Abstract
Short text message (SMS) as a key communication means in China received a lot of attention in research community. 114 subjects attended the study, sharing totally 10843 SMS they sent and received daily. We divided the SMS into two categories (instrumental and expressive), analyzed vocabularies, functions and effects of demographic factors and SMS categories on SMS lengths and found: 1) Top 400 Chinese characters occupied 85% and top 388 words occupied 73% in SMS. Punctuations appeared frequently (18%), while Smiley appeared very little (less than 0.1%). 2) People sent both instrumental and expressive messages regardless of their age. Female users tended to send longer SMS. Retired people sent longest SMS, followed by working people and students. People exchanged SMS with close friends and families. Expressive SMS have more words than instrumental SMS. 3) People over 40s exchange more SMS with children than with friends.KeywordsSMSChinainstrumentalexpressive
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