Sprechakte in der Kommunikation in Kinderwunschforen
Speech Acts in Communication in Fertility Forums

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses an example of internet communication with the main focus being the communication in fertility forums. Such forums are frequented and used by female users who need medical assistance to become pregnant. The users seek contact with people who experience similar problems and exchange information related to infertility treatments. Although internet forums have been widely examined with the use of linguistic tools, the fertility forums still need further analysis as they undoubtedly offer research potential. This study looks at what speech acts have been employed at a particular forum, and what are the lexical and morphosyntactic components of these speech acts. The forum corpus consists of 130 posts available at www.wunschkinder.net. The analysis of the corpus has shown the repeating patterns in the use of speech acts. It has consequently led to establishing a list of the most characteristic speech acts for the given forum, which are: MENTIONING FERTILITY PROBLEMS, ASKING QUESTIONS, SHOWING SYMPATHY, EXPRESSING UNDERSTANDING, SHARING INFORMATION, OFFERING ADVICE AND CONSOLATION. In addition to neutral expressions, colloquial expressions, and professional medical vocabulary are used in the posts. The tendency to use initialisms or abbreviations is noticeable. On the syntactic level, the forum participants use simple as well as compound and complex sentences. They mostly use complete sentences and, occasionally, sentences without a subject.

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