*-repair in Online Discourse

In this article, I present evidence of a repair morpheme in the variety of Online Written English (OWE) used by a community of World of Warcraft players. This morpheme, represented by the asterisk (*), has no counterpart in spoken English but yet follows discernible rules for use and deployment within the community. While *-repair follows many principles of repair used in spoken English, it has developed natively in an online environment using an extra-alphabetical character which is unique to the online community. The existence of *-repair is one example of how OWE has differentiated itself from spoken varieties of English, and creates questions about the influence of the internet on language forms.