Word Formation Processes in the Context of Social Media Discourse: A Case of Chuka University Students

Abstract

The social media discourse is a hybrid of both written text and spoken discourse and therefore exhibits unique linguistic features that researchers can explore. This paper reveals the new dynamics of word formation processes in the social media discourse context, which is apparently a new genre. Morphological processes have in the past been analyzed in the context of spoken and written discourse. However, due to the evolution of the social media discourses that emanate from the communications that is mediated by divergent media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagrams and twitter, there is a need to shed light on how language is used in social media. This paper focuses on one aspect of such usage; how words are formed in the social media milieu. This paper therefore analyses the morphological processes drawing from Chuka University students’ social media discourse on WhatsApp platform. Students exhibits similar language usage due to the fact that they share a lot in common as a speech community. The paper therefore utilizes the social network theory to show how the interactants exploits the linguistic artifacts available at their social media network to interact meaningfully. Particularly, the focus is on the morphological processes that are evident in their interactions. The research design used is descriptive and the approach to data analysis is qualitative. The data used to inform this paper is drawn from the researcher’s thesis (2019). The findings revealed that students’ social media discourse results in the formation of new lexical items, use of symbols, Arabic numerals and letters to represent morphemes or words that are used in their day-to-day interactions. Similarly, morphological processes such as compounding, blending, clipping, borrowing, abbreviations and acronyms are common in the students’ social media discourse.