Digital English as a Lingua Franca. Shaping New Models through Q&A websites.

the aim of this book is to investigate the aesthetics of informal text-based Computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as Q&A websites (e.g., Stack Exchange, GitHub, Quora, Yahoo! Answers) conceived of as a distinctive medium of communication based on cosmopolitan brand communities that share the same field of expertise and a common interest in a particular topic. Since these Q&A websites have gradually become one of the major sources of information today, surpassing corporate websites in terms of influence on purchasing decisions, the purpose here is to detect whether their success is also due to a set of powerful pragmalinguistic devices, which may reveal that clear questions can make people more willing to help. Furthermore, these assumptions will also help to clarify new and different insights into the role of context on Q&A websites, thus providing evidence for the existence of possible relationships between the reputation of community members, the specialised domain, and the uniqueness of the temporal-historical dimension in online interactions. By interacting in digital communities and in online forums or social networks, users can ask questions and receive feedback regarding specific topics, opinions, and experiences, thus generating debates, the exchanging of ideas and the raising of emotions. More specifically, by adopting sentiment analysis for recognizing the positive/negative semantic orientation of texts and their emotional style, an attempt is made to demonstrate that the aesthetics of such informal texts written using English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is influenced by how we express, understand, and are affected by the shaping of subjectivity; how we associate emotions and opinions with certain linguistic aspects, such as specific words or syntactic patterns; and how we can classify linguistic expressions according to the type of opinion that they convey.