Asynchronous electronic discourse, constrained by its conferencing software to thread and archive responses whenever they are received, currently all but eliminates the conversational features of turn-taking or adjacency pairs: while the writers may be taking a turn with what they have just read, the readers are likely to find the just-written missive stored some distance from the original stimulus. It is hard, in the minimally hypertextual virtual world of electronic conferences, to track topical threading, or even to see when and how a writer has borrowed, appropriated, or assimilated the words of others. Referentiality and cohesion shift their shapes. Signposts change directions. Pronouns sometimes index time, not person; clausal patterns may signal stance in virtual space (Brewer and Davis forthcoming 1997).
Nonetheless, writers of electronic conference discourse adapt their conversational strategies to the new medium. They take pains to build in some cues that will let readers know which responses reply to which previous messages. They foster the illusion of familiar conversational interaction while engaging in an interaction that is time-delayed, medium-constrained, and constructed in and through the text the writers exchange. Features at the lexical, syntactic and discourse level contribute to the ways writers first establish, then guard their territory, their spatial equivalent as onscreen text to establishing their individual authority and self-legitimization.
Electronic conference discourse rather quickly becomes repetitive, emulative, intertextual; this intertextuality replaces a variety of conversational conventions and becomes a sanctioned articulation by the individuals participating in the conference. Electronic discourse presents the reader with both on-line and off-line constructs of authority; its multiparty situation affords the participant ample opportunity to create "occasion-specific identity" (Goodwin & Goodwin 1990, p. 85 ff).
In this discussion, we have claimed that electronic conference discourse presents a language situation in which people adapt to each other in multiparty discussion while articulating and maintaining the preferences of their individual idiolects. Being articulate in keyboard-composed asynchronous electronic discourse is to "express an articulate persona" (Johnstone 1996) in performance.
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