Child Texting

The recent phenomenon of ‘texting’ only began in 1992, however children starting texting in the early 2000’s. So why is it thought that children are doing the majority of the texting? The most common assumption is that is that teenagers are filling their text messages with abbreviations and misspelling all of their words, however David Crystal a professor of linguistics has done many different studies which show that 80% of the people who are texting are adults and only 10% of the words are abbreviated, but is this true? Within my essay I am going to explore my own data and their inclusion of brevity and spoken language features. To gain an accurate conclusion I have collected 3 sets of data with various different contexts, my first set of data is between me (A) and a boy/peer who is my age (B). My second data is between me (A) and my mum (C) and my third piece of data is
D has used a lot of different brevity features, she used ‘u’ twice. This is an example of homophonic representation this could be because she is attempting to be ‘cool’ or perhaps isn’t very good with her phone and uses homophonic representation to increase the speed in which she texts. D also uses clipping when she says ‘seein’ instead of ‘seeing’ this may be a virtuous clipping error as she has used one previously when she says ‘that’ instead of ‘that’s’ although I think that it may be a deliberate clipping because throughout the message she has shortened or changed most words to make them more concise.
Data 3 contains turn-taking even though the message are almost 2 hours apart, this may be because C doesn’t need a reply from D straight away. They both use phatic expressions – both messages start with ‘Hi’ this implies friendliness within the messages and makes the messages become more