Chapter Three
3.2 SLexipedia - Word Formation
Word formation is the study concerned with the origin of words and how new words are coined and invented. Many scholars of morphology, lexical semantics and etymology have been interested in word formation processes (e.g. Adams, 1973; Bauer, 1983;
Durkin, 2009; Katamba and Stonham, 1993; Lieber, 2004; Stageberg, 1981). Bauer claims that "any discussion of word-formation makes two assumptions: that there are such things as words, and that at least some of them are formed" (1983: 7). Bauer's two main branches of morphology, inflectional morphology and word formation, serve us well here. Inflectional morphology is the branch of morphology that "deals with the various forms of lexemes", while word-formation "deals with the formation of new lexemes from given bases" (Bauer 1983: 33). Figure 25 shows Bauer‘s classification of word formation into two types, derivation and compounding, with derivation composed of class-maintaining and class-changing forms, and compounding identified according to the word class of the resultant compound form, limiting it to only nouns, verbs and adjectives. Although Bauer is referring to English here, the same applies to Arabic.
Stageberg (1981) classifies eleven types of word formation processes, including both compounding and derivation as the main processes, but adding more in Figure 24:
DERIVATION (affixation) - disadvise COMPOUNDING - breakfast
ECHOISM - clang, hiss
CLIPPING - prof, mic
BLENDING - smog, flunk
WORD-FORMATION BACK-FORMATION - singer, edit
FOLK ETYMOLOGY - coleslaw, cockroach
REDUPLICATION - lovey-dovey
INVENTION - nylon
ANTONOMASIA - sandwich,hamburger
ACRONYMY - MP, NATO
Figure 24: word formation processes with examples from Stageberg, (1983: 128)
Scholars (such as Adams, 1973; Durkin, 2009; Katamba and Stonham, 1993; Lieber, 2004) who have worked in this field have similar taxonomies regarding the types of word formation, and all agree on compounding and derivation (or affixation) as the main processes. However, Stageberg's 1981 taxonomy will be used as a basis here as it has eleven different categories of word formation processes. Not all of Stageberg‘s categories will be given attention as some are irrelevant regarding the data in the SL corpus; only those that appear in the data shall be discussed and are emboldened in Figure 24. Additional word formation processes will be presented and discussed as the creativity and innovation of creating new words is presented. Table 3 summarises Stageberg‘s word formation processes that are discussed with his examples and example words taken from the SL corpus.
Table 3: Stageberg‘s word formation processes
Process Stageberg examples SL examples Meaning
Compounding
INFLECTIONAL
(deals with forms of individual lexemes) CLASS-MAINTAINING
MORPHOLOGY DERIVATION
(affixation)
CLASS-CHANGING
WORD-FORMATION
(deals with formation
of new lexemes) COMPOUND NOUNS
COMPOUNDING COMPOUND VERBS
(more than one root)
COMPOUND ADJECTIVES
Figure 25: Basic divisions of morphology showing word formation (Bauer, 1983: 34)
By new, the researcher refers to the fact that they are either completely new formations that have established themselves in SLEnglish and/or SLArabic, or they are existing words that have experienced significant semantic extension or pragmatic alteration in the way they are used in context, usually in a way specific to SL. This section is concerned with presenting an account of how the entries in the SL glossary are used in social circumstances, with the aim of discussing their role in the formation of a virtual identity. The glossary entries are organised alphabetically and also proceeding from the term that occurs most frequently (and its derivations) to that which occurs least frequently.
The next sections are presented according to the word-formation processes of the words being analysed in context: acronymy, compounding and blending, derivation, and clipping. Examples from the corpus in both languages (English and Arabic) are discussed regarding the use of these vocabulary items in their social context and the implications for the acquisition of a virtual identity.
3.2.1 Acronymy
Economy is a characteristic of CMC (Baron, 2000; Crystal, 2001; Danet, 2000; Herring, 1996, 2001; Yates, 1996) because of the "rapid-response dictates of CMC" (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006: 260) and various forms of abbreviation are ever-present, although extensions and elaborations also exist for affective and emotive purposes (see 3.1).
Clipping and alphabetism are both types of economising formation processes.
Alphabetisms are of two main types: initialisms and acronyms. There are some differences among scholars regarding the definitions of the terms acronym, initialism and abbreviation (Bauer, 1983; Cannon, 1989, Stageberg, 1981). Bauer states that:
An INITIALISM [original caps] is one type of alphabetism. In an initialism, the initial letters of the words in a phrase are taken to replace the phrase.
These letters are pronounced as a sequence of letters.
An ACRONYM is an initialism which is pronounced according to ordinary grapheme-phoneme conversion rules.
(Bauer, 2006: 500) However, Cannon (1989) refers to both as initialisms, but names Bauer's initialisms as abbreviations. Stageberg (1981: 123) on the other hand defines Acronymy as "the
process whereby a word is formed from the initials or beginning segments of a succession of words" He states that "In some cases the initials are pronounced, as in MP, (military police, or Member of Parliament)" as is the case with Bauer's initialisms and "In others the initials and/or beginning segments are pronounced as the spelled word would be. For example NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is pronounced /neito/ and radar (radio detecting and ranging) /reidɑː/," as in Bauer's acronyms.
Stageberg does not separate these two terms as Bauer does; therefore Bauer's categories are more useful for precision in this analysis.
Having affiliations with Netspeak and being characterised by economy and extravagance, where texting is the form and the context is mostly informal and less rule-governed, it is expected that initialisms and acronyms are frequently present in a corpus of SLEnglish. The most recurrent of the Second Life initialisms are SL (Second Life) and RL (Real Life) with 458 and 201 occurrences respectively in the SL corpus, that is a rate of 2.5/1000 words for SL and 1/1000 words for RL (see table 6). These were recovered from the corpus using Wordsmith Tools (Scott, 2011) and they both appear in the keyword list for the SL corpus as is to be expected. SL is also used in other initialisms to refer to something specific to SL. SLT for example means Second Life time which is fixed at -8 GMT, the time that Residents refer to and live by inworld. The frequency and distribution of the other initialisms and acronyms across the corpus are also shown in Table 4. TP (short for teleport) stands out as one of the frequent initialisms, especially in casual conversation (CC). When people want to move around from one place to another, they TP each other to their whereabouts. This is not frequent in academic discussion (AD) as the meetings take place in a fixed location and there is little moving around. The six times that TP does occur in AD is when a member of the discussion who is already there offers a TP to someone coming in. LL (Linden Laboratories) however is mentioned frequently and much more in AD than in CC. This is because SLers do not usually concern themselves with the producers and designers of Second Life, while members of the VWER academic discussion group frequently mention LL in their suggestions for development of SL and critical discussions about entities within it that concern LL.
Table 4: Distribution of Top Ten Initialisms and Acronyms across Conversational Genres Acronym Total # (%/1000
words)
Casual Conversation (CC)
Academic conversation (AC)
Interviews (INT)
Automated response (AUTO)
Business meeting (BM)
Full form
SL 458 (2.25/1000) 121 (0.5/1000) 226 (1.1/1000) 91 7 13 Second Life
RL 201(1/1000) 101 24 62 14 - Real Life
TP 61 (0.3/1000) 46 6 5 4 - Teleport
HUD 34 (0.15/1000) 12 3 - 19 - Head‘s up display
LL 32 (0.15/1000) - 32 - - - Linden Laboratories
IM 29 (0.14/1000) 15 10 2 - 2 Instant Message
AO 25 (0.13/1000) 10 - - 15 - Animation
Overrider
SLT 17 (0.08/1000) - 17 - - - Second Life Time
LM 17 (0.08/1000) 5 10 1 - 1 Landmark
L$ 5 (0.02/1000) 2 1 - 2 - Linden Dollars
SL is used mainly as a noun modifier, as in the example cases below:
18. <PBChereandthereOCT10.CC>
[19:55] SW: who is Lashay?
[19:55] AV: OMG, I love her, she is my SL sister
[19:55] AV: LV [typing her name showing its resemblance to my own]
[19:55] SW: lol
19. <PBChereandthereOCT10.CC>
[20:00] SW: And he was telling how much he wanted to be with me. He had just broken up with his sl gf.
20. < PCbbMAY11.CC>
[16:11] VM: my SL daughter comes from leeds
In all three of these cases SL is used as noun modifier of the words ‗sister‘, ‗gf‘
(girlfriend) and ‗daughter‘ giving these words the positioning identity characteristic that they are 'in SL only' and not biological or exist in real life. In addition to relationships, SL can be used to premodify objects such as the sun in 21 or even abstract entities in the virtual world, as in SL drama in 22.
21. <AVOGclubMAY10.CC>
[16:49] OG: maybe u need more sl sun to get more color lol 22. < AVHcreamy12AUG2011.IE>
[10:02] H: Interesting. This is a very good club to be. A lot of sl drama, relationships, voice
OG and I were discussing how my avatar was not appearing in the form that it should be, but rather it was plainly grey in colour. She added humour to the conversation by stating that it might need some more SL sun. H recommends a club to friends which is highly interactive. There are social feuds and lots of drama, and this is rather specific to SL, as one would not expect the attendants of a party at a club to all know each other and interact in real life, especially with the feature of being able to communicate with people across the hall or dance floor, which would be realistically almost impossible.
This is a characteristic of virtual communities. The use of SL in 8-12 overtly as a modifier reflects an awareness of the virtual surrounding and its contrast to 'real' life as the modifications of the different nouns place them in the virtual. More examples are discussed in (4.2.2) where the terms here and in SL are contrasted, but it is worth mentioning here that the most frequent collocate of SL is the preposition in with 236
(51.5%) occurrences while in SL occurs 184 times (40%). Where SL is not a modifier it usually refers to Second Life, the virtual world, or the 'game' in general (23 and 24).
23. <VWERampitheatresMAY-JUL2011>
M: I first heard about SL way back (check my avatar‘s birth date) 24. <VWERampitheatresMAY-JUL2011>
AJB: so – what kind of assessment are we talking about ... I‘m asking because – I don‘t see why we should assess the tool – we asses the learning, irrespective of the tool
Prof. D: If you assess an RL classroom, then it makes sense to assess SL.
Otherwise, not so much.
AJB: how? the mode should not be assessed, should it – should it be the learning that is assessed?
In 24, SL is used in an academic setting as a subject of discussion involving virtual learning and teaching. Here SL is used as a 'tool' and is contrasted with RL.
The substantial part of the corpus is casual conversation (CC), representing 66% of the corpus as a whole (see 2.4), and this reflects the dominant casual nature of SL. The SLers who participate in CC are people who are simply living out their second lives like AV's SL sister LV, who has been married, had four children, and been divorced in SL.
These are the users who I would argue have an avatar-identity, that is one of an avatar living in SL as a real person would live in RL. In this case, everything such users mention exists or happens in SL, so the need to literally mention SL ceases to exist. The objects mentioned in 25 are all unmodified nouns referring to SL objects, but there is no need to mention in SL, or SL bed, SL baby as this is implied from the context of the conversation.
25. <ADARstacey'sJULY2011.CC>
[18:34] AD: the bed i put in the house has a lot of animations, its the one we had in the ranch house on our first sim, we never got to use it though .
.
[18:41] AR you arent thinkin a baby already are you?
The reference to the bed and the ranch house is one of presupposition and implicature, as in a virtual context and doing what they are doing (furnishing a virtual home), AD and AR, the participants of this conversation, know that the referents of the objects they
mention are to be perceived as in SL. The context is a virtual one, in virtual space and time, and the identities involved in the interaction are virtual avatar-identities. When such a Resident feels that he/she needs to say SL in conversation, it is to make a distinction between SL and RL, to avoid confusion as in 18 and 19, where SL sister is not to be confused with real world sister, and SL gf is not to be mistaken for real life girlfriend, or when Second Life in general, that is, the program itself, is mentioned, as in 26.
26. <ADARstacey'sJULY2011.CC>
[19:06] AR: omg i love that gown [19:06] AD: sl is bad, i still dont see you [19:06] AR: i'm next to you
[19:07] AD: ahh, there you are :-)
In 26 AD is referring to Second Life as a program saying it is ‗bad‘, meaning that the loading process is slow. After a short while, AR becomes visible in the gown she is wearing and AD expresses his content with the smiley face emoticon :-). Later in the same conversation AR mentions the anonymising nature of the SL program relating to identity claiming that it can be deceiving, giving it agency.
27. <ADARstacey'sJULY2011.CC>
[19:06] AD: she always told me she was older, but would never say for sure [19:06] AR: But i guess sl decieves everyone with the way we portray ourselves
In many of the SL examples above, the use of the initialism is to do with contrasting it to its 'real' life counterpart RL.
Although this initialism is not exclusive to SL, but used in any other virtual environment (Rua, 2007) to refer to the real as opposed to the virtual, it is the second most common initialism in the SL corpus with 201 occurrences (1/1000 words) and it is not mentioned in Crystal's glossary (2004). An observation of how RL is used is important because of its frequency and the fact that it contributes to the SL observation as they are regarded as opposites.
Being classified in the same grammatical class and having the same grammatical functions in any sentence, one would perhaps expect that SL and RL are similarly
distributed across conversational genres. As it is the spontaneous conversational use in different social circumstances that is our concern, this proves not to be the case. Where almost half of the quantity of the occurrences of SL came from academic discussions, in the case of RL, half of the 201 occurrences appear in casual conversation, and a large number in sociolinguistic interviews in which the questions target the differences between SL and RL.
Some of the occurrences of the initialism bring out the distinction between SL and RL, but they are limited in frequency. Example 28 is taken from an academic discussion about language and virtual identity, hence the essentialism of the distinction between what happens in 'real' life and what happens in here referring to Second Life. The use of here places the speaker in the virtual deictically, and so RL acts as the natural there relating to here.
28. <VWERampitheatresMAY-JUL2011.AD>
JR: In RL so much of what we say is communicated through body
language. In here words take the higher ground with endearing tolerance for language barriers and other cultural differences
29. <VWERampitheatresMAY-JUL2011.AD>
Prof. D: I‘ve found that some students who have a serious problem with anxiety reading aloud their work in RL have an easier time here in SL.
29 also shows the contrast between the two 'places': RL and SL. Prof. D highlights that the anonymising features of the here encourage students to read aloud, something they are very anxious to do in front of a 'real' audience. In both the above examples one notices how SL is considered in terms of spatial deixis the ‗here‘ as opposed to the implied ‗there‘ of the real world (see 4.1.2).
In casual conversational circumstances, or such situations as first encounters, questions asked in relation to real life identity have to be clearly stated as they can be easily misinterpreted. When a question of age emerges inworld, the expected reply is for one to reveal their SL age, that is, the number of days since the SL account was first opened.
This information is also visible in a SLer's public profile. 'Real life' age is not expected to be asked about or mentioned as it is the habit of many Residents to separate RL and SL, keeping anonymity intact. From the conversation in 30, it is clear that ―roffo‖
knows SS's real life age, and hence is requested not to give away traits of her real life identity:
30. <PClar's27AUG2011.CC>
[00:02] SS: n shhhsh roffo dont be givin away my rl in here :P
RL in 27 also has implications for deleted elements such as 'information' or 'age', and here once again positions the speaker in the virtual surrounding. There are many instances of the use of RL when compensating for deleted elements according to the context of the conversation. "RL calls", "My RL is bad", or even "my RL is coming"
with the ellipted element being 'husband' or 'wife' for example. Usually, when immersed inworld, the context is perceived to be the virtual one, and the RL is 'the other'. If a resident states their preference of not mixing the two worlds, it would be somewhat inappropriate to ask about 'real' world information, as in 31.
31. < AVPCsweetheartsJULY2011.IE>
[11:03] CM24: ya so how old r u in rl i dont mean to b rude
CM24 apologises up front for her question about age knowing that it may be inappropriate. If she only asked "how old are you", the hearer would have taken the question to be referring to his/her SL age. This is a face-threatening act mitigated with an apology.
Another frequent occurrence of RL is during leave-taking, as real life can intervene with a person's hours spent online, and so it is common for residents to state that RL requires them to leave Second Life at that particular time.
32. <PCclubNOV10.CC>
[16:47] BB: hate to tip and run but rl calls..have a great night all 33. <AVSGsweethearts24AUG2011.CC>
[11:47] SG: rl time for me...thank you for sharing...
There is also an acknowledgement that real life is the 'real' and Second Life the fake, or the game, and that reality always comes first. RL is prioritised over SL.
34. <AVSGsweethearts24AUG2011.CC>
[10:46] SG: please no excuses.. things happen that way and rl is the more important
35: <AVMFlars24AUG2011.IE>
[23:44] MF: we all have rl ...
[23:45] MF: which should come first
RL acts as a constant reminder that Second Life is the virtual and not the reality.
Residents do not forget that they are performing identities which are often perceived to be different from their real life ones. Boellstorff quotes a resident saying "the SL me and the RL me are two totally different people. I may appear strong in my online presence, but in RL I'm so weak it's not even funny," (Boellstorff, 2008: 120). In an interview with a resident in my data, he had this to say:
36. <AVNCleedsuniOCT10.INT> 6 please..i guess you could say that the role i play inworld is care free
36. <AVNCleedsuniOCT10.INT> 6 please..i guess you could say that the role i play inworld is care free