Practices of Language Use

Before we move on to data analysis, what still needs to be clarified is which ones of the 100-match conversations should be chosen for thick description (Geertz, 1973), considering

the limited space of the study. This question leads to another analytic model of mine that has a bearing with Bucholtz’s (1999) framework for the community of nerds’ linguistic identity

practices (See Section 2.1.3). Within a community of practice, it should be clear that our goal

is to search for what kinds of practices, including linguistic patterns, take on great importance in justifying one’s membership in the community. In line with this view, Bucholtz

subcategorizes his linguistic identity practices into positive or negative, which represent

respectively what linguistic indices individuals do and do not employ in order to actively construct a chosen identity. However, as it is difficult to contend whether a linguistic practice is being avoided or simply not needed in a particular context, I suggest that positive identity practices is all what a researcher could get from limited data sources; negative identity practices would only be clear when there are comparisons among more than two groups of speakers. Another point where I deviate from Bucholtz comes from my observation that his definition of linguistic identity practices only consists of linguistic forms such as phonology, syntax, lexicon, and discursive strategies (e.g. punning and parody). Holding that identity practices are social actions, I argue that Bucholtz’s categorization of linguistic identity practices covers only a part of a community’s “linguistic practices” in a more general sense.

In my view, we should also consider communicative goals and discursive effects of particular speeches when developing a typology of practices of language. As a result, in my analysis I will employ not only the form-based linguistic identity practices proposed by Bucholtz but also a whole new set of practices of language that has more to do with social interaction – what I call communicative practices. The reason why I coin the term so is to emphasize its relation to communicative purposes within the discourse while keeping the trace of the community of practice theory. The ideas of both linguistic and communicative identity practices will help me with the choices of data for display and the structure of my analysis in the next chapter; a major focus will be placed on the most dominating or frequently employed

practices of language use in the LoL game chat.

As communicative practice is an analytic tool newly proposed here, I shall spend the rest of the space elaborating on how it works to underline the relationship between language and identity in a community of practice. In fact, such communicative practices could be taken as

speech activities, which is a concept employed in Kiesling’s (2009) study on style and stance.

Each communicative practice is like a genre or form of participation in talk, tied with a particular communicative purpose and a range of possible uptakes of the recipients. In the terms of pragmatics, the notion of communicative practice can involve the performances of different speech acts that suit their interactional purposes. More importantly, engagements in the communicative practices could mean to achieve certain face effects on recipients of

concern. Similar to linguistic practices, communicative practices, when thought of as positive identity practices, are linguistic indices that may reflect the speakers’ memberships in the

community. However, different from linguistic practices, communicative identity practices are meanwhile defined by follow-up uptakes of the co-participants. That is, they could easily stir up further negotiation of meaning among the members of a group, which implies that the stance claims as related to the presented communicative practices may be misunderstood, denied, or reaffirmed in the rest of discourse. The implications of communicative practices about identity or relational work, therefore, are much more robust than linguistic practices with regard to the fact that not only the participants’ intents to identify themselves as certain

types of people are shown, but also the interpersonal consequences or processes of identification on the part of the recipients are seen. This is also where the tactics of intersubjectivity can be effectively put into use.

C HAPTER 4

A NALYSIS OF I N- G AME T EXTUAL I NTERACTION

“Welcome to the summoner’s rift!” When this announcement is heard – when players can

start controlling the movements of the avatars with keyboard and mouse, their sociality begins. From then, the avatars are on behalf of the social actors behind them, participating in the virtual reality created by the video game company. Any moves, no matter how minor they are, may be considered socially meaningful to the speakers themselves or other participants on the spot. According to the conversational data recorded during my ethnography in LoL, language is a powerful tool for negotiation of identities and interpersonal relationships. In this chapter, I try to provide linguistic reasons why LoL players, although not known to one

another, should be considered members of the same community of practice. After a general description of the norms of conduct that govern the members’ gaming practices (Section 4.1),

I start to focus on how LoL players manage identity and relational work in the virtual community with language, at the levels of both linguistic forms (Section 4.2) and functions (Section 4.3). The analysis will get more complicated when concerning a player’s overall strategy of intersubjectivity in a game that lasts up to more than twenty minutes (Section 4.4).