Pushing the envelope phd 4 u: British researcher receives first ever doctor of texting
Texts are much more about maintaining and building relationships rather than passing on raw facts; as such they tend to include a lot of information which is irrelevant but entertaining
A student at a British university has been awarded the first ever Ph.D. in text messaging. Linguist Caroline Tagg — now Dr. Caroline Tagg — spent more than three years at Birmingham University researching the subject of text messages and the language used within them.
The Telegraph.’s Richard Alleyne writes that she trawled through 11,000 text messages sent by 235 people aged between 18 and 65 and together containing 190,000 words, and analyzed them for the quality (or not) of their spelling, grammar, and abbreviation.
From her research she believes that texts are much more about maintaining and building relationships rather than passing on raw facts. As such they tend to include a lot of information which is irrelevant but entertaining.
“People deliberately use words like this when they don’t need to.” she said. “There is a panic about the effect of text messaging and people are genuinely worried about it but I don’t think they should be. People use playful manipulation and metaphors. It is a playful language. Not only are they quite creative, it is also quite expressive. It was interesting to be able to research a number of linguistic methods and frameworks and apply them to the text message, because the text messages were quite fun. It was enlightening.”
She concluded that the average text contains 17.5 words and, contrary to the popular view that text messaging is eroding existing styles of written communication, that texts are good for the English language. “Quite the contrary from destroying the English [language], [text messaging] is actually encouraging it.”
