A LEXICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED DISCOURSE IN SELECTED INSTANT AND TEXT MESSAGES OF NIGERIAN STUDENTS

Messaging

From table 2 above, we found that abbronyms had the highest

number of occurrence featuring at the average rate of 9.72 per

message for IM'ing and 13.9 for texting. Of the total number of

messages sampled (N=75) texting occurred 1044 times almost

doubling average frequency of occurrence in IM'ing with 729

times. Emoticons and vocal segregates (emotexts and vowel

extension) - all representing the non linguistic vocal

segregates, on the other hand, occurred at the average rate of

2.76 per message for IM'ing and 1.2 for texting. There is less

representation of emoticons and vocal segregates in texting

Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.

54

4.4% per message transmission, with average frequency of

occurrence at 1.2. The frequency of occurrence for the non

linguistic signs was 207 times. This means that the total

average frequency of occurrence for all the IM textual signs is

12.48. Based on these findings, we can infer that computermediated

communication of instant messaging has its

peculiarities in the textual signs such as emoticons, emotexts,

vowel/letter extension and abbronyms, even in an ESL country

like Nigeria. Nigerian students thus construct and interpret

messages with the shared assumption of these CMC lexemes.

One can also conclude that a IM constructed by an average

Nigerian student would reflect predominance of lexical signs

(abbronyms) over visual signs (emoticons) and much less of

these occurrences for text messaging over the mobile phones.

Some of the instances of the linguistic and non linguistic signs

are presented, as extracts, as follows:

bjrealme: hw sister?

bjrealme: na you i should ask

bjrealme: una no c each order?

westsideoutlawzus2p: stop posting me joo

5 westsideoutlawzus2p: na me suppose ask u dat

bjrealme: ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

bjrealme: 8-x

bjrealme: you funny ohhh

bjrealme: no be ur babe

10 bjrealme: you go dey contact each orda now

westsideoutlawzus2p: wel no b say i no dey

here 4rm her but jst 2 ask abt her welfare

bjrealme: she should be in good condition

Sociology of English in Nigeria

55

westsideoutlawzus2p: aw abt ur admision

15 bjrealme: you don finish exams'

westsideoutlawzus2p: yes

bjrealme: we just go do post jamb

(EXCHANGE 15)

The same goes for extracts 2 (Exchanges 15). Move 7

Exchange 15 shows an instance of emoticon, moves 14, 19, and

20 show instances of abbronyms peculiar to Instant Messages

which interactants may have shared assuption of.

It suffices to say here that findings from the sampled

text corroborate results of earlier studies on some systems of

CMC, especially the email and newsgroup. It has been found

that email and e-chat have a peculiar linguistic structure

stemming from the use of multifarious word formation

processes, emoticons and abbronyms being part of this. These

signs make CMC text in Instant Messaging program to appear

more like speech than writing communication (cf. Hunnicut

and Magnuson, 2001; Sjoberg, 2001; McElhearn, 2000) and

much different from that of the text messaging. Let us consider

an extract of the sampled text messages:

Watz goan, be reminded that our

general meeting holds Tue 17/7. Also

our society harvest is same day at 9am

mass. Pls come wt gifts O! NO

SHAKING!Enjoy ya weekend

Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.

56

Contractions (operationalized here as the use of

apostrophe and excludes the possessive case) which typically

appear in informal speech and writing are examined. The

reason for the analysis stems from the fact that this category of

contraction is shorter to type than the full forms, especially

when omitting the apostrophe. In computer-based IM,

apostrophes require only a single keystroke, while needing four

key taps on mobile phones. We calculated percent of full and

contracted forms against total potential contractions. For

apostrophes, we scored only use in contractions, not

possessives. In texting, 14% of all potential contractions were

contracted. In IM, only 24% were contracted. Mispells were not

accounted for in our quantification and these were much. Being

fresher students, it is assumed that the subjects are still battling

with the mechanics of the English language.

In the dimension for the analysis of punctuation,

punctuation at the ends of transmissions and the ends of

sentences was examined. We also tallied use of question marks

at the ends of semantically-interrogative sentences in

comparison with use of periods, exclamation marks, or

equivalent punctuation (ellipses, dashes, commas, and

emoticons) at the ends of declaratives, imperatives, or

exclamations. Texting and IM followed similar patterns, with

the proportion of texting punctuation always lower than in IM.

Sociology of English in Nigeria

57

Total sentence-final punctuation was 39% for texting and 45%

for IM. Transmission-final punctuation appeared in only 29%

of text messages and 35% of IMs. However, for transmissions

containing multiple sentences, the sentences not appearing at

the ends of transmissions had more sentence-final punctuation:

54% of text messages and 78% of IMs, Logically,

transmission-medial punctuation is more critical than

transmission-final marks in helping recipients interpret

messages. In most cases, the act of sending a message coincides

with sentence-final punctuation.

To compare question marks and periods (or equivalent

marks), we divided each corpus into two categories: semantic

questions and "other". More question marks were used to end

semantic questions than periods (or equivalents) to end other

sentence types. In texting, 23% semantic questions were ended

with a question mark, while only 10% of "other" bore sentencefinal

punctuation. In IM, all (52%) of questions ended in

question marks, while only 41% of the remaining sentences

were punctuated. More frequent use of "required" question

marks may pragmatically highlight the request for a response

from the recipient.

Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.

58

Conclusion

Analyses of texting and IM'ing against the socio-linguistic

backgrounds of second language user (English) much enabled

as a result of the mobility of the Internet in today's media

landscape have shown peculiarities in the textual constructs of

Nigerian students. The paucity of emoticons and heavy use of

abbronymizations in both texting and IM corpora is not in

consonant with studies of this nature in North America (Ling

and Baron 2007) and the UK (Thurlow and Brown 2003).

However, sameness in the previous reports on sentential

punctuation in texting or IM'ing, shows the degree to which

affordances and constraints of the CMC media affect uniformly

English language constructs and meaning making in online

platforms. Findings have shown that usage patterns are hardly

contrastive. Ling and Baron (2007) notes that students often

omitted transmission-final marks (especially periods), but their

overall punctuation choices tended to be communicatively

pragmatic. The fact punctuation was consistently more

prevalent in IM than in texting probably reflects greater ease of

input in IM. It is however worthy of note that student approach

textual composition with differences in their competence level.

More so, text messages were consistently longer and contained

more sentences, probably resulting from both differential

costing structures and the tendency of IM sequences (but not

Sociology of English in Nigeria

59

texts) to be sent in series one after the end to form threads and

turn sequences. Text messages contained significantly more

abbreviations than IMs, but even the number in texting was

small.

Texting and IM'ing data, therefore, are in tangential

with respect to contractions and apostrophes: more contractions

appeared in texting, but texting used only one-third the

apostrophes found in IM. Greater use of contractions in texting

could reflect the higher tendency to use abbreviated forms to

save cost (compared with IM'ing), which in turn is in

consonance with an awkward input device of the mobile phone,

even with qwert-keyboarded phones. The same applies to

apostrophes in texting.

References

Adegbija, Efurosibina. 1989. A Comparative Study of

Politeness Phenomena in Nigerian English, Yoruba and

Ogori. Multilingua 8(1):57-80.

Awonusi, Victor. 2004. "Little" Englishes and the Law of

Energetics: A Sociolinguistic Study of SMS Text

Messages as Register and Discourse in Nigerian

English. In V. Awonusi and E. Babalola (eds.),

Domestication of English in Nigeria: A Festschrift in

Akande, A. & Odebunmi, A.

60

Honour of Abiodun Adetugbo. University of Lagos

Press, pp 45 - 62.

Awonusi, Victor. 2010. Beyond Energetics: A Sociolinguistic

Study of SMS Text Messages as Register and Discourse

in Nigerian English. Online Journal of Humanities 1: 1-

16.

Bamgbose, Ay. 1971. The English language in Nigeria. In

John Spencer (ed.), The English language in West

African. London: Longman, 35-48.

Bamiro, Edmund. 1994. Lexico-Semantic Variation in Nigerian

English. World Englishes 13.1, 47-60.

Bastian, Misty. 1999. Nationalism in a Virtual Space:

Immigrant Nigerians on the Internet. West Africa

Review: 1, 1. [iuicode:

http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.1.1.2].

Blommaert, Jan and Tope Omoniyi. 2006. Email Fraud:

Language, Technology and the Indexicals of

Globalisation. Social Semiotics (16)4: 573-605.

Chiluwa, Innocent. 2008 Assessing the Nigerianness of SMS

Text Messages in English. English Today 24(1): 51-56.

Chiluwa, Innocent. 2009. The Discourse of Digital Deceptions

and '419' Emails. Discourse Studies 11: 635-660.

Chiluwa, Innocent. 2010a. Nigerian English in Informal Email

Messages. English World- Wide 31(1): 40-61.

Sociology of English in Nigeria

61

Chiluwa, Innocent. 2010b. Discursive Practice and the Nigerian

Identity in Personal Emails. Taiwo, Rotimi. (Ed.).

2010c. Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior

and Digital Communication: Language Structures and

Social Interaction. Pennsylvania, USA: IGI Global

Publishers, pp. 112-129.

Ekong, Uyinomen and Victor Ekong. 2010. M-Voting: A

Panacea for Enhanced EParticipation. Asian Journal of

Information Technology 9(2): 111-116.

Herring, Susan. 2004a. Slouching Toward the Ordinary:

Current Trends in Computer-Mediated Communication.

New Media & Society 6: 26-36.

Herring, Susan. 2004b. Computer-Mediated Discourse

Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online

Behaviour. In S.A. Barab, R. Kling & J. Gray (Eds.),

Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of

Learning, New York: Cambridge University Press,