к.ф.н.
Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Шукурбаева А.
Региональный социально-инновационный университет
Texts
Messaging: Reasons for Respellings
Not since man uttered his first word and clumsily
held a primitive pencil nearly 10,000 years ago has there been such a
revolution in language. From tapping abbreviated words into a mobile phone to
emailing people on the other side of the Atlantic, today's technology is
changing the way in which we communicate at an alarming rate.
Text messaging has not transformed life or language
as we know them; instead, like other communicative technologies, it has
facilitated and added to existing social practices. In the particular case of
texting, the technology has increased the extent to which people are able to
correspond with each other from a distance on a daily basis, through personal,
private and intimate written messages. It is this which encourages the kind of
discourse which has been reported on and treated so warily by the media; and to
an extent this is no surprise: personal communication of this kind encourages
group codes, realized as respellings or in-group phrases. At the same time, the
creativity involved in respelling and adopting speech-like practices into a
written medium suggests linguistic awareness and an ability to use language for
expressive and interactional purposes. The discourse that emerges, at least
among one extended texting community, is explored in the rest of this book.
Text messaging is often defined, at least in the
media and in much public debate, by its spelling. The text message above
encapsulates popularly held conceptions as to what text looks like. Words are shortened in
various ways (feelin, bout, hav, missd) and some are spelt phonetically (gud), while other
spellings reflect how we might say the words in fast, informal speech (bin, wiv,
lotsa). Words may often be run together without spaces between
them. As you'll notice above, words may instead be separated by punctuation (u got bac?Gud
news) or by number homophones such as 2 and
4 in
Lookin4ward and 2seein.
One of the fears expressed in the media is that Txt is indecipherable.
And it may well be - to those looking over their children's shoulders. We may
all have received the odd text message (in both senses of the word) which we
puzzled over. In general, however, it is fair to say that when we text we are
aware of what our interlocutor will understand. Textisms are difficult for
outsiders to understand precisely because they draw on intimate contextualized
practices and shared knowledge between those involved. As Thurlow and Brown [1,
p. 15] point
out, most textisms are 'semantically recoverable', that is, they can be
understood in (or 'recovered' from) context. When people shorten a word by
omitting the vowels, for example, they recognize the fact that consonants carry
the greater information load:
please can be recovered from <pls> but you would hardly
recognize it if you removed the consonants and were left with <eae>;
while phonetic spellings can often be interpreted simply by reading them aloud.
Spaces are often only omitted where words are broken up by numbers or
punctuation: hence the alphanumeric sequences Lookin4ward and 2seein described above. Ultimately, these forms emerge
from interaction and are likely to be understood by the people involved: in
this respect, as Thurlow and Brown put it, textisms are fairly 'unremarkable'.
Why do people sometimes choose to spell certain
words unconventionally? The obvious answer is that they are abbreviating words
to save time, effort and space (and hence money), and that this is encouraged
by the constraining physical features of the mobile phone - the tiny keypad, the limited character allowance.
As Crystal [2, p. 20] points out, abbreviated messages
in full form would tend to be longer than unabbreviated ones (as illustrated in
the text messages above), suggesting that people are trying to compress longer
messages, or hasten their delivery. Two points emerge here.
Firstly, if we look at the data, it becomes
apparent that the need for brevity is not only motivated by technological
factors. It is also dictated by communicative demands, such as the expectation
that responses will be quick [1]. So, abbreviations may be a response to interpersonal as well as technological
factors. That is, when people decide how to spell, they are concerned with how
their spelling will be received by their interlocutor as well as how much
space, time or money they can save. The question then becomes: if people
abbreviate with an eye to their audience (rather than to save space), will they
not also lengthen words or play with spellings in a way that does not result in
truncation? Is brevity the only result when people play with spellings? Once we
accept that spelling practices may be shaped by interpersonal considerations,
we can assume that spelling plays a greater role in communication than simply
speeding it up. Is the need for brevity enough to explain the differences in
spelling and the effect they have in these two messages, for example?
Thankyou for ditchin me i had
been invited out but said no coz u were cumin and u said we
would do something on the sat now i have nothing to do
all weekend i am a billy no mates i really hate being single
Hi, how u? R u getting ther?
I'm in bank quein up-payin in stuf4alice-who I Wrk4.
We'l av2go out4drink soon-let me no if u wan2 ova nxt few days-not thur. Sux
In their study of text messaging in the UK, Thurlow
and Brown posit three motivations for respelling. These are as follows:
1
'brevity and speed' (seen in lexical abbreviation including
letter-number homophones; and the minimal use of capitalization, punctuation
and spacing);
2
'paralinguistic restitution' (such as the use of
capitals to indicate emphasis or loudness, or multiple punctuation, which
compensate for the lack of such features as stress and intonation)
3
'phonological approximation' (i.e. often playful
attempts to capture informal speech such as <ya> or <nope>).
Often, more than one of these motivations can be
fulfilled within one spelling: <ya> for you, for example, serves both to abbreviate and recreate a spoken utterance. In other cases, however, the
desire to approximate an informal spoken form may result in additional
characters, as in <nope> or <okie dokie>.
Two initial observations can be made: that most spelling variation
in CorTxt follows or extends English orthographic principles; and that it thus
reflects historical and current spelling practices. By choosing to spell in
principled ways which deviate from expected conventions, texters use
respellings in meaningful ways. The fact that texters make choices, vividly
illustrated through 'competing' respellings such as <u>, <ye> or
<ya> for you implies texters
actively and creatively choose how to present themselves, albeit constrained by
situational factors and orthographic principles.
It is naturally not possible from the text messages
alone to determine what texters intend to mean through respellings, nor how the
respelt forms are interpreted by interlocutors, but research into other writing
domains (such as fanzines or graffiti) allows us to speculate on what spelling
in texting may mean.
Bibliography:
1.
Thurlow, C. and A.
Brown (2003) 'Generation Txt? Exposing the sociolinguistics of young people's text-messaging', Discourse Analysis Online 1/1.
2.
Crystal, D. (2008) Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. Oxford: Oxford University Press.