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XIV. ESTRUCTURA ORGANIZATIVA Y CUMPLIMIENTO REGULATORIO
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Figure 2.8 Business card design from the mass-marketing of the ‘Uneeda biscuit’ brand, early twentieth century US
2.3.3 Trade name respelling as mass distributions of vernacular choice
In contrast to the comparatively domestic contexts in which infants’ early spelling is conducted, the innovations associated with trade spelling broadcast such variation across the public sphere by the relay of industrialised mass-consumerism. Davies’s 1987 study of four thousand trade names offered a linguistic overview of trade spelling, which she interpreted as manifesting advertisers’ awareness of the salience and vividness afforded by creative non-standard coinages. Her references follow the documentation of trade names back to equivalent study in the 1960s (Jacobson 1960, Praninskas 1968) through to Pound’s earlier accounts of the newly-developing conventions of commercial respelling and mass-marketing in the US in the early twentieth century (1923). All these studies show the level of conventionalised linguistic patterning in such respelling. Pound’s typology provides the template for trade names, reworked in SMS and related digital media (Appendix II): ‘Krazy’ <k> for <c> and <ck>; simplification of <i> for <igh> in <nite> or <mite>; humorous consonant substitutions such as <ph> for <f> as in <phat> or <phool>; and a then-new subgenre of newspaper columnists writing ‘in character’ in stylised regiolectal spelling, replete with contextualisation cues intimating the vividness of spoken address and informal tenor (ibid., Appendix II, Figure II.vii). Such methods can be found in Ryan’s much later archive of spelling in popular music, to give but one example (Ryan 2010, Sebba 2015).
Pound speculated whether respelling conventions in US trade names would diffuse into standard forms, noting her surprise at the speed of change driven by what she termed the ‘commercial linguistics’ of branding and mass-marketing.32 Spellings might now originate in a localised
occupational context and could then be diffused by the public sphere broadcast of industrialised
marketing, rather than being coined in academic contexts of expert knowledge, and privileged encoding in linguistic authorities and reference. These innovations may also show multiple motivation. So, in the logo above, imagined obligation, transgressive word-boundary marking in a collocation, and the use of logographic homophone spelling, combine to construe a level of direct address not available from <You need a biscuit>. The innovation is spread in any future reference to this mass-market product, and may generate further creative extensions (e.g. <4> for <for>). By 1930, Pound’s contemporary Alexander had located the diffusion of <U> for <you> in the US - later the most frequent respelling in this study’s SMS corpus - to these branded biscuits and other related trade names. Pound also speculated about whether the sudden changes she observed in the nature of orthographic innovation indexed a phase in the collapse of a more deferential respect by the mass of people for nation-state authority, and therefore both linguistic and political authority, after the First World War. She suggested the emergence of a subjectivity less pliable in its following of received schooled traditions, and the contiguous susceptibility of mass audiences to the appeal of commercial design. Such awareness points to the influence of audience expectation as orchestrated by mass consumerism and to the possible influence of economic and political circumstances on attitudes and practices around spelling choice. Both Pound and Alexander make connections between the popularity of respelling and contemporary social developments, including popular movements for spelling reform, the diffusion of commercial shorthand and general interest in the ‘phonetic transcription of words.’(ibid.)
2.3.4 Vernacularity and CMCs
Earlier approaches to SMS commonly treated it as a subvariety of CMC, with two empirical approaches salient in that phase of study. Following the application to CMC of corpus methods derived from earlier studies of speech and writing, sociolinguists sought to identify various CMC media as discrete and comparable linguistic varieties, adapting the model of ‘dimensions’ of mode drawn from study of large data-sets (Biber 1988, Yates 1996, Colmot & Belmore 1996, Herring 1996, Hawisher & Selfe 1998). That approach saw rich development in a number of later corpus approaches, notably those by Frehner (2008) and Tagg (2009), and subsequently in the development of very large ‘live corpus’ data-bases (see Chapters 4 and 6). A subdisciplinary facet of this approach took the form of compiling lexical lists based upon corpora of interaction drawn from those particular medium subvarieties (Crystal 2002, 2004, 2008). That earlier method of logging CMC linguistic features drawn from data-sets of unknown provenance has been criticised for showing insufficient attention to participants’ interests, designs and the general surrounding social conditions in which interaction takes place (Dürscheid 2002, Androutsopoulos 2006b, Dürscheid & Frehner 2010). This criticism was met in part by the more sophisticated theoretical and methodological models developed by Herring, which balanced contextual evidence of linguistic variation, including orthographic choice, motivated by demands of situation and register with factors motivating variation caused by the affordances
and constraints of particular media (2007). There was a separate development of approaches built on ethnographic research methods applied to digitally-mediated interaction (e.g. Androutsopoulos 2008, 2012, e.g. Jones 2009). A third approach conceptualised the linguistic and discoursal innovations found in a particular CMC medium through the theoretical perspective of creativity, as this concept was developed and invigorated by the corpus analysis of informal talk, and of related forms of digitally-mediated interaction (Carter 2004, Goddard 2003, 2006a & b, 2009, North 2006). In those approaches, the higher-level creativity associated with valued literary production provided a basis of comparison with comparable sociolinguistic behaviours found operating in interaction which might typically have been deemed as mundane, casual and low status. For example, Goddard examined the ‘literariness’ of the rhetorics used in internet chat interaction (Goddard 2003, 2006a, cited in Carter 2004).
2.4.1 Orthographic choice in SMS as digitally-mediated vernacular address
CMCs, such as SMS, can be thought of as offering opportunities for ‘oralised script’, with little certain ‘need of correct spelling or syntax’. The context does not necessarily require that level of regimentation to be credible and engaging for its intended audience. More than this, respelling may offer some of the properties found in the differential aesthetic of vernacular writing identified by Fiske. Notional deviation from standard forms may function as ‘markers of oralization’: signs recruiting localised vernacular affect, and the kind of evaluations of authenticity and honesty found by sociolinguists to be associated with covert prestige.33. As observed, such markers are indicative of the kind of spoken vernacular which achieves credibility by invoking appeals to social solidarity rather than status. Fiske reminds us that errors may arise out of design or ignorance but their impact remains broadly equivalent in intimating a direct spoken manner of address. Whether such choices are witting or unwitting is in part based on the correspondence between the resourcing of the social and material conditions in which discoursal acts are composed and social consensus around what constitutes literate accomplishment. By treating SMS spelling choice as digitally-mediated vernacularity, the object of enquiry is framed as vernacularity rather than a phenomenon determined by the technological affordances and constraints of a particular CMC medium.
2.4.2 ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc’: after this, therefore, because of this - a caution
I have argued that orthographic innovations found in SMS show a degree of enregistered commonality and convention, deriving in form from analogies based on aural principles of shallow orthographic word formation: <wot> for <what>, <2> for <to>, <luv> for <love>, <dat> for <that> can be found across space and time (see Appendix II). There is also the potential for over-reading evidence about the hetero-graphic provenance of such prior spelt forms.34 So, to illustrate the point, I am not claiming that Pete is drawing from such examples as Dickens’s Pip when he writes <u> for <you> or <r> for <are> in Figure 2.3. While SMS and other vernacular choices reflect a level of routine convention, their means of distribution is by
its nature heterogeneous and hard to monitor. Furthermore, the resources being drawn on may be multiple in provenance, and in motivation. In chapters 5,6 and 7, I show how specific SMS variational choices are often distributed by informal means of uptake which lie outside the contexts of schooling, print and those other relays of institutional context. The evidence presented in that empirical section of this thesis is that such choices are likely to be innovated in the course of situated interaction occurring at an idiolectal, ‘microlectal’, or sociolectal level. According to my respondents, frequent vernacular choice may have various motivations: intuitive analogy, casual allusive reference, accommodation to in-group norms, exemplification in popular culture artefacts such as comics, or some other combined process of happenstance (see Chapter 7), including extemporising shallow orthographic principles from an extended ‘graphabet’ (see Shortis, in press). In arguing that there may be an individual realisation of a collective experience of variational spelling, I am emphasising that spelling conventions are not circumscribed by what is recorded in standardised English, although they also feed indirectly on the patterns to be found in that inscribed regularity.
So, to give another example, the use of the initialism <OMG> evident in the corpus (see chapter 6, Appendix VI) may have a complex provenance. It is not in any simple or direct way resourced by its citation in a 1917 letter with its sly joke about the profusion of initialisms spawned by the profusion of military decorations occasioned by the First World War, or, for that matter, by anecdotal claims and folk theories made by some respondents about the enregisterment of the exclaimed <OMG> by 1990s US talk show host Whoopi Goldberg, supposedly to play on its affordances in marking a dramatic interjection while avoiding blasphemy. <OMG> may have a complex mixture of provenance and motivation. Acronomy is associated with twentieth century scientific, military and industrial social practice; interjections may take euphemistic forms, including those afforded by initialisms. At some level, the etymology of spellings used in vernacular contexts is fluid and unknowable, and possibly irrelevant, except by their recognition and evaluation in a moment of localised interaction. exceptions can be traced back to a provenance in earlier forms of digitally-mediated interaction documented in the pioneering empirical work of Reid, Werry and others. Some are older still as in the following early example.129