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Optionality of Question Mark in Online Communications

The article is based on a study of incidence of omitted question mark at the end of interrogatory sentences in informal Internet-based discourse. Private communication in a number of social networks (“VKontakte”, “Facebook”, “Instagram”) and messengers (“Telegram”, “WhatsApp”) was analyzed, and it was found that the question mark was absent in 30 % of all reviewed interrogatory sentences. The article discusses these points: why the question mark is rudimentary now, what mark may take the place of a question mark at the end of an interrogatory sentence and if the omission of a question mark prevents the addressee from understanding the addresser’s communicative intension. The article offers special classification of interrogatory sentences that corresponds to informal communication reality. It also describes a psycholinguistic experiment that illustrates the aforesaid thesis. Thus, the results of the study show that question mark at the end of an interrogatory sentence in informal Internet-based communication is optional, used at the discretion of participants.