an investigation into the english language used on facebook social network by vietnamese learners of english = nghiên cứu về ngôn ngữ anh được người học tiếng anh ở việt nam sử dụng trên mạng xã hội facebook

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ LINH AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE USED ON

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

NGUYỄN THỊ LINH

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE USED ON

FACEBOOK SOCIAL NETWORK BY

VIETNAMESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

(NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ NGÔN NGỮ ANH ĐƯỢC NGƯỜI HỌC TIẾNG ANH Ở VIỆT NAM SỬ DỤNG TRÊN

MẠNG XÃ HỘI FACEBOOK)

M.A MINOR THESIS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.0201

HANOI – 2013

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

NGUYỄN THỊ LINH

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE USED ON

FACEBOOK SOCIAL NETWORK BY

VIETNAMESE LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

(NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ NGÔN NGỮ ANH ĐƯỢC NGƯỜI HỌC TIẾNG ANH Ở VIỆT NAM SỬ DỤNG TRÊN

MẠNG XÃ HỘI FACEBOOK)

M.A MINOR THESIS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.0201

Supervisor: Kiều Thị Thu Hương, PhD

HANOI – 2013

DECLARATION

I hereby, certify the thesis entitled “An investigation into the English language used

on Facebook social network by Vietnamese learners of English” is the result of my

own research for the Minor Degree of Master of Arts at University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi The thesis has not

been submitted for any degree at any other universities or institutions I agree that

the origin of my paper deposited in the library can be accessible for the purposes

of study and research

September, 2013

Nguyễn Thị Linh

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to show my gratitude to all those who gave me the possibility to complete this thesis

I have sincere thanks to the Post-graduate Department of ULIS, VNUH for giving

me permission to commence and go ahead with this M.A thesis and to use departmental data

I am deeply indebted to my supervisor, Dr Kiều Thị Thu Hương, Vice-Dean of the English Faculty – Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, whose encouragement, guidance and support enabled me to develop an understanding of the subject and to accomplish the final version of the thesis as expected

This thesis would not be possible were it not for my lecturers in the M.A course, namely Prof Dr Hoàng Văn Vân, Assoc Prof Dr Lê Hùng Tiến, Assoc Prof Dr

Võ Đại Quang, Dr Hà Cẩm Tâm, Dr Nguyễn Huy Kỷ, Dr Ngô Hữu Hoàng, Dr Lê Văn Canh and Dr Huỳnh Anh Tuấn I would like to thank them for their interesting lectures, devotion, assistance and valuable hints

Especially, I owe my deepest gratitude to my parents whose endless love and encouragement helped me finish this work

Lastly, I offer my regards and blessings to all of those who supported me in any respect during the completion of the study

ABSTRACT

Languages in general and English in particular evolve and diversify over the time Especially with the outburst of computer-mediated communication like the social network Facebook, English language incessantly gets its new look

The undertaken research examines the statuses and comments published on the Facebook sites of Vietnamese graduates of English to observe the trendy features of English language The level of formality/informality of online written English is considered as well The study focuses on the main aspects of the language‟s grammar, namely morphology, syntax and punctuation

Thanks to the descriptive, analytic, comparative and contrastive methods, the results reveal the tendency of the participants‟ using abbreviated expressions on Facebook This also proves their preference of maintaining informality on this social network Nevertheless, most instances indicate the hesitation of Vietnamese graduates of English in creating brand-new English, which now becomes the trend of Facebook users

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES vi

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS vii

PART I – INTRODUCTION 1

1 Statement of the problem 1

2 Objectives of the study 2

3 Research questions 2

4 Significance of the study 3

5 Scope of the study 4

6 Design of the study 5

PART II – DEVELOPMENT 6

CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 6

1.1 Written English 6

1.1.1 Morphology 6

1.1.2 Syntax 9

1.1.3 Punctuation 16

1.2 English phonemes 16

1.3 Informal English 18

1.4 Conversations 19

1.5 Review of related studies 19

CHAPTER II: THE STUDY 22

2.1 Methodology 22

2.1.1 Subjects 22

2.1.2 Data gathering instruments 22

2.1.3 Procedure 23

2.2 Findings and discussion 24

2.2.1 Morphology 25

2.2.2 Syntax 32

2.2.3 Punctuation 39

2.2.4 Discussion 40

PART III – CONCLUSION 42

3.1 Conclusions 42

3.2 Limitations of the study 43

3.3 Suggestions for further study 43 REFERENCES I

ENGLISH I VIETNAMESE IV

APPENDIX V

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

Figure 1 - The preference of each abbreviated form 25

Figure 2 - Proportion of phrase types on Facebook status 33

Figure 3 - Proportion of sentence types on Facebook status 37

Figure 4 - Proportion of sentence types on Facebook comment 38

Tables Table 1 - Chart of English consonant phonemes 17

Table 2 - List of Sound-based Substitutes on Facebook 27

Table 3- List of Initialisms on Facebook 28

Table 4 - List of Clippings on Facebook 30

Table 5 - List of Sound Imitations on Facebook 31

Table 6 - List of Colloquialisms on Facebook 32

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

Adverb Phrase Complement Combination Exclamation Interjection Modal (verb) Noun

Noun Phrase Object Preposition Prepositional Phrase Subject

Sentence Social Networking Site University of Languages and International Studies Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Verb Verb Phrase and

in other words for example

no date

PART I – INTRODUCTION

1 Statement of the problem

Language is always a fertile field for linguistic researchers since it has incessantly been renewed by users to get what they want to express It is beyond doubt that English has been used not only widely but also dissimilarly in different regions of

the world For instance, the prepositional phrase „at the weekend‟, which is preferred by British, turns to „on the weekend‟ in American English; or when you hear an Australian say „sunnies‟, it means „sunglasses‟ in British and American English As an aspect of culture, language is “the system of communication in

speech and writing that is used by people of a particular country or area”1 In other words, language in general and English in particular has been exploited by a certain community that shares the same habits of using the linguistic patterns

Thus, when it comes to Facebook, one of the most popular social networks, which connects people all over the world, one issue raised is whether or not a new kind of English will be created by Facebook users It is the very founder of Facebook, Mark

Zuckerberg who declared that this social network was “helping to define a

brand-new language for how people connect”2 He explained that vocabulary was really limited, so adding nouns and verbs could help to express a large number of things and connect to anything in any way we want Therefore, Zuckerberg himself has called Facebook users to create a language with pleasure

Thanks to a wide coverage of Facebook, many Vietnamese learners of English consider it a good site to practice the language by communicating with English speakers There are more and more Vietnamese people sharing their status and

1

language (n.d.) In Oxford Advanced Learners‟ Dictionary (8th ed.) Retrieved from

http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/language

2Zimmer, B (2011, September) “The rise of the Zuckerverb: The new language on Facebook” The Atlantic

Retrieved from language-of-facebook/245897/

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-rise-of-the-zuckerverb-the-new-giving comments in English on Facebook They are more likely to use English to make Facebook users understand their expressions However, what kind of English

do the Vietnamese utilize on Facebook? Do they prefer to use the Standard English learnt at school/university or the created one? Hardly have any answers to these questions been found in any research papers before

Thus, the present study has been carried out to investigate the trendy features of English used by Vietnamese learners of English on the social network Facebook

2 Objectives of the study

The statuses and comments posted on Facebook are characterized as asynchronous, that is, the mode of communication where the author and the reader are online at different times (Yus, 2011) In contrast to synchronous communication, asynchronicity allows selective message construction (Duthler, 2006), thus language users are able to plan, review and control their texts more than in synchronous media like chats Consequently, asynchronous online communication would allow a more formal style Following this premise, the objectives of the study will be twofold:

1) To examine online English writings on Facebook to find out the trendy features of this language when used by Vietnamese learners of English

2) To investigate the degree of formality/ informality followed by Vietnamese learners of English on this social network site

3 Research questions

The study aims at seeking answers to the following questions:

1) What are the trendy features of English language used on Facebook by Vietnamese learners of English?

2) What is the degree of formality/ informality of English followed by

Vietnamese learners of English on Facebook?

4 Significance of the study

The paper is an attempt to look into an under-researched issue on Facebook and for the Vietnamese graduates of English Thus, once completed, its outcome may offer benefits to entities involved, namely Vietnamese learners and teachers of English, and other Facebook users in the world

First of all, it is Vietnamese learners of English that benefit the most from the results of this paper This study partly helps them to differentiate Facebook English from academic and business English: when the former is rather informal, the latter seems to be more formal and standardized As a result, they will be more aware of using suitable English for different purposes, especially for some formal documents like reports, business letters or researches

In addition, for some Vietnamese undergraduates who have not had stable basic background knowledge of English language yet, it is really risky if using Facebook English becomes their habit At that time, there is no doubt that they will unconsciously bring what they read and see on Facebook to school, which leads to their unavoidable mistakes in English Thus, the findings of this study familiarize Vietnamese teachers of English with forms of the uncommon language that their students may use in class and that they consider errors or mistakes Hence, teachers can understand causes of the problems and find out appropriate solutions

Furthermore, in regard to Facebook users in general, the research may provide them with deep and comprehensive insight into the current situation of English used by the Vietnamese Hopefully, all of Facebook users can understand what their Vietnamese interactants mean This helps to connect more users on Facebook Last but not least, researchers of the related fields can use the current paper for reference and carry out further and deeper investigation

5 Scope of the study

According to Vietnam‟s Youth Magazine (2012)3, the majority of Vietnamese accounts on Facebook are under the age of thirty-four Besides, due to the fact that Vietnamese graduates of English are more likely to use English on Facebook, twenty-three- to thirty-three-year-old users have become the most suitable informants of the study

Additionally, there are several applications for Facebook users to communicate on

this social network such as private and public message, status, comment, note, chat,

voice and video call and so on, but some of them are hard to be observed and

intervened to study on the used language Therefore, only status and comment have

been taken into consideration As a result, written English has become a variable of the study However, despite numerous fields of English language, the research only

focuses on the aspects of morphology and syntax, the two main components of a grammar (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p.4) Also, punctuation is concerned as the

study targets to written English

Moreover, in regard to English, there exists a list of dialects of this language such as British English, American English, Australian English, and Canadian English and

so on Until now the issue called „Global English‟ is still a matter of argument,

hence the study needs to choose a Standard English to make comparison with the one used on Facebook In Huddleston and Pullum‟s (2002, p.4) theory, Standard

English “is the language of government, education broadcasting news publishing,

entertainment, and other public discourse” Standard English in the twenty-first

century can be grouped into two regional dialects: British English and American English (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p.5) Nevertheless, the researcher decided to put only British English on one scale of comparison The reason is

the scholarly interest in global English is of mainly British origin The British

seem to be much more aware of the necessity of somehow overseeing the

development of global English Anderman (2005, p.147)

3

30,8 triệu người Việt Nam sử dụng Internet (2012, Oct 19) Retrieved from

http://nhipsongso.tuoitre.vn/Nhip-song-so/516689/308-trieu-nguoi-Viet-Nam-su-dung-Internet.html

6 Design of the study

The study includes three parts:

Part one is the Introduction of the study which states the problem, the research questions, objectives, scope, significance and the design of the whole paper

Part two is the Development which is composed of two chapters Chapter one

presents the theoretical background related to the issue Chapter two presents the

research methodology (i.e subjects of the study, data collection instruments, and procedure), findings (i.e analysis of data, results) and discussion

Part three is the Conclusion which summarizes significant findings of the

investigation, elaborates contributions of the research, puts forward practical suggestions for future research as well as addresses notable limitations

in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and books In order to get precise sentences, writers of any language need to master its grammar composed of

morphology, syntax and punctuation

1.1.1.1 Word formation

A word is an independent meaningful linguistic unit typically larger than a morpheme but smaller than a phrase Morphologically, words can be formed in many processes which are presented as below based on the grammatical theories by Quirk et al (1987, p.430) and Huddleston (2002, p.1621)

• Affixation – the formation of words by adding a prefix or a suffix to the

base, e.g predict, presidential, informal

affix, e.g import (used as a verb or a noun), abstract (used as a noun or an

adjective)

greenhouse from green and house, desktop from desk and top

removing one part of the word this can change its part of speech or meaning, e.g

the verb opt back-formed from the noun option

- Clipping – the formation of a word by shortening but still keeping its

meaning and part of speech, e.g phone from telephone, photo from

photograph, and flu from influenza

- Acronym – the process of forming a word from its initial letters of a series

of words, which is itself pronounced as a word, e.g UNESCO

// (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization), NASA / / (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), UNICEF // (The United Nations Children's

Fund)

- Initialism – the process of forming a word from its initial letters of several

of words or parts of a word, which is itself pronounced letter by letter, e.g

TV // (television), UFO // (Unidentified Flying Object)

motor and hotel, smog from smoke and fog

• Reduplication – the process of forming words from two or more wither

identical or slightly different elements, e.g goody – goody, tick – tock, tip – top

heroin, Google, zipper

language and used in their own, e.g mammoth (from Russian - large, hairy extinct elephant), gung-ho (from Chinese - too enthusiastic about something without thinking seriously about it, especially about fighting and war), tycoon (from

Japanese - a person who is successful in business or industry and has become rich and powerful)

associated with the objects or actions they refer to, e.g kiwi (a New Zealand flightless bird which can produce the sound like „kiwi‟), click, clink

1.1.1.2 Parts of speech

In traditional grammar, words are classified into eight parts of speech: noun,

pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection

However, in the theories by Quirk et al (1987, p.18), two more parts of speech are

added, namely article and demonstrative

Parts of speech are divided into two groups: closed-system and open-class The

former is “the sets of items closed in the sense that they cannot normally be

extended by the creation of additional members” (Quirk et al., 1987, p.19) This

system embraces functional words such as articles (a, an, the), demonstratives (this,

that…), pronouns (I, you, her, them…), prepositions (in, at, on…), conjunctions

(and, when, although…) and interaction (oh, ah, well…) These kinds of words are

reciprocally exclusive, which means the words of the same part of speech are not

used together in a given structure For instance, one can have a pen or the pen but not the a pen In addition, the closed system is also reciprocally defining thus the

meaning of an individual item should be defined in relation to the rest of the system

For example, when talking about a student coming third in a contest, it may come to different understandings with the meaning of third in a set of four and in a set of

forty (Quirk et al., 1987, p.19)

In contrast, the latter group – the open-class is indefinitely extendable It consists of

notional or lexical words such as nouns (Jack, book, work…), verbs (do, have,

play…), adjectives (happy, attractive, big…) and adverbs (very, really, quickly…)

In the open-class, new items can be constantly created, thus a noun can be created

from an adjective, e.g happiness from happy, an adjective can be formed from a verb, e.g attractive from attract and so on Additionally, the parts of speech in this

group can be combined with each other and with the closed-system in a given structure (Quirk et al., 1987, p.19)

E.g a really beautiful Vietnamese girl

The phrase is the combination of article a, adverb really, adjectives beautiful and

Vietnamese and noun girl

1.1.2 Syntax

Syntax is concerned with the way words combine to form phrases, clauses and

sentences (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p.4) Remarkably, clause may form either a

sentence or part of a sentence4; hence only phrase and sentence are concerned in this paper

1.1.2.1 Phrase

As a grammatical unit smaller than a clause,

…the term phrase is an ancient one, and it has long been used to denote a

grammatical unit which is typically (though not invariably) consists of two or

more words, but which does not contain all of the things found in a clause.

For example, a noun phrase consists of a noun and its complement, as in the sun, an

intelligent student and something new

Especially “since the 1940s, linguists have recognized a much larger variety of

phrases than was formerly the case” (Trask, 2007, p.218); namely noun phrase (e.g

a good book), verb phrase (e.g has been looking for the keys), adjective phrase

(e.g more attractive), adverb phrase (e.g most enthusiastically) and prepositional

phrase (e.g in the room) Every phrase is built up from a head, an item (usually a

single word) which itself determines what kind of phrase the whole thing is A word phrase consists of a head with no other elements at all

one-In short,

…each of these types of phrase represents a single phrasal category, and a

phrasal category is one type of syntactic category – that is, it represents one of

the basic building blocks used in constructing sentences

Trask (2007, p.218)

1.1.2.2 X-bar model

The X-bar theory was first introduced by Chomsky (1970) and further developed by Jackendoff (1977) It is

…the theory about the internal structure of syntactic constituents which was

originally intended to place constraints on the power of phrase structure rules

X-bar theory captures the insight that all phrases share some essential structural

In this X-bar model, X is called the head of the phrase It determines the nature of the phrasal constituent (XP) A noun (N) will project an NP, a verb (V) a VP, a preposition (P) a PP, etc X' and X'' are called projections of X Typographically, these projections are marked by one or more primes (X' and X''), called bars Thus, X' is pronounced X-bar; X'', X-double-bar etc The head is called the zero projection (also written as X0) The top node X'' (or XP) is called the maximal projection of X All other projections between the head and the maximal projection are called intermediate projections The “sister(s)” of X are called the complements (of the head), and the “sisters” of X' are the specifier(s) and modifier(s) (of the phrase) A complement takes the role of extending the variant X to X-bar This means the head determines its complement via the selection of properties of its lexical entry Besides, a modifier expands the X-bar and this expanded X-bar may be iterated in

many nodes of the tree diagram (reviewed in 1.1.2.4.) Meanwhile, a specifier

continues to extend the X-bar to X-double bar or XP Thanks to the X-bar theory, it becomes possible to characterize natural classes of syntactic categories (Kornai &

Pullum, 1990 and Võ, Đ Q., 2005) Based on the rules, the noun phrase „the clever

boy over there‟ is analyzed in the X-bar schema as follows

N′′

Adj N′

the clever boy over there

In general, the X-bar theory belongs to a complex and expert syntactic field To properly digest and apply this theory into syntactic analysis is to study deeply its formation and development in relation to linguistic theories generally and generative linguistics particularly Needless to say, the X-bar theory is a sharp tool for syntax (Võ, Đ Q., 2005, p.43)

Remarkably, the current X-bar system can be extended to sentence structure (Võ,

Đ., Q., 2005, p.41) However, due to its complicated features, the study only applied X-bar theory into phrasal structure analysis

1.1.2.3 Sentence

A sentence is a grammatically independent unit of expression, made up of two

essential parts called the subject and the predicate In writing, a sentence begins

with a capital letter and ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation

point

Ellsworth & Higgins (1997, p.1)

Grammatically, in a sentence the subject is what being discussed and the predicate

is what being said about the subject Take the following sentence as an example:

Her parents visit her sick uncle every day

The sentence is about an activity of „her parents‟, thus „her parents‟ takes part of the subject of the sentence and the verb phrase „visit her sick uncle every day‟ is the

predicate It should be noted that the subject determines concords, thus the verb of the sentence must select the singular or plural form depending on whether the

subject is singular as in „This book is interesting‟ or plural as in „These books are

interesting‟ Moreover, it is the subject that changes its position when a statement is

made interrogative, e.g Is this book interesting?

In regard to predicate, it can be divided into operator (auxiliary) and predication

The distinction between the two may be displayed as follows:

Sentence

Auxiliary Predication

as operator

He had given the girl an apple

Had he given the girl an apple?

Quirk et al (1987, p.11)

The particular division of the sentence helps the language users understand the process of forming interrogative, negative, emphatic sentences and others

According to Quirk et al (1987), a sentence can comprise five sentence elements

namely subject, verb, object, complement and adverbial, abbreviated as S, V, O, C,

A, respectively For example,

(1) He (S) is crying (V)

(2) This picture (S) is (V) charming (C)

(3) The girl (S) came (V) into the house (A)

(4) He (S) broke (V) the vase (O)

(5) I (S) have sent (V) you (O) an email (O)

(6) My birthday (S) is (V) on 1 st April (A)

(7) He (S) makes (V) me (O) happy (C) all the time (A)

Syntactically, a subject is normally a noun phrase or a clause with nominal function

Its position is before the verb phrase in declarations and immediately after the operator in questions Especially, a subject has number and person concord and it rules the conjugation of the main verb in the sentence With the same part of speech

with a subject, an object generally follows the subject and the verb phrase of a

sentence but it takes the role as a subject in passive form An object may be an indirect or a direct one, the former precedes the latter if both of them are present In

regard to complement, a noun phrase or an adjective phrase or a clause with nominal

function comes after the subject, verb phrase and object (if one is present) to modify the subject (Cs) as in sentence (2) or the object as in sentence (7) Additionally, an

adverbial is normally mobile and optional as in (7) It may be defined as an adverb

phrase, a noun phrase, a prepositional phrase or an adverbial clause However, in some sentences like (6), an adverbial is obligatory

Sentence may be classified into two ways (Ellsworth & Higgins, 1997): by purpose and structure; yet due to the scope of the study, only the latter is taken into

consideration

According to the number and kind of clauses the sentence contains, it may be

simple, compound, complex or compound-complex

• Simple sentence – that consists of a single independent clause

E.g All these book are mine

• Compound sentence – that comprises two or more co-ordinate clauses as its

immediate constituents

E.g He was watching TV while she was cooking

• Complex sentence – that consists of two or more clauses; at least one them is

the independent superordinate clause, the others are sub-ordinate clauses as its

immediate constituents These constituents are themselves clause elements within the structure of the superordinate clause

E.g You can use my phone if you want

• Compound – complex sentence – that is the combination of compound and

complex sentences

E.g Having seldom talked to anyone before, the child simply widely opened his

beautiful eyes and looked at the stranger

In the present study, the researcher would like to concentrate on the structure of

expressions used on Facebook status and comment by the Vietnamese graduates of

English Thus, the study would point out which types of structure are most frequently used by the participants on Facebook

1.1.2.4 Tree diagram

If the study chose the X-bar schema to analyze phrases, it is the tree diagram that is selected for sentences Tree diagram is used widely in linguistics to display the internal structure of a sentence The root of the tree is situated on the top of the diagram and denoted by „St‟ (sentence) in this study The going-down branches describe all levels of a sentence, which begin with phrases as the first level below sentence and followed by word classes The separate words of the sentence are put

in the last line (Võ, Đ., Q., 2005, p.34) The following sentence and its tree diagram

The tree diagram owns the principle of dominance: the lower intersection called node is dominated by the upper In particular, the node S dominates the nodes NP and VP directly and all other nodes below indirectly Similarly, the node VP asserts

a direct dominance over the nodes V and NP, an indirect one over „Det‟ and „N‟ Additionally, the categories like „NP‟ and „VP‟ in the above tree diagram have the same derivation (St) so they are in the same level The strong point of this tree diagram is its ability to explicit not only the syntactic but the functional relations between the sentence elements For instance, in the above example, the NP right under the node S indicates the subject of the sentence but the NP right under the node VP with the same level as V is referred to the object of the sentence (Võ, Đ., Q., 2005, p.34)

The present study would use the tree diagram to analyze all the sentences in the investigated statuses and comments so as to find out which types of sentence are preferred by the Vietnamese graduates of English as Facebook users

1.1.3 Punctuation

Punctuation serves two main functions: separation (i.e hyphen, comma, dash…) and specification (e.g question mark, exclamation mark, apostrophe, period…) of

language function (Quirk et al., 1987, p.458) The study merely concentrates on

apostrophe – the punctuation used in writing the genitive singular as in boy‟s or

plural as in boys‟, and in the informal contractions, e.g I‟ll, Mary doesn‟t, he can‟t

(Quirk et al., 1987, p.458)

1.2 English phonemes

As mentioned above, the present paper aims to study on the written English language However, in an informal linguistic context like the SNS Facebook where the Facebook users may use spoken language in their writings, there would be some

creation of the language related to its system of sound Consequently, the study would review the English phonemes in case of the necessity of data analysis

Phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two words (Roach, 1998, p.36) The English phonetic alphabet consists of twenty-four consonants and twenty vowels; the former are displayed in the chart as follow

Besides the consonants are twenty vowels including five long vowels /, , ,

, /, seven short vowels /, , , , , , / and eight diphthongs /, ,

, , , , / Long vowels tend to be longer than short vowels in similar contexts A diphthong is a glide from one vowel to another, and the whole glide acts like one of the long simple vowels (Roach, 1998, p.18)

1.3 Informal English

The definition of informal English in this study refers to the language in daily life,

including colloquialisms, slang words and non-standard language patterns

which lack of accurate grammatical structures

Colloquialism, according to Oxford dictionary, is “a word or phrase that is used in

conversation but not in formal speech or writing”5 For instance, ain‟t (am not),

reckdon (suppose) and yonder (over there), etc Some linguists have made a

distinction between colloquialisms and slang words like Zuckermann (2003, p.21):

Slang refers to informal (and often transient) lexical items used by a specific

social group, for instance teenagers, soldiers, prisoners, or surfers…

Meanwhile,

colloquialism is a lexical item used in informal speech; whilst the broadest

sense of the term colloquialism might include slangism, its narrow sense does

not Slangisms are often used in colloquial speech but not all colloquialisms are

slangisms

Zuckermann (2003, p.21)

Therefore, the words that most native speakers know are more likely colloquialisms Another method of distinguishing between a slang word and a colloquialism is to look it up in the most updated dictionaries Thanks to the more popularized use of colloquialisms, most of them have been added in dictionaries with the note of informal words

However, the problem is that this is not a discrete but a continuum system Although the majority of slang words are short-lived and often replaced by new ones, the number of non-slang colloquialisms is always growing Thus, the present study has been carried out to discover whether there are any slang words and colloquialisms created on the most popular SNS Facebook by Vietnamese users

5 colloquialism (n.d.) In Oxford Advanced Learners‟ Dictionary (8th ed.) Retrieved from

http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/colloquialism

1.4 Conversations

Most of the time, conversation consists of two or more participants taking

turns, and only one participant speaking at any time

Yule (1996, p.72)

It is worth noting that status is posted aiming to report or update something about

the Facebook user‟s feelings, emotions or daily activities It can be considered a

„topic-raising‟ statement expecting others‟ feedbacks or in other words, it is the very

beginning of a conversation Meanwhile, comment is the application for other

Facebook users to freely give their opinions related the „topic sentence‟ or status, which makes a real successful conversation

Due to the asynchronous characteristics of the social network Facebook, users are under no pressure of time when posting something on this site Therefore, long pauses (long silence between turns – Yule, 1996, p.72) normally exist between the comments In addition, this kind of indirect non-restrictive conversations permits any one to take their turn at any time, but there will be no overlaps thanks to the system‟s time management Nevertheless, because of the free turn-taking, adjacency pairs (formed by certain sequences of turns going together – Yule, 1996, p.77) of conversations on Facebook are not often contiguous and ordered

1.5 Review of related works

With spectacular growth and popularization of social networking sites6, many studies have been conducted concerning the use of languages on SNSs

Take the research titled “Intercultural internet chat and language learning: A

socio-cultural theory perspective” by Pasfield-Neofitou (2007) as an instance With the

participation of five Australian advanced learners of Japanese and their five

6Social Networking Reaches Nearly One in Four Around the World (2013, June 18) Emarketer Retrieved

from

http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Social-Networking-Reaches-Nearly-One-Four-Around-World/1009976#bGpi5vTHD1rIwudR.99

Japanese chat partners in the form of chat logs, the study uses Socio-cultural theory

to investigate the properties of Japanese-English intercultural Internet chat Collected over a month by follow-up interviews, the data are analyzed within conversations to find out a variety of linguistic and interactional features in the ten chat logs gathered, in terms of turn taking, language features, and features linked to computer literacy and amount of experience in using chat The findings lead to a conclusion that sociocultural factors are important in shaping the nature of language

used in the discourse, and chat provides opportunities for natural language use with

native speakers

Concerning the same issue, Nguyễn, D T T, Nguyễn, T T T & Nguyễn, T T H

(2008) carried out “a study on the impact of @-language on the mother tongue”

@-language, according to the authors, is the one used for chatting on internet by the

young generation Participants of the study are students from two classes of two high-schools in Da Nang, Vietnam The findings disclose a pervasion of @-language on the young In regards to the reasons leading to their preference of using @-language, 65,3 % of the participants express their interest in strange language, 49% of them want to save time with abbreviated expressions, a minority 14,28% like to update the trend of the teenage language and another 8,16% of the participants use @-language to keep their parents in the dark about what they share with their friends The study concludes that @-language may deprive the young of their ability to perceive and understand the nature and beauty of the mother tongue

In short, both of the two linguistic studies, as many others by Milroy (1987), Young

(2009), Morris, Cunliffe & Prys (2012) and Vũ, N N K (2012)…, mainly target to

chat language in the SNSs in general

Not until the outburst of Facebook, have some researchers concerned the language

in a particular network community like this SNS Specially, since Zuckerburg – the founder of Facebook, called Facebook user to create language with pleasure, this SNS has urged more linguists to study on the uncommon features of English