The discourse deictics 4 and o - - in a World of Warcraft community

In the written English variety used in a community ofWorld of Warcraft players, two iconic lexical items created from symbols have undergone semantic change. The words analyzed are 4 and o-, which have shifted from iconic deictic items used for discourse reference to non-iconic epistemic meanings. 4 shifted from a discourse deictic to an affirmative of a previous utterance, and o– shifted to a selfidentifying meaning similar to a pronoun. The existence and evolution of these lexical items are related to the medium in which they were created, as their meanings are associated with a visual-spatial environment created by textual chat in the virtual world. The different meanings of 4 and ocurrently exist in polysemy in the community, and the continuum of meanings are documented using data from natural language use spanning three years. A statistical analysis is performed on the data, and a diachronic change in meaning is found; furthermore, the observed change follows the path of semantic shift processes previously documented in spoken language. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.