Discourse of Text Messaging Analysis of SMS Communication

Understanding the discourse of text messaging has profound implications for society. SMS text messaging has impacted considerablyon how we communicate with others. Negative, sometimes alarmist media coverage continues to fuel debate surrounding its 'damaging' effects on language and literacy,yet these portrayals tend to be based on extreme or fictionalised accounts of text messaging. What kind of language do people really use when they text? Drawing on a range of academic sources from various fields, this book describes the language used in a corpus of over 11,000 textmessages, as yet the largest collection in the UK. In particular, the book shows how the discourse of text messaging is shaped by users' often creativeresponses to the functions and constraints of the medium. This is an essential book for upper levelundergraduates and postgraduates studying discourse analysis, as well aseducators wanting to understand this important new form of discourse.

Chapter1: Situating text messaging: what, who, how and why \ Chapter 2: Issues in Collecting Data\ Chapter 3: Respellings inText Messaging\ Chapter 4: The Grammar ofText Messaging\ Chapter 5: Spoken DiscourseMarkers in Text Messaging\ Chapter 6: Frequent Wordsand Phrases in Text Messaging \Chapter 7: EverydayCreativity in Text Messaging \Chapter 8: PerformingIdentity through Text Messaging \Chapter 9: Text messaging inthe World: the State of the Art and its Future \Bibliography \ Index