#AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
-
Andreea S. Calude
,
Maebh Long
Abstract
As social media use continues to increase its presence in our lives, so does the language of such platforms. One of the most salient features of social media discourse is the hashtag. Starting its life on Twitter (X) about 15 years ago, the hashtag has seeped from online to offline communication. Yet, it is not clear whether hashtags are words, tags, or something else altogether, nor is it clear what morphological process gives rise to them. This study presents an extensive analysis of 3,423 hashtags from 1,216 English-language tweets, each manually coded for various linguistics features, including position in the tweet, grammatical function, and syntactic integration. Our findings suggest that hashtags are extremely varied and we propose that they are indeed words, arising through a process of hashtagging (which is distinct from compounding). We also argue that some hashtags are syntactically integrated while others constitute parenthetical material.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the University of Waikato ALPSS Research Fund, to David Trye for comments on the draft and for his Python code and help in extracting the data, and to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments. All remaining errors are of course our own.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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- Frontmatter
- Editorial
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- Phonetics & Phonology
- The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
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- Morphology & Syntax
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- A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
- L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
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- “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
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- Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
- Language Documentation & Typology
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