LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SECURITY DEBATE IN FACEBOOK CONVERSATION

Abstract

The work is aimed at examining some of the common linguistic forms used in the cyberspace communication, especially on security debate in facebook conversation. The qualitative descriptive research design was adopted for the work. Data for the work were taken from two security debates from an asynchronous discussion forum “Facebook†where Nigerians congregate to interact on several social issues that is not controlled or conditioned by rules and regulations. The work adopted Halliday`s (1998) Systemic Functional Grammar as its theoretic anchorage. The work equally adopted descriptive and interpretative tools as means for data analysis. After the analysis, the work revealed more than 8 linguistic typologies/features that characterize the two selected security debates on Facebook Conversation. The work concludes that the “Cyberspeak†which includes all the orthographic, graphic and grammatical forms in online communication has emerged with the distinct variety which enables users of the major (English) language of computing to cope with linguistics constraints of this new technology.