The spread of Internet use continues to transform our communicative behavior, our communicative choices on all levels, our societal life in all its aspects, and our societies at large. Far from indulging in pessimistic jeremiads about the decay of social life, culture, and, in particular, language, the view taken by this project is one in which new communicative opportunities and styles of presenting content and identities are recognized. Success in life will depend on the acquisition of media literacy, on what the right choice of the medium - spoken, written, fax, telephone - in a given context will be, and on how and to whom to send which linguistic forms. While composition and rhetoric have traditionally focused on the spoken and written medium, the development of Internet competence is still a task for the future. The precondition for defining this competence is the scientific study of communication and language use in the new digital medium.

This project studies the way new genres with new communicative choices and restrictions are currently forming, and how they are different from their traditional counterparts, if at all. Is the scientific article still the same when accessible on the net? Is chat the same as or different from conversation? What is the status of the "text" in literary discourse? Focusing on language, the project studies, by manual tagging some 35 grammatical features, the linguistic properties of a large corpus of Internet text. The purpose of this analysis is to find out the linguistic structures and uses that characterize Internet discourse in general, and different types of Internet genres (chats, muds, email, intranet etc.) in particular. The distribution of these grammatical features is to be correlated with extra-linguistic, physical and social properties of the digital types of discourse. The results of this linguistic analysis of digital discourse and its norms can then be used as an empirical basis for the teaching of digital discourse and its rhetoric beyond etiquette recommendations.

CONSTRUCTIONS offers a forum for linguistic research concerned with the structure, use, function, and development of 'constructions' in language and linguistics. The journal aims at a balanced integration of both notional, informal approaches to constructions in general and more formal treatments, as for example, within the framework of construction grammar. One of the long-term goals is to establish contact between researchers from various perspectives. The term 'construction' as understood in this journal is deliberately chosen to have a broad extension and not be limited to any specific definition or linguistic orientation. Constructions is not restricted to any particular language or language family, and aims at combining theoretical, empirical, and applied issues. For more information, visit http://www.constructions-online.de

LANGUAGE@INTERNET will focus research on the pivotal role of language under the new medial conditions of use and interacting with the various societal domains. Linguistic concerns, including sociolinguistic, discourse analytic, and pragmatic perspectives will be at the centre of interest, but it will have to include the conditions, functions and constraints of the societal domains like law, economy or medicine, as they are factors in shaping language and are themselves transformed in their practice in the process. In order for society to be able to exploit and implement these new uses, there has to be a body of scientific knowledge for these domains to draw upon in application and teaching. The purpose of this journal is not only to enhance our linguistic body of knowledge, but also to make available a repository of knowledge for application. For more information, visit http://www.languageatinternet.de