Tweeting Out Loud: Prosodic Orthography on Social Media

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the connections between orthography and spoken prosody in relation to English CMC (Computer Mediated Communication). Beginning from the theory that certain nonstandard uses of orthography in CMC are intended to convey prosodic information and that their meaning in a text arises as a result of the prosodic interpretation, I designed and implemented a novel production study to test for these associations. The study compares various prosodic features of productions of tweets written with nonstandard orthographic features to productions of minimal pair versions of the tweets across 35 participants. While still limited on its own, when combined with other methods of analysis the production study allows for a great range of prosodic theories to be tested and for unexpected associations to make themselves apparent. Nine specific nonstandard orthographic patterns are examined in this project. First, five different variations on nonstandard capitalization are compared, including All Caps, All Lowercase, Increasing Caps, Word Caps, and Alternating Caps. After determining the typical productions of All Caps and All Lowercase, the three other capitalization patterns are analyzed for similarities to the two basic patterns as well as the overall iconic function of capitalization. The Repeated Letters pattern is the only spelling-based pattern examined, and it is compared in particular to the Word Caps pattern due to the similarity of the localization of the nonstandard orthography to a single word. Finally, three punctuation patterns are examined, including Repeated Question Marks and Repeated Exclamation Points (in comparison to the Repeated Letters pattern) and the Consecutive Punctuation pattern, as a examples of the strength of conventional prosodic associations under nonstandard circumstances. Taken together, these analyses offer support for the use of nonstandard orthography as an indicator of prosody, as well as providing a nuanced and occasionally surprising picture of how nonstandard orthography is interpreted in CMC contexts.