The sort of elliptical utterances without focus above are common and well known linguistics. Discourse analysis (DA) is the branch of linguistics that deals with spoken conversation. In DA, elliptical statements are a common element in conversations among eople who are friends or who at least share a common context and jargon. With so much common knowledge, speakers only have to say the minimal new information needed to get the idea across. Transcripts of spoken conversation among friends seem almost hopelessly illiterate to those outside their context, but the conversations are actually very efficient for those in the know.

What this tells me about the chatterbox is that people really do treat it as chatter, as a written version of a spoken conversation. And as you say, there is a fascinating deviation from the spoken paradigm when people inject detailed perl code or site references. Such detailed information probably could not be remebered easily in spoken conversation, but it works well here.

-Mark

In reply to Re: Chatterbox Linguistics by kvale
in thread Chatterbox Linguistics by jZed

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.