Discourse of Text Messaging: Analysis of SMS Communication

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Description

Understanding the discourse of text messaging has profound implications for society. SMS text messaging has impacted considerably on 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 text messages, as yet the largest collection in the UK. In particular, the book shows how the discourse of text messaging is shaped by users' often creative responses to the functions and constraints of the medium. This is an essential book for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying discourse analysis, as well as educators wanting to understand this important new form of discourse.

Reviews

'The Discourse of Text Messaging is a pleasure to read. A detailed analysis of a corpus of text messages reveals how people deploy all the resources of language - from spellings and punctuation through to grammar and discourse markers - to create meanings, to construct identities and to generally get things done'. The wide-ranging analyses are clearly explained and engagingly written about throughout.' -- David Barton, Professor of Language and Literacy, Lancaster University, UK
'Through a meticulous investigation of a rich corpus of authentic text messages, Tagg's The Discourse of Text Messaging is by far the most comprehensive book-length study of mobile phone texting from a linguistics perspective. A must-read for anyone interested in digital discourse and communication in the mobile world.' -- Carmen Lee, Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Author Bio

Caroline Tagg is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.