Abstract This paper outlines a multi-level framework for empirical research on punctuation in digitally-mediated interaction and exemplifies it by close qualitative analysis of a corpus of WhatsApp conversations collected among secondary-school students in Northern Germany. We propose a sociolinguistic analysis of digital punctuation that orients to Silverstein's notion of “total linguistic fact” (Silverstein 1985), i.e. the integrative study of linguistic form, language practices, and language ideologies. Applying this to the case of the period, our analysis integrates its frequency of use in digital conversations, its placement in a message, the illocutionary force of messages that contain a period, and their sequential placement in digital interaction. Our findings suggest the period undergoes a process of pragmaticalization, i.e. a gain of pragmatic functions at the expenses of syntactic ones. In particular, its overall quite rare use in message-final position is found to contextualize a terminal point in the on-going interaction. Based on the interplay between digital data, ethnographic insights and interviews with informants, the analysis then shows that the metapragmatic awareness of period use among the adolescents is linked to its on-going enregisterment as an index of communicative distance and a part of adult and professional registers of language. We suggest the pragmaticalized period is a salient feature of a register of informal written language, which our informants identify as part of their everyday out-of-school digital practices. These informal practices co-exist with institutional literacy norms to which the students equally orient to. We juxtapose these insights to the thematising of punctuation in German school textbooks.

中文翻译：

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数字标点作为一种互动资源：德国青少年的信息终结期

摘要 本文概述了数字媒介交互中标点符号实证研究的多层次框架，并通过对在德国北部中学生中收集的 WhatsApp 对话语料库进行密切定性分析来举例说明。我们建议对数字标点符号进行社会语言学分析，该分析面向 Silverstein 的“总体语言事实”概念（Silverstein 1985），即语言形式、语言实践和语言意识形态的综合研究。将此应用于该时期的案例，我们的分析整合了它在数字对话中的使用频率、它在消息中的位置、包含一个句点的消息的言外力，以及它们在数字交互中的顺序位置。我们的研究结果表明，这个时期经历了一个实用化的过程，即 以句法功能为代价获得语用功能。特别是，发现它在消息最终位置中的整体非常罕见的使用被发现将正在进行的交互中的端点置于上下文中。基于数字数据、人种学见解和与线人访谈之间的相互作用，分析表明，青少年对经期使用的元语用意识与其作为交流距离指标的持续注册以及成人和专业人士的一部分有关。语言记录。我们认为实用化时期是非正式书面语言记录的一个显着特征，我们的线人将其视为他们日常校外数字实践的一部分。这些非正式的实践与学生同样倾向的机构识字规范共存。