Text messages operate on a protocol which allows from 148 to160 characters per message, including spaces between words. In such a highly circumscribed environment, writing is seriously hampered by the limited space and the usage of the numeric phone keypad. Thus, the advent of a new quality of the text language, sometimes referred to as "textese", was inevitable under those conditions. One of the characteristics of text messages is frequent deletion of letters in orthographical forms, like in the following example: IfYaMthWozNEBiGrUWdntHavNEFAcLft2Wsh (if your mouth was any bigger you wouldn't have anything else left to wash). In order to investigate the nature of letter deletions in text messages a study was undertaken, which analyzed ten examples of text messages coming from various sources. The aim of the study was to determine whether the deletion of letters was regular, the general prediction being that text messages are decoded via the mediation of their phonemic representations (or via mental reading). It was speculated that the regularities were governed by phonological principles such as the semiotic "figure and ground" principle (Dressler 1996) and the "rich-get-richer" principle (Donegan 1978/1985). The results demonstrate that phonology is very likely to govern reductions albeit without any recourse to the prosody level.More specifically, phonology apparently affects the pattern of deletions in text messages, whereas there is a marked tendency that stress assignment does not determine the nature of deletions.

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The study compares educated Poznań speech on the basis of a study by Witaszek-Samborska (1985, 1986) and a corpus compiled 30 years later. The features of Poznań speech, examined on 14 speakers from the corpus, include: voicing of obstruents before heterolexical sonorants (okszyg emocji), realization of word-final ‹-ą› as [-ɔm] (idom tom drogom), realization of /stʂ tʂ dʐ/ as /ʂ  / (szczelać), the presence of the velar nasal [ŋ] before a heteromorphemic velar plosive /k/ (okienko), realization of word-final ‹-ej› as /-i(j)/ or /-ɨ(j)/ (lepi(j)), presence of prothetic [w] before word-initial /ɔ/ (łojciec), presence of voiced /v/ in clusters with preceding voiceless consonants (trwały), and realization of ‹-śmy› as [ʑmɨ] (słyszelˈiśmy). The results suggest a change in Poznań speech and point towards dialect levelling. 1 We would like to thank our audience at the 47 th Poznan Linguistic Meeting, in particular to Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Raymond Hickey and Peter Trudgill for their comments and suggestions. We have included the implicational hierarchy and the result is, we believe, a stronger article. Our three anonymous reviewers deserve special mention as their insights prompted exacting revisions to our original manuscript. Last but not least, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Ministry of Higher Education which contributed to corpus collection (grant number: 0113/NPRH2/H11/81/2013).

The study reports the results of an acoustic analysis of vowel reduction of the /iː/ vowel, considering all three traditionally explored aspects of vowel reduction, i.e. duration, F1 and F2 in read speech produced by 12 native speakers of English. Starting from the observation that the standard literature considers only duration as a proxy for overall reduction, the aim of the study is to verify whether duration, F1 and F2 exhibit reduction (construed as shortening of duration and centralization of formants, respectively) to the same degree. The r test reveals the lack of a robust linear correlation between duration, F1 and F2, the highest value being 0.51 (the correlation between duration and F1) and 0.24 (the correlation between duration and F2), neither of which is a strong correlation. In light of the results, the study seeks to establish a gradual scale of vowel reduction, combining the spatial and the temporal aspects by means of averaging the distances between the least and the most reduced tokens across duration, F1/F2 on an equal basis. The resulting degree is expressed on a scale of reduction, ranging from 0 (no reduction whatsoever) to 100 per cent (reduction to schwa).

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