Dude, srsly?: The Surprisingly Formal Nature of Twitter's Language

Twitter has become the de facto information sharing and communication platform. Given the factors that influence language on Twitter - size limitation as well as communication and content-sharing mechanisms - there is a continuing debate about the position of Twitter's language in the spectrum of language on various established mediums. These include SMS and chat on the one hand (size limitations) and email (communication), blogs and newspapers (content sharing) on the other. To provide a way of determining this, we propose a computational framework that offers insights into the linguistic style of all these mediums. Our framework consists of two parts. The first part builds upon a set of linguistic features to quantify the language of a given medium. The second part introduces a flexible factorization framework, soclin, which conducts a psycholinguistic analysis of a given medium with the help of an external cognitive and affective knowledge base. Applying this analytical framework to various corpora from several major mediums, we gather statistics in order to compare the linguistics of Twitter with these other mediums via a quantitative comparative study. We present several key insights: (1) Twitter's language is surprisingly more conservative, and less informal than SMS and online chat; (2) Twitter users appear to be developing linguistically unique styles; (3) Twitter's usage of temporal references is similar to SMS and chat; and (4) Twitter has less variation of affect than other more formal mediums. The language of Twitter can thus be seen as a projection of a more formal register into a size-restricted space

Vielfalt und Integration - diversitá ed integrazione - diversité et intégration: Sprache(n) in sozialen und digitalen Räumen: Eine Festschrift für Elisabeth Burr

Diese Festschrift für Elisabeth Burr stellt Vielfalt und Integration in der Sprachwissenschaft und in den Digital Humanities in den Mittelpunkt. Die Beiträge berühren zentrale Fragen im Schaffen Burrs: Wie kann Sprache und ihre Variation in Abhängigkeit von sozialen und geographischen Faktoren adäquat beschrieben werden? Wie lassen sich informatische und digitale Zugänge dafür nutzen? Verknüpft werden sie mit ihr wichtigen und aktuellen Themen aus Sozio-, Gender- und Korpuslinguistik, Dialektologie und Sprachgeographie sowie den digitalen Geisteswissenschaften. Die Beitragenden sind u. a. Stefania Spina, Thomas Krefeld, Annette Gerstenberg, Lazslo Hinyadi, Carol Chiodo und Lauren Tilton, Manuel Burghardt, Øyvind Eide, Jürgen Hermes, Andreas Witt. Ray Siemens, Arianna Ciula, Alejandro Bía sowie Rob Evans