Volume 7, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media corpora / Guest editors: Reinhild Vandekerckhove, Lisa Hilte, Darja Fišer & Walter Daelemans

Tho , the nonstandard spelling of though which was proposed by American spelling reformers in the 19th century, is making a comeback. In 2013, internet memes such as that backflip tho gave a boost to the shortened form. This sociolinguistic study investigates the use of tho in RedditGender, a 19 million-word corpus of comments posted by 1044 Reddit users. First, concordance lines generated from the whole corpus were analyzed in order to compare the use of tho with the meme and the standard spelling. Then, regression analysis was conducted with a sample of the corpus, containing only complete cases. Results show that tho is rarely used in the meme construction that contributed to popularize it, and that it appears more often as an adverb than as a conjunction. They also seem to indicate that the use of tho is correlated with gender and race. Most frequent users are black males. This suggests that the shortened spelling is not simply a way to save time when typing, and that it is not semantically equivalent to though . It seems to be a marker of affiliation with a social group and of familiarity with internet subcultures.

The present study examines adolescents’ attitudes and perceptions with respect to writing practices on social media. It reports the findings of a survey conducted among 168 Flemish high school students with various socio-demographic profiles. The survey examines linguistic attitudes and awareness of sociolinguistic patterns in computer-mediated communication, as well as relevant language skills. Moreover, the present paper uniquely combines the study of both adolescents’ perceptions and their production of informal online writing, as the participants’ responses to the survey are compared to their peers’ actual online writing practices. The respondents appear to have a fairly accurate intuition with respect to age and gender patterns in social media writing, but much less so with respect to education-related patterns. Furthermore, while typical chatspeak phenomena are easily identified as such, ordinary spelling mistakes often are not. Strikingly, the teenagers do not claim a high standard language proficiency, although they do state to care about standard language use in formal contexts. Finally, some significant differences were found between participants with distinct socio-demographic profiles, e. g. girls and highly educated teenagers appear to be more sensitive to the potential negative connotations of linguistic features and that sensitivity seems to increase with age.

The German verbal lexicon has been enriched by numerous English borrowings, particularly within the past 100 years, but while many verbal anglicisms are frequently used and sanctioned by language authorities, the status of new, non-standard, and rare verbal anglicisms in German has not been subject to extensive research attention. In this study, a new method is used to analyze non-standard German verbal anglicisms in a large and novel corpus compiled from the social media platform Twitter. After a review of previous work, the methods used to create a corpus of German-language tweets and to automatically extract new verbal anglicisms are described, and the semantics of some of their most frequent types are analyzed, including forms with separable and inseparable prefixes. Then, present and past participles are considered according to assimilation to standard German orthography, use as participle or attributive adjective, and stem vowel quality. In the final set of results, the focus is on the productivity of the verbalizing morpheme -ier- , a historically important element for the integration of foreign word material into German. The study demonstrates that non-standard verbal anglicisms are widely used, and that their morphological behavior is mediated by frequency effects as well as phonological, pragmatic, and semantic considerations.

Political campaigns are important moments for a political personality, but for their campaigners as well. During this period, ideas flow between the two, and one can wonder how the discourse of a political personality is constructed and how they use what the campaigners say. This way, one can understand the rhetorical strategies of the political personalities during campaigns. To answer these questions, in this paper we discuss the dissemination of political language patterns between a political personality and a campaign community, as a way to access political representations and ideological issues. In particular, this involves evaluating the polyphonic dimension of the discourse, widely described in enunciative linguistics, but rarely used in NLP works seeking to measure these phenomena. In this paper, we put forward an analysis methodology based on statistical computations which provides encouraging results. We tested our methodology on the case of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a French political personality, head of the France Insoumise party and candidate in the 2017 French presidential elections. We used two corpora: one composed of a set of tweets from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and a second composed of two sets of data coming from two different forums used by the campaign community. In the study, we compare the results from both corpora to provide answers to the political question of the construction and circulation of political ideas, studying a movement with a charismatic leader and an important campaign community. From a linguistic point of view, we discuss the links between language elements, themes, ideologies, and the rhetoric dimensions of political discourse.

This paper presents types and annotation layers of reply relations in computer- mediated communication (CMC). Reply relations hold between post units in CMC interactions and describe references from one given post to a previous post. We classify three types of reply relations in CMC interactions: first, technical replies, i. e. the possibility to reply directly to a previous post by clicking a ‘reply’ button; second, indentations, e. g. in wiki talk pages in which users insert their contributions in the existing talk page by indenting them and third, interpretative reply relations, i. e. the reply action is not realised formally but signalled by other structural or linguistics means such as address markers ‘@’, greetings, citations and/or Q-A structures. We take a look at existing practices in the description and representation of such relations in corpora and examples of chat, Wikipedia talk pages, Twitter and blogs. We then provide an annotation proposal that combines the different levels of description and representation of reply relations and which adheres to the schemas and practices for encoding CMC corpus documents within the TEI framework as defined by the TEI CMC SIG. It constitutes a prerequisite for correctly identifying higher levels of interactional relations such as dialogue acts or discussion trees.

This paper reports on findings from the MoCoDa2 project which is creating a corpus of private CMC interactions from smartphone apps based on donations by their users. Different from other projects in the field, the project involves users not only as donators but also as editors of their data: In a web-based editing environment which provides users with access to their raw data, they are supported in pseudonymising their data and enhancing them with rich metadata on the interactional context, meta-data on the interlocutors and their relations, and on embedded media files. The resulting corpus will be a useful resource not only for quantitative but also for qualitative CMC research. For representation and annotation of the data the project builds on best practices from previous projects in the field and cooperates with a language technology partner.