Abstract
AbstractWriting on social media often departs from prescriptive norms through the use of non-standard words, spellings and punctuation. Amongst these traits is the repetition of letters (e.g. <ouiiiii> for oui ‘yes’). In this study, we draw upon a corpus of over 65 million tweets from three dialects of French (Laurentian, Metropolitan and Midi) to test phonological motivations for the choice of repeated letter in a word with repetition. Using mixed-effects multinomial regression, we compare dialectal differences in whether repetition targets final consonants (silent or pronounced), word-final orthographic <e> corresponding to phonological schwa, and prosodically accented penults. We demonstrate that repetition covertly signals phonological properties. We conclude that prosody mediates morphological and phonological effects and that grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences vary between regions, thereby producing phonological patterns that writers likely did not intend to convey at the time of writing. We also propose that orthographic repetition on Twitter has two prosodic sources: the default pitch accent in French (shifted or not) and focus.
Highlights
Twitter constitutes a large corpus with spontaneous or semi-spontaneous writing, which allows for both formal and informal communication
We examine a novel case in that the phonological traits we are inferring from the non-standard spelling are not strictly those we believe the tweet author was highlighting through their choice of spelling
We found evidence that French varieties having differing phonological statuses for the schwa and having different vowel inventories showed evidence of these phonological traits through the patterns of letter repetition written by speakers of those varieties
Summary
Twitter constitutes a large corpus with spontaneous or semi-spontaneous writing, which allows for both formal and informal communication. The author could repeat any or all letters in the word or could consistently repeat letters in a specific position (for example, always repeating the last letter of the word or always repeating the rightmost vowel) This is not the case, ; as we will demonstrate, there are patterns with respect to the letters that undergo repetition, and these patterns can inform us about the author’s phonology. We will show that phonological properties can be signalled indirectly through letter repetition choices, which we interpret as a covert side effect of the author’s intent to communicate prosody This suggests a revision to Tatman’s (2016) proposal; non-salient features must predict or influence a salient feature (like prosody) in order to be represented on Twitter. The test cases were selected to examine instances where the dialects are phonologically similar to establish a baseline (test case 1; section 2.4), one where dialects are clearly phonologically distinct to show potential differences between dialects
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