How character limit affects language usage in tweets

Arnout B Boot,Erik Tjong Kim Sang,Rolf A Zwaan,Katinka Dijkstra

doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0280-3

Arnout B Boot, Erik Tjong Kim Sang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0280-3

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Abstract

In November 2017 Twitter doubled the available character space from 140 to 280 characters. This provided an opportunity for researchers to investigate the linguistic effects of length constraints in online communication. We asked whether the character limit change (CLC) affected language usage in Dutch tweets and hypothesized that there would be a reduction in the need for character-conserving writing styles. Pre-CLC tweets were compared with post-CLC tweets. Three separate analyses were performed: (I) general analysis: the number of characters, words, and sentences per tweet, as well as the average word and sentence length. (II) Token analysis: the relative frequency of tokens and bigrams; (III) part-of-speech analysis: the grammatical structure of the sentences in tweets (i.e., adjectives, adverbs, articles, conjunctives, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs); pre-CLC tweets showed relatively more textisms, which are used to abbreviate and conserve character space. Consequently, they represent more informal language usage (e.g., internet slang); in turn, post-CLC tweets contained relatively more articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. The results show that online language producers adapt their texts to overcome limit constraints.

Highlights

Spontaneous linguistic communication is typically unrestrained in terms of the length of utterances but in some situations there are constraints on utterance length
The advent of the telegraph, in which words were literally at a premium, necessitated an elliptic style that has become known as telegram style of telegraphese, which is viewed as a normal expressive form of language (Barton, 1998; Isserlin, 1985; Tesak and Dittmann, 2009)
A crucial difference is the nature of the length restriction: In telegrams, the costs are related to the number of words and not the number of characters

Summary

Introduction

Spontaneous linguistic communication is typically unrestrained in terms of the length of utterances but in some situations there are constraints on utterance length. There are word count limitations to newspaper headlines, advertisements, journalistic articles, student papers, and scholarly manuscripts. These limitations are sometimes so restrictive that they impact sentence structure and content and word forms. A more contemporary example of an elliptic style is textese, which is often used in modern text messages (Drouin and Driver, 2014). Textese and telegraphese are both characterized by an imposed limit constraint (Barton, 1998; Drouin and Driver, 2014; Isserlin, 1985; Tesak and Dittmann, 2009). Textese has been called ‘squeeze text’, which well reflects its grammatical features (Carrington, 2004)

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