The nature of SMS discourse: The case of Hebrew
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Esther Borochovsky-Bar-Aba
Short-message service (SMS) discourse, a type of computer-mediated discourse, is a mix of written and spoken language. In this article we show that SMS language is indeed similar to the spoken and written languages, but also differs from them. We provide a description of the salient lexical and grammatical characteristics of Hebrew SMS discourse and analyze its properties by comparing three 18,000-word corpora; one of spoken language, the other of written language, and the third of SMS language. The production characteristics of SMS discourse force senders to shorten their utterances, which sometimes causes their messages to be incompatible with the normative grammar, while at the same time they may contain high-register characteristics. Additionally, the style and lexicon of SMS messages are affected by their limited content: they convey directions, everyday questions, etc.
© Mouton de Gruyter – Societas Linguistica Europaea
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Articles in the same Issue
- The nature of SMS discourse: The case of Hebrew
- Hypervernacularisation and speaker design: A case study
- Nasal vowels in French loanwords in German: The effect of linguistic environment
- Mismatches between grammatical number and conceptual numerosity: A number-decision experiment on collective nouns, number neutralization, pluralia tantum, and idiomatic plurals
- Antifunctionality in language change
- The French construction nouveau + past participle revisited: Arguments in favour of a prefixoid analysis of nouveau
- On the lack of case on the subject of infinitives in Polish
- Book reviews
- Report on the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Lisbon, 9–12 September 2009)
- Conference announcement: 43rd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
- Publications received
