Lauren Squires

Tethered or Mobile? Use of Away Messages in Instant Messaging by American College Students

Since the appearance of the telegraph and the telephone, interlocutors have had options about how to communicate with one another at a distance. Typically, there is a settling-in period for new language technologies, as people gradually work out what medium is most appropriate to use with which interlocutor, and how messages should be formulated (Baron 2002). The kinds of usage patterns that emerge with new technologies are rarely monochromatic. Differences may reflect economic considerations, age, gender, education level, and cultural habits. For example, telephone usage was far more pervasive in the United States than in many other countries until well after World War II (Baron 2000). Email was largely restricted to the university community until the 1990s, and teenage use of mobile phones to send short text messages dwarfs SMS usage by older cohorts (Ling 2004).

Enregistering internet language

This article investigates the enregisterment of an internet-specific language variety and its features. The enregisterment of internet language is explored through several sites of metadiscourse: academic scholarship about computer-mediated communication, uses of the metalinguistic terms netspeak and chatspeak in print media, and online comment threads about language and the internet. This metadiscourse provides evidence of a shared concept of internet language as comprising distinctive written features, primarily acronyms, abbreviations, and respellings. Internet languages enregisterment emerges from standard language ideology and deterministic views of technology, where the construal of these features as both nonstandard and internet-specific articulates the perceived distinctiveness of internet interactions. Yet empirical evidence shows that these features are relatively rare in instant messaging conversations, one form of interaction to which internet language is attributed; this discrepancy has implications for the application of indexical order to enregisterment. (Enregisterment, language ideology, computer-mediated communication, internet, metadiscourse, indexical order, Standard English, technological determinism, mass media)*

Processing, Evaluation, Knowledge Testing the Perception of English Subject–Verb Agreement Variation

This article explores US English speakers’ perception of subject–verb agreement variation by using self-paced reading and mouse tracking. Two experiments exposed participants to standard, nonstandard, and uncommon subject–verb combinations. Experiment 1 measures participants’ reading times, and experiment 2 measures their social judgments. The standard forms are [singular+doesn’t] and [plural+don’t]. The nonstandard form is [singular+don’t], which is attested widely across English varieties; the “uncommon” form was [plural+doesn’t]. Experiment 1 was a self-paced reading experiment, wherein participants read sentences word by word at their own pace. Reading times were slowed the most for uncommon agreement, and nonstandard agreement was also processed more slowly than standard agreement, showing that processing is sensitive to sociolinguistic variation. Experiment 2 was a mouse-tracking experiment, wherein participants read sentences and then chose between two photographs to indicate whether a high- or low-status speaker was more likely to say the sentence. Sentences with the nonstandard and uncommon patterns were more likely to be assigned to low-status speakers than were standard sentences. However, participants’ mouse movements showed that the decision-making processes for uncommon sentences were more like those of standard sentences. Implications for the understanding of sociolinguistic knowledge are discussed.

Grammatical feature frequencies of English on Twitter in Finland

Technological change affects the parameters of language use, and as internet access has expanded rapidly in recent decades, communicative encounters resulting from online activity have begun to play an increasing role in daily life. Commercial social media platforms such as Twitter, whose content consists of millions of user messages with global extent, represent an important site of online language use. The use of English online has been subject to much attention in public discourse in mass media as well as in academic scholarship, and while research into online language has addressed a wide range of topical considerations, a recurrent typological interpretation of English as it is used in computer–mediated communication (CMC) is that it differs from traditional language varieties in terms of lexis, grammar, and pragmatic features. Crystal (2006: 18) uses the term Netspeak to refer to “a type of language displaying features that are unique to the Internet. . . arising out of its character as a medium which is electronic, global and interactive” (cf. Androutsopoulos 2006).1 At the same time, the global status of English as the world’s lingua franca continues to evolve, with English now serving not only as the principal language of international communication in academia, business, media and diplomacy (Crystal 2003), but increasingly as an important language for online communication in informal and geographically localized communicative contexts, particularly in the European Union (European Commission 2011). Despite widespread recognition of the prevalence of English in global CMC, there have been relatively few efforts to systematically investigate variation in the lexis or grammar of English on social media in international contexts.2 Although studies have investigated the use of particular linguistic features in