The types of initial utterances in the computer-mediated communication

The article examines the types of the speaker's utterances that start a dialogical communication in a chat in German. The object of the empirical analysis is one of the chat forms - a consultation chat, in which users can ask a question to an invited political guest. The focus is the structural types of utterances to express a question. A speaker's utterance or a turn starts a conversation in a dialogue and sets a tone for communication. As a research material, 992 initial utterances were collected on the topic "Politics" from the popular German and Austrian web-sites. Besides the method of continuous sampling, the research methodology included the analytical-descriptive method, the method of quantitative analysis, generalization. The following objectives are set in this article: to analyze the characteristics of the speaker's utterances in this type of dialogue; to determine the structural types of the sentences used in a consultation chat to enquire information; to quantify the types in order to determine the most frequent way to start a conversation online. By classifying the structural types, ways of oral and written language verbalizations were determined. The analysis of the speaker's utterances in a consultation chat shows that they possess a number of features, which are a result of a clear macro- and micro-structure of this type of text, the order in turn taking controlled by a moderator, predominantly detailed turns, the opportunity to send a question in advance, and many others. The quality analysis of turns shows that they have many characteristics of written language such as long sentences, structures with many objects used one after another, quoting, the rare use of incomplete/elliptical sentences. Some structures, which are widely used in oral speech, are not used in this type of chat. The empirical study shows that the most numerous type of the initial utterances according to their syntactical structure is a complex utterance consisting of declarative and interrogative sentences. The number of these turns is 32.05%. The users need to explain the information (e. g., his/her knowledge on a given topic) in detail, so 53% of complex utterances start with a declarative sentence to establish the common ground. The second most frequent type of utterances is a complex sentence (21.06%). Among the 7 frequently used types of complex sentences, the most common is a complex sentence in the form of an "indirect" question (31% of all complex sentences). It is followed by the pronominal question (15.52% of initial statements), among which a traditional written structure with an interrogative pronoun in the first place prevails (90%). The general question is used in 11.79% of sentences. The least popular initial utterance type to start communication in a chat is the declarative sentence.