Assessing the Written Language of Text Messages

Textese and Singlish in multiparty chats

“…Two textism types were added to the expressive textism category, namely, ‘Rebus writing including leet speak and semiotic words’ and ‘pragmatic punctuation’. These textisms can be seen as salient features which did occur in previous studies (Abidin , Squire ), although not analyzed in the prior studies reviewed by Grace and Kemp (). In what follows, a discussion of the two dominant categories, namely contractive textisms, and local textisms, in terms of their globalized or localized statuses, Singlish accent stylizations’ inherent glyphic economy and compatibility with the prevailing sociolinguistic maxim of brevity and speed in synchronous Internet registers and the extent of abbreviation in local textisms will ensue.…”

“…Although Tagliamonte () did not account for the similar numbers of textism occurrences in instant messaging and SMS, we can deduce that the more prevailing maxim of brevity and speed in multiparty quasi‐synchronous chat would similarly encourage abbreviated messages. Grace and Kemp's () seminal meta‐analysis of textism categorization used by various studies concluded that textese can be analyzed according to a typological framework of three major categories of textism types, namely, contractive, expressive and other textism types. In this study, I have redefined the three categories in order to maintain discrete boundaries among the three categories (Table ).…”

“…Contractive textism types adhere to Werry's () motivational principle of economy and text entry reduction and Thurlow and Brown's () sociolinguistic maxim of brevity and speed; expressive textism types follow Werry's () motivational principles of simulation of spoken language and graphical and kinesthetic devices and their equivalent sociolinguistic maxims of phonological approximation and paralinguistic restitution; local textisms, particularly adhere to the motivational principles. In Grace and Kemp's () meta‐analysis, the most popular ‘other’ or local textism type is accent stylizations. In this study, participants are Singaporeans who favor stylizing textisms according to Singapore Colloquial English, or Singlish, an English localized creole that is the vernacular popularly used in Singapore (Leimgruber ).…”

“…The typology of textese used in this study is modified from Grace and Kemp's () review of textism categorization found in recent studies (Table ). Only textism types that are analyzed in more than three recent studies reviewed by Grace and Kemp () were included in the typological framework of textism types for this study. In Table , the examples given for each textism category are not exhaustive and are given to illustrate each broad category and related textism types.…”

Texting, Textisms and Teaching Portuguese

“…Quite the opposite: several studies conducted in the United States (Drouin and Driver, 2014;Gann et al, 2010), England (De Jonge y Kemp, 2012;Plester et al 2008), France (Bernicot et al, 2014), Spain (Gómez-Camacho, 2007 andVázquez-Cano et al, 2015), and Brazil (Silva, 2014;Freitas, 2010), just to mention a few, have shown that the use of textisms cannot be related to low literacy performance. What is more: in some studies, the learners have evidenced an improvement in literacy skills, especially spelling (Wood et al, 2011;Grace and Kemp, 2015).…”