Register Analysis of Iranian Students' Text Messages Publisher



Maniati M¹ ; Mashhadi A² ; Khazaie S³
Source: Teaching English Language Published:2020

Abstract

The majority of mobile phone subscribers are able to receive both alphanumeric text and emoji signs through Short Messaging Service (SMS) transmissions, among other functions of mobile phones. The discourse of the SMS texts represents a kind of interaction, for the most part on the boundary between verbal and visual communication. Adopting Halliday's Socio-semiotic Model of Language, this study considered three register variables of filed, mode, and tenor in a text message corpus comprising 2440 SMS messages collected from 122 students at Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences to investigate how the discourse of SMS is affected by the sociolinguistic dimensions of the context of language use. To that end, SMS texts were analyzed and categorized in term of the social interaction that constituted the content of messages. The findings revealed that mobile text messaging is an asynchronous mode of communication which is characterized with particular register variables, and there are also pragmatic reasons in addition to the technical restrictions for the creation of this register and its users actively and selectively draw on the resources of spoken and written discourses in constructing the message. © 2020, Teaching English Language and Literature Society of Iran (TELLSI). All rights reserved.