Over the years, the language of texting (SMS messaging or text messaging) has generated a lot of discussion: Thurlow (Reference Thurlow2003) and Hård af Segerstad (Reference Hård af Segerstad, Palen, Harper and Taylor2005) refer to ‘hype and hysteria’ that have accompanied the emergence of this new way of communicating and Crystal (Reference Crystal2008; also in the foreword of the reviewed volume) emphasises the hard work involved in debunking the myths associated with texting language (or textese, as it is sometimes referred to). Now that the initial popular panic over the potential detrimental effects of texting on literacy and communicative skills has abated—and more than two decades have passed since the first text message was sent—it is time for a linguistic analysis of this much-feared genre.
This volume is one of the ‘Benjamins current topics’ series and its aim is to bring timely material earlier circulated in the form of a journal special issue to a wider readership. Chapters in this volume were previously published in 2012 in Lingvisticae Investigationes 35:2. The eleven papers devoted to various aspects of the linguistic analysis of text messages (SMS) are now available in a book format, preceded by a foreword by David Crystal and an introduction by the editors. The threefold aim of the book, as stated in the introduction, is (i) to present recent linguistic research pertaining to SMS communication, (ii) to provide information about existing SMS corpora, and (iii) to demonstrate the range of linguistic research that can be conducted on SMS corpora. The introduction provides a useful summary of existing research into SMS communication (although some research, such as Hård af Segerstad's (Reference Hård af Segerstad, Palen, Harper and Taylor2005), could have been added to complete the list), starting from the early research that recognised the importance of the medium, with its affordances and constraints, in constructing electronically mediated texts and the particular features of individual digital media, to the emerging, although still quite rare, studies of the linguistic phenomena of the language used in text messages. The editors bring attention to the many aspects of SMS language that still need exploring. For example, very little research has been done on lexical and dialogical properties of SMS language, syntactic trends, and the impact of SMS practices on more formal writing. The pioneering research has, however, opened a line of enquiry into the features of SMS language and enabled a move to a more varied range of subjects that this volume aims to continue. Frequent reference is made throughout the volume to the sms4science project (http://www.sms4science.org), which is aimed at constructing and studying an international corpus of text messages and which constitutes the largest corpus of real-life SMS messages to date (over 220,000 SMS messages collected in France, Canada, Switzerland, and Belgium).
Organised alphabetically, the chapters cover a wide range of issues involved in the methodology, sociolinguistics, and syntax of SMS research. A diachronic perspective is adopted in one of the papers and two chapters tackle SMS corpora from the point of view of natural language processing. While the chapters could have been grouped into thematic sections, the alphabetic organisation maintains a journal feel, although, in a book format, this can seem haphazard. In what follows, I present an outline of the chapters in a thematically organised way.
There are two methodology-focused chapters in the volume. Rachel Panckhurst & Claudine Moïse focus on SMS collection methods. They discuss questionnaire design and the process of SMS data collection; they also provide a preliminary analysis of over ninety thousand authentic text messages and 435 responses to the sociolinguistic questionnaire that they collected as part of the sud4science Languedoc-Roussillon project. Data processing procedures (anonymisation, transcoding, annotation, and linguistic analysis) are also discussed. The collection of the Quebec French SMS corpus Texto4Science is described in Philippe Langlais and Patrick Drouin's chapter. They discuss the methodology used to collect and perform a complex annotation of the corpus. The chapter includes a detailed account of the process, the advantages, and some points for consideration, and can serve as a guide for annotating data in future research.
A sociolinguistic perspective on SMS language is covered in chapters by Josie Bernicot, Olga Volckaert-Legrier, Antonine Goumi, & Alain Bert-Erboul, Céline Combes, Olga Volckaert-Legrier, & Pierre Largy, and Maria Sabaté i Dalmau. Josie Bernicot and colleagues focus on the use of text messaging by young adolescents in their first year of using SMS. Based on a more than twelve-month longitudinal analysis of a corpus of text messages, the authors focus on how adolescents are able to master the structural characteristics of SMS messages (in particular the use of textisms, including shortenings, initialisms, letter/number homophones, and misspellings). Céline Combes and colleagues analyse the different processes that come into play in the production of new orthographic forms in texting. The level of automation of the production process was analysed with respect to the participants’ SMS writing experience and the level of attention that they were able to devote to the SMS writing task. In her chapter, Maria Sabaté i Dalmau analyses the linguistic features, the social indexicalities and the particular uses of transnational text messages sent by migrants in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. She engages in an ethnographic and user-focused approach, providing a way of analysing transnational communication that goes beyond a mere description of linguistic features.
Úrsula Kirsten Torrado takes a diachronic approach to the emergent phenomenon of text-message language through a comparison of an online corpus of 202 text messages collected from seventeen to eighteen year olds by Tim Shortis in 2000 and her own corpus of 1,500 text messages collected from twelve to fourteen year olds in 2010. Quantitative analysis of the corpora was conducted using Microsoft Word ‘word count’ function, and questionnaires were used to collect biodata items about participants. The author describes the methodology employed, questionnaire design, and provides an analysis of spelling adaptations referring to existing classifications. Among the chapters that take a syntactic and semantic focus, Elisabeth Stark presents a quantitative analysis of ne retention and ne deletion in French text messages in her chapter. She considers both language-external and language-internal factors that may trigger deletion and compares the rate of deletion to corpora of spoken French and earlier research on French in chatrooms. Deniz Uygur-Distexhe, by contrast, aims to understand the SMS use of three frequently occurring initialisms: lol (laughing out loud), mdr (Mort De Rire—translated in the chapter as ‘died from laughing’ or ‘helpless with laughter’) and ptdr (PéTé De Rire—in the chapter translated literally as ‘burst from laughing’ or ‘to split one's sides with laughter’). He proposes that these initialisms should be seen as belonging to the discourse marker category (in an ‘inclusive and gradual’ understanding, which the author explains in his paper) and gives each of the three initialisms a score based on their syntactic and semantic potential as discourse markers. A thorough discussion of code-switching in texting, considering genre features and additional considerations, is presented in the chapter by Etienne Morel, Claudia Bucher, Simona Pekarek Doehler, & Beat Siebenhaar. The authors test the applicability of traditional code-switching approaches to texting and discuss some challenges related to defining ‘codes’ in SMS communication and identifying and categorising code-switching. Some of the aspects covered include pseudo-borrowings, homographs and homophones, as well as morphological variants. Based on their findings, they call for a revision of some of the formal categories of code-switching that exist in the literature.
Finally, two chapters take a natural language processing perspective. Pierre Accorsi, Namrata Patel, Cédric Lopez, Rachel Panckhurst, & Mathieu Roche propose a two-phase procedure for anonymising identifying information in the highly idiosyncratic language of SMS messaging, devised for anonymising the sud4science LR corpus of French text messages (sud4science forms a part of the international project sms4science). The chapter describes the working of each of the phases separately, discussing their purpose, micro-stages and the way in which the difficulty of addressing misspellings (both traditionally understood and characteristic of electronically mediated communication) and idiosyncratic language was dealt with. In the other chapter with this focus, Caroline Tagg, Alistair Baron, & Paul Rayson report on the use of the VARD2 software to manually normalise spelling variation in a corpus of text messages (CorTxt) and further employment of DICER (Discovery and Investigation of Character Edit Rules), a complementary tool which serves to analyse the normalisation performed in VARD2. The chapter also deals with the question of categorisation of spelling variation and proposes a set of spelling rules that can be employed to normalise spelling in other text-message corpora.
Throughout the volume, a lot of attention is paid to the detailed description of methodology. The structure of individual chapters is very clear, with sections and subsections that make the chapters easy to follow. Findings in most chapters are illustrated with useful tables and graphs (some printed in colour) and each chapter is accompanied by a brief summary. All of this makes the volume very easy to use, although—as suggested earlier—arranging chapters into thematic sections would have benefitted the overall clarity and ease of use of the volume.
Individual chapters vary not only in terms of content and methodological approach, but also in quality. While most chapters are well-written, well-grounded, and well-structured, this volume would benefit from careful proofreading, particularly Kirsten Torrado's chapter, but also with regard to consistent use of terminology across the volume.
The above mentioned shortcomings, however, do not take away from the volume's merits, especially that of bringing together a wide array of good quality papers presenting linguistic analyses of SMS messages from a number of different perspectives. It is a useful resource for anyone interested in finding out about the linguistics of text messages, but also specifically for those considering embarking on a research project involving this type of data.
