* repair

What is it about?

This paper discusses a use of the asterisk (*) in a community of online gamers as a method of correcting errors in their chat. Users can use the * to correct a typo or missing information, or they can also use * to correct mistakes made by other players. This paper proposes that * be considered a repair morpheme in online English.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

In spoken English, we correct ourselves all the time. We can say "er, I meant to say...", for example, if we happen to misspeak. Much linguistic investigation has gone into understanding repair in spoken language. This paper represents one of the first investigations into repair in written conversations online.