The Pragmatics of Text Messaging

Making Meaning in Messages

Michelle A. McSweeney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351391955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides a comprehensive linguistic exploration of textism use by bilingual young adults, illustrating the function of alternative and creative linguistic features and their role in conveying tone through text. Drawing on a corpus of nearly 45, 000 text messages donated by bilingual young adults in New York City, this volume explores the ways in which the use of texting features such as 'lol, ' emojis, abbreviations, and acronyms is systematic and essential.

In part, toward the aim of exposing the tensions bilinguals face navigating a platform that preferences monolingual language practices, the book highlights creativity as a means of both constructing meaning and performing identity for bilingual youths. These findings are extended to explore the role texting plays in communication and identity construction in contemporary society more generally. This volume extends the boundaries of emerging research on language and digital communication, and will be of particular interest to graduate students and scholars in computer-mediated communication, pragmatics, and new media.

1 A Language Is Born

Introduction

On December 3, 1992, Neil Papworth, an engineer at Vodaphone, sent a message that changed the world: “merry Christmas” (Deffree 2015). Text messaging was originally intended to be a marketing tool for cell phone companies—there is no way the Vodaphone engineers involved could have known about the social and linguistic changes that began that day. In 2006, 12.5 billion messages a year were sent in the United States; in 2007, that number grew to 45 billion. At the time of writing, more than 2 billion messages every day are sent in the United States alone (Fingas 2017; Portio Research 2015). Text messaging is now considered by many to be a preferred communication mode and accounts for much of our daily social interaction (Lenhart 2015). This technological shift has brought with it a world of cultural, social, and linguistic changes.

Cell phone ownership among teenagers in the United States has reached 100% (Pew Internet Research 2017)—that is more people than own a television, a car, or any other consumer goods. For the general population under age 64, ownership is around 98%. Globally, more people have regular access to a cell phone than household electricity (the World Bank 2013) or plumbing (Baum, Luh, and Bartram 2013). But phones are different for two major reasons. First, they are small, lightweight, and purchased by individuals rather than communities. But more importantly, unlike technologies that affect our physical lives, digital communication tools are technologies that affect our social lives.

Environmentally speaking, humans are adaptable. We can meet our physical needs in nearly every environment in the world. But we cannot live for long without each other. So while technologies such as electricity and running water make our lives easier, technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet get at something much deeper and have the potential to reconstruct the social fabric of our lives.

Our social lives are mediated through language; in order to connect with the people around us, share our ideas, thoughts, and feelings, and learn about others, we use language. To establish relationships, build trust, and indicate that we are members of the same social group, we use language. To perform identity and align with ideas of ourselves, we use language. Digital communication technologies such as mobile phones and their corresponding tools, such as text messaging,¹ allow us to perform many of these functions through writing. The widespread adoption of mobile phones combined with the unique constraints and affordances of text messaging has resulted in a language form that is best suited to digitally mediated communication. Henceforth referred to as ‘Txt,’ this language form draws on features of both spoken and written language, but also has important features unique to itself (i.e., it is semi-synchronous, multimedia, and impermanent, but not ephemeral). This form has been referred to as ‘Txt’ (Tagg 2013), ‘Netspeak,’ (Crystal 2001), and ‘Textese’ (Drouin 2011), though the features are similar even if the definitions are circular: It is the language form commonly found on digital devices. The social context of Txt is unique as well, being that it is so deeply integrated into the daily lives of billions of people worldwide (Ericsson 2016). It is these factors that have contributed to the development of a language form for communicating socially and quickly through writing.

Texters have adapted the orthographic features of traditional written language (i.e., punctuation and spelling conventions) and drawn on the unique affordances of the medium (i.e., emojis and digital stickers) to communicate pragmatic functions such as politeness, illocutionary force, and identity.

Taken together, these features represent the norms and conventions of text messaging that allow texters to navigate complex social relationships, highlight implied information, and express themselves. Though it may initially appear that texters are creative rather than systematic in this language, we shall see through the course of this book that that creativity is systematic itself and has important pragmatic functions (see Chapters 4, 5, and 6). We will also see that categories of features have distinct pragmatic functions. Whereas the use of initialisms, abbreviations, and creative respelling can indicate positive politeness and social closeness, emoticons, punctuation marks, and ‘lol’ can help clarify the illocutionary force. Emojis as a category themselves fulfill almost every pragmatic function, but if we look at them more closely, we come to see that their use is systematic as well.

The features texters use, how they use them, and with whom are also significant in constructing a texted identity within a social context. But, as we shall also see, the technology itself has serious constraints that should be critically considered. Primarily, the fact is that any language that is mediated through a mechanical or computational technology will necessarily homogenize users’ language practices. This is particularly true for bilingual texters who may have tricks for overriding the technology in order to draw on their full linguistic repertoire, but are ultimately aware of the fact that the technology is simply not built for bilinguals (see Chapter 7).

Though the technologies can contribute their constraints and affordances, it is not the technologies that are driving linguistic change. Rather, the near-universal adoption of text messaging and the way it has become integrated into the daily life of users drives these changes. Most of the linguistic features that have emerged with text messaging (textisms) have a sociopragmatic or discourse function: they clarify the meaning, do interpersonal work, and set the tone. While these features rely on writing, they are not taught in a classroom, but they still must be learned to be able to communicate effectively. Given near-universal adoption of digital communication, to maintain social networks, teenagers and young adults must have a certain level of print literacy and fluency with written self-expression. At no other time in human history was one’s social life been so dependent upon literacy. Though this type of literacy does not need to be academic, and texters do not need to adhere to prescriptive norms, to have a social life in the era of text messaging, one must be able to read and write.

When I started this research, I was not expecting to find any major differences between participants’ texting and my own. My texts look like a casual version of academic writing but with more exclamation points and emojis. I even remember my first text message. It looked something like this (Example 1.1):

Angela! It’s Michelle! I got a phone, call me!

Example 1.1

I am fairly sure Angela called on my landline; I was not born into the language of text messaging; my friends and I talked on the phone or made dates to see each other. I remember a time before the Internet, and I got a road atlas when I bought a car. I got a mobile phone only reluctantly once it no longer made financial sense to keep the landline. I can use the abbreviations and modulate my punctuation. I can even productively use emojis, but it is a largely conscious process that I am constantly working to refine.

Young adults in this study are being socialized into a completely different world. Born in the late 1990s, they grew up with phones. Most have had a mobile phone since they were 10 or 11 years old, and everyone had a phone by the time they were 14. They cannot imagine how they would have made friends without it: To be without a phone would make one a social ghost. They are native texters and understand how to use written language to express themselves in this digitally mediated world. They have adapted the language they use on these platforms in order to build relationships, establish trust, and indicate tone within the confines of writing.

In defining this language form, researchers often point to creative and adaptive features such as emoticons, emojis, and respellings, or the short length of the messages. But the features are only a by-product of what makes this language so special. Spoken language emerged as humans evolved, and writing emerged to record spoken language, but texting emerged in tandem with the technology. Unlike letters or postcards, texting is dialogic, and unlike handwritten notes in a classroom, it allows interlocutors to be separated by inches or oceans and yet still in almost immediate contact. Texting allows a type of visual play that is difficult to achieve with a handwritten note (depending, of course, on artistic skill), but also constrains that skill. But, ultimately, the most important difference between text messaging and every other type of writing is that its primary function is phatic communion. Until the advent of text messaging, telling someone you were thinking about them required being in the same time or the same space or sending a written note through time and space. It is now possible to perform phatic communion semi-synchronously and at great distances. This capacity fulfills a very basic desire among friends and family members—to be connected at a distance—and that desire has driven the widespread adoption of not only mobile communication technologies but also many social media platforms.

Yet when digital communication technologies were first emerging, many people were concerned that they spelled the end of writing; there were fears that students would no longer develop literacy, and we would all be sucked into a world filled with “text-speak” (Jury 2010; Tagliamonte and Denis 2008). Fortunately, that has not happened, as teenagers and young adults are, in fact, capable of keeping the language forms separate (Grace et al. 2015). They know when to use formal academic writing, when to use colloquial language, and when to be extra polite. What they do not know is a time when all of these social functions occurred on different platforms and different modalities. Today, situations that are highly formal and highly informal all occur through the same device. This has not resulted in a loss of formal language, but rather, a blurring of the lines of what is appropriate when and with whom. When it is all conducted through the same devices, it begins to look the same. Though participants in this study rarely used e-mail, when they did (mostly with their teachers), it was sometimes written with the style of a text message (as reported by their teachers). This dismayed many teachers, but seemed natural to students since it is all being written from the same device. To students, they are similar platforms, but to teachers, e-mail was more like a letter, with an opening and a conclusion. It is only in this era of widespread written communication that the overlap could exist and the platforms can be conflated in such a systematic way.

This is not the first time that people have been concerned about the downfall of a certain way of writing. Before digital communication technologies emerged, there was steam-powered printing. When newspapers in the United States made the shift from hand-powered presses to steam-powered around 1830, the cost of newspapers fell. Before this, newspapers were a luxury item, costing as much as six cents, whereas these new papers cost just one cent (earning them the name ‘Penny Press’). Now middle-class citizens could afford to buy and read the paper. Accordingly, these papers shifted their reporting style to be more like tabloids, reporting on sensational news, sports, and gossip, and subsidized by advertising. As newspapers became ubiquitous and print entered more people’s lives, journalists started to play with the language. From 1838 to 1839, and from Boston to New Orleans, there was a surge in creative language (Read 1963). Columnists and journalists invented initialisms, spelled words in novel ways, and played with language throughout their writing, as illustrated in this example from the September 11, 1838, Boston Morning Post: “The jury, without leaving their seats said, ‘That’s n.g. No Go-to-wit, Not Guilty and off he went’ ” (Read 1963). From the rhyme to the parallel structure, the author is explicitly playful. By explicitly and intentionally misspelling words and using ambiguous terms, authors created a sense of humor and lightness in their writing.

If this sounds reminiscent of Txt, it is because it is. In both instances, a change in communication technology led to an increase in print media and a corresponding explosion in playful written language. The difference is that newspapers, even tabloids, are a one-to-many format. Text messaging is one-to-one or one-to-few—a fact that changes the type of writing if not the nature. Eventually, most of those abbreviations and initialisms faded away because, while fun, they were not necessary. It remains to be seen what will happen to the creative and adaptive features of Txt, but we have already seen some emerge and then disappear.

This modern form of Txt has its roots in earlier digital communication technologies. Before there was texting on mobile phones, there was writing on the Internet, and before that, there were international bulletin board services such as FidoNet. The language form now found on digital devices evolved in the crucible of these earlier technologies. As of 1989, active bulletin board users were already incorporating abbreviations and emoticons into their communications. These features were so popular that one user, L. Edel, felt the need to clarify how they should be used by sending out a dictionary of sorts defining each item (see Chapter 4) (Edel 1989). This may be the first recorded definition of ‘rotfl,’ which stands for “rolling on the floor laughing” and emoticons such as ;), which, according to Edel just means ‘wink,’ though today it means so much more (Dresner and Herring 2010; Thompson and Filik 2016).

In the early days of messaging (texting, chatting, and other semi-synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-few platforms), abbreviations and playful language were everywhere. In his 2009 book, David Crystal identifies hundreds of playful acronyms and abbreviations in 12 languages, including grapho-phonemic representations (‘cu@home,’ ‘l8r’) and emoticons such as :-@ (screaming). Today, many of these forms have gone out of fashion and no longer appear in text messaging or Twitter corpora. So what happened? Well, this is probably the same process that resulted in abbreviations going out of fashion after newspapers became so ubiquitous. The novelty of the new technology wore off (autocorrect became more common), and rather than taking an overtly playful approach to language, these forms have developed their own meanings. A clear example of this is with ‘lol.’ In the early days of digital communication, ‘lol’ was defined as “laugh out loud” (Edel 1989). Example 1.2 illustrates that ‘lol’ has another function as a pragmatic particle that texters can immediately understand.

1 ALICIA: Want to go with me and Jessica to mall??

2 SARA: Go with Maria lol my legs hurt

Example 1.2

In this example, Sara probably is not laughing out loud. Rather, she is using ‘lol’ to soften her message and make sure that Alicia knows that she is not trying to reject her; she just does not want to go to the mall. In this way, ‘lol’ functions as a pragmatic particle rather than an acronym to stand for laughing. While ‘lol’ may be the most common particle of this type, it is certainly not the only one. Punctuation, capitalization, repeated letters, even emojis are all systematically used as pragmatic particles in this way.

Pragmatic particles are essential in text messaging, as their use is what allows texters to express themselves; across languages, pragmatic particles “express the speaker’s attitude toward the addressee or toward the situation spoken about, his assumptions, his intentions, his emotions” (Wierzbicka 2003). Furthermore,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Language Is Born: Introduction
• 2 Txts in Focus: Participants and Data
• 3 It’s All in the ‘Contxt’: Theoretical Background
• 4 Mind Your Texts: Politeness
• 5 Txt Acts: Speech Acts and Texting
• 6 *Nvrmnd: Texting Identity
• 7 We Don’t Speak Phone: Bilingual Text Messaging
• 8 Txt IRL: Conclusion
• Index