the three subcorpora. The influence of certain contextual variables such as multiculturality, age, linguistic proficiency and group size seems to have a strong bearing on the Expressives employed by each group.