The medium is not the message

Abstract

Linguistic expressions in social media vary along many axes, including author style, the specific medium and its affordances, and others. In this paper, we argue that different registers must be distinguished within social media and that register should be included as an important factor independent of (social) medium in analyses of variable linguistic phenomena. We introduce a new German cross-media corpus, consisting of blog posts and tweets from the same 44 authors. We define the registers as ‘Informative’, ‘Narrative’, and ‘Persuasive’, based on situational characteristics of the texts. We then correlate the registers with two variable linguistic phenomena: German modal and intensifying particles. In each case, we document considerable inter- and intraindividual variation in the expressions used and their frequency across texts. The statistical analysis shows that the register grouping corresponds more closely to linguistic similarities between texts than the grouping by medium does.

A Multidimensional Analysis of a High-Stakes English Listening Test: A Corpus-Based Approach

“…Biber argued that texts of fewer than 200 words were not conducive to extracting the co-occurrence features. However, there were also some studies conducting MDA with short texts, such as Scheffler et al [94], who used Twitter posts, and Shakir and Deuber [95], who analyzed online comments and texts from Facebook groups. In addition, it is noted that factor loadings were acceptable in this study, and the results show that they are sufficiently useful in MDA analysis.…”