In most situations the following sentences, injected without context into a conversation, would be too vague to be meaningful and would conjure up the questions shown in parens after them: 

   Please look and tell me what's wrong.   (look where? at what?)
   I have this to say about that.          (Which this? Which that?)
   What she wrote!                         (Who wrote what?)

Imagine someone walking into a room and saying one of those sentences with no preamble and no follow up. One would have some doubts about the speaker's sobriety, sanity, or communication skills. Unless, of course that room was the Perlmonks' Chatterbox - in the Chatterbox, sentences like the ones above are normal, expected, and content-rich, thanks to a conversational innovation supported by the Chatterbox software.

If my linguistics isn't too rusty, these sentences are examples of focus on a missing topic. They draw attention to something but the people hearing the sentence have no idea what that something is. Context can fix this, for example: 

   Doctor, my elbow is really painful.
   Please look and tell me what's wrong.

The first sentence provides a context by introducing a topic. The second sentence puts focus on that topic. Thus are conversations built.

At least, thus are ordinary conversations built. But not here at the Monastery! Here, these kinds of phrases are perfectly well understood, even when interjected into a conversation without prior context. That's because, in the Chatterbox, they'd have links around them something like this: 

   Please [id://foo|look] and tell me what's wrong.
   I have [id://bar|this] to say about [id://baz|that].
   What [id://qux|she] [id://quimble|wrote]!

[download]

We all take this for granted in the Chatterbox, but it's really quite revolutionary. It allows entire webpages to become the topics of sentences and for us to use the webpages as words. It's as though there's suddenly a "require module_name" or "include header" mental directive that allows us to import an entire other conversation into the current conversation. Now how cool is that?

So I'm interested to hear two kinds of things from other monks: 1) what examples of this kind of communication can you think of outside of the Chatterbox. For example non-verbal gestures sometimes serve to give context to an otherwise topic-less utterance. 2) what other kinds of conversational innovations have you noticed in the Chatterbox?

In reply to Chatterbox Linguistics by jZed

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