Abstract
Orthography in social media is largely understudied, but rich in pragmatic potential. This study examines the use of "caps lock" on Twitter, which has been claimed to function as an emotive strengthener. In a survey asking participants to rate tweets on gradient scales of emotion, I show that this claim does not account for all the data. I instead propose that caps lock should be understood as an indicator of prosody in text. I support this theory by drawing on Twitter corpus data to show how users employ single-word capitalization in positions indicative of emphatic stress and semantic focus. A prosodic interpretation of capitalization accounts for all the data in a unified way.
Highlights
Non-standard orthography on social media is a frequently referenced but largely under-studied phenomenon
We have observed that internet users tend to deviate from the orthographic norms of English, and under the assumption that these deviations must be linguistically meaningful in some way, have set out to determine how
Adopting the theory that certain capitalization patterns are used to convey prosody allows us to explain the data for all three emotions by forcing us to consider the prosodic realizations of different emotions and how they might be represented orthographically
Summary
Non-standard orthography on social media is a frequently referenced but largely under-studied phenomenon. According to Crystal (2011), the systematic nature of most orthographic deviations on social media sites suggests that the observed range of variation is not due to carelessness or typos, but should rather be analyzed as stylistic (and, I will argue, linguistic) choices In other words, these deviations are intentional, and meaningful in some way. “as a result of constant selection pressure towards increasing efficiency, the human cognitive system has developed in such a way that our perceptual mechanisms tend automatically to pick out potentially relevant stimuli, our memory retrieval mechanisms tend automatically to activate potentially relevant assumptions, and our inferential mechanisms tend spontaneously to process them in the most productive way” (Sperber & Wilson 2004:254) In this way, a writer may utilize non-standard orthography as a stimulus, knowing that it will attract the attention of the reader, who will pick it out as relevant and assign it a meaning. This assigned meaning will be strongly influenced by contextual clues and may require one to draw on other assumptions and competencies
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