Herramientas y equipos

Interlocutors make SMS orthographic choice under conditions of relatively fluid external expectation – Sebba’s more ‘permissive regime’ – while being constrained by a range of social and environmental motivations. The typology below reflects this patterned heterogeneity by offering a classificatory framework for spelling choice by dimensions of affordance and polysemic meaning.

So <U> for <you> may be motivated in part by the deep orthographic etymological challenge of a standardised spelling based on past patterns of pronunciation (see OED entry, figure 2.12), which may appear elaborate and illogical in its lack of shallow orthographic correspondence; YOU in any realisation is also the most frequently occurring word in SMS, reflecting its dyadic address (Tagg 2007, 2009;360, 2012;53), so additionally motivating the value of a more economic text-entry method; in addition, the spelling <u> significantly reduces text entry demands on a 12-button phone-pad, reducing <999_666_88> to <88> (Chapter 2b above); in addition, <u> is an easily understood ‘morphogram’, which can be ‘sounded out’, following the principles of ‘constructed homophony’ and combined with other morphemes or orthographic particles (Ryan 2011); and the spelling shows some level of semi-conventionalised recognition, by its being culturally attested in records of vernacular and popular culture back to the nineteenth century, and is still in frequent current use in both those domains (e.g. Pound 1923, Alexander 1930, Herriman 1991, Inge 1990). <U> or <u> conveys semantic nuance and metapragmatic imaginings of conceptual orality, and represents the more vivid mode of reading elicited by respelling (Jaffe 2000, Koch & Oesterreicher 1984); in addition, <u> may function as part of an extended orthographic repertoire by which interlocutors with access to standardised variant forms may align themselves in construals of localised social belonging in the social

networks mediated by CMCs (Georgakopoulou 1997, Paolillo 2001); furthermore, <u> has achieved a measure of enregistered iconicity as an SMS spelling, and may function to index a particular social group or stance of digital identity (Chapter 2, McIntosh 2010 in Deumert & Lexander 2013;535). For some, it may have additional functions. Some respondents suggested it restored vocative localised address which had disappeared following the loss of THOU/THEE in standardised English as the second personal singular forms of familiarised address: the ‘tu/ vous’ (t/v) distinction.79

The <u> for <you> example shows the multiple affordances of respelling, which may not be not fully amenable to the kind of flat classifications used in earlier phases of this study. The use of a letter name (<U>/<u>) sound learnt with the rest of the alphabet by children as a morphogram which may also operate as a homophonous word is a ‘script shift’ within written English but it is likely to be intelligible. <U> for <You> is not simply or necessarily a ‘lexical homophone spelling’, a ‘morphogram’ or a simple transcription into a variational equivalent. It has multiple motivations, and may construe multiple meanings and connotative nuances.80

Figure 4.6 identifies factors which motivate respelling by superordinate functions of text entry reduction, grapheme substitution, cultural allusion and ‘paralinguistic restitution’. It includes contextual factors of text entry difficulty for the particular keyed sequence of numbers (ergonomic pressures); opportunities for shallower orthographic correspondences, principles of constructed homophony (etymological challenges), and likely frequency of the word based on Tagg’s word frequency for SMS (frequency expectation). This revised typology shapes each respelling as offering a particular configuration of affordances and constraints localised to its dimensions on this profile. It attempts to count the application of the categories to over 900 respellings in the corpus constituted by the variant spellings of the 150 Word-Group list explained in Chapter 6.81 _{This was less useful than hoped, because it did not reflect the unique} configurations of potential likely affordance offered by any respelling. The affordances and constraints are as perceived by interlocutors, without any reference to any extrinsic criteria, beyond the fact of the choice not being the standardised, codified form. By this analysis, feature spotting of semiotic forms of respelling offers a way into analysis but not a substitute for it.

This leads to a problematic issue in the methodology. A number of the instruments treat respellings as variant forms, following methods applied to variant spoken realisations in variationist sociolinguistic approaches to features of accent. Tagg used a similar conceptualisation to arrive at her ‘Word-Groups’, which enabled classifications and counts of spellings and respellings (see Chapter 6). Similarly, in Chapter 5 this approach of variant synonyms is applied to achieve a provisional approximation of the level of deviation from standardised forms in a particular text, as indexed by approximate counts of variational features. Other qualitative data collection instruments afford strong evidence that these variant forms were not perceived by interlocutors as synonyms because each variant construed distinctive

meanings. I report and analyse such discussion (Chapters 7 and 8), focusing on the epitomising examples of what was inferred by <soz> and <wot> /<wat>, treated notionally as synonyms for <sorry> and <what> respectively (Chapter 5 and 6). The unsatisfactory nature of typologies, which nonetheless afford provisional insight, illustrates Burawoy’s claim for the extended case study being focused on the ‘imaginative and parsimonious reconstruction of theory to accommodate anomalies’ (1998;5).

typologies, which nonetheless afford provisional insight, illustrates Burawoy’s claim for the extended case study being focused on the ‘imaginative and parsimonious reconstruction of theory to accommodate anomalies’ (1998:5).