الفهرس 
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Abstract
The present study aims at studying the nature of the new medium of communication, i.e. the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) from functional and formal perspectives. The study reflects the similarities and the differences between this electronic kind of interaction and the everyday conversation and the effect of this new variety on the English language.
This study stems its importance from the nature of electronic chat as a new communicative phenomenon with new linguistic features. This new phenomenon is evidence of the incarnation of the strong relationship between language and its context, and also it represents how the emergence of some new varieties or genres have the ability to be one of the causes of the evolvement of any language. Therefore, the study of such emergent variety, which is used in the online synchronous public chat groups’ interaction, is a kind of tracing this relationship to emphasize the fact that language cannot be studied in isolation of its own context.
The study in hand is divided into four chapters. Chapter one is an introductory chapter, as it deals with the definition of terms and the history behind the emergence of this new variety. It also explores the differences between the two essential terms ‘genre’ and ‘register’ and how far the chat variety is considered a ‘register’ and not a ‘genre’. The last part of the chapter illustrates the nature of the variety used in chat groups’ situations as written or spoken.
Chapter two provides a thorough explanation of the theoretical preliminaries used in this study. The study of the online synchronous public chat variety depends on three eclectic theories; it adopts the Discourse Analysis approach, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), and the lexical analysis using some parts from Bloomfield’s Structural Grammar. This chapter deals in detail with each theory of them and the relation of this theory to the main topic here, i.e. the chat variety. It provides a general syntactic– pragmatic framework to analyze the variety used in online synchronous chat groups’ interaction. It presents a detailed analysis of the traditional face-to-face conversations and how they will be used as tools to compare and contrast the chat groups’ electronic situations.
Chapter three represents the researcher’s contribution to the research as it provides all the analysis of the chat groups’ variety by analyzing some of virtual-synchronous chat rooms. This chapter presents a thorough and deep analysis of the chat groups using the previous mentioned theories and methods of research. This chapter concludes the similarities and the differences between this type of interaction and the traditional face-to-face one.
Chapter four, which is the last chapter of the thesis, is the conclusion. It is a concluding chapter discusses the findings of this research shedding light on some recommendations for further research.