Sms Texting Among Gsm Users in Nigeria: a Morpho-syntactic
Sms Texting Among Gsm Users in Nigeria a Morpho-syntactic
Abstract of Sms Texting Among Gsm Users in Nigeria a Morpho-syntactic
The gradual shift from the offline to online communication such as text messaging has given way to innovative
language-short forms whose morph-syntactic aspects have permeated the linguistic characters of the texters. For
about a decade now, there exist a growing body of research on mobile phone text messaging by linguists but
only very few have been done in the area of morpho-syntax. The work therefore, examines the aspects of
morphology and syntax found in SMS text messages. It adopts a combination of Chomsky (1957)
Transformational and Silverstein (1976) Meta pragmatic theories. Through the move-a rule and the pragmatic
method of analysis, the study discovers that there are morpho-syntactic variations among texters which are
problematic to formal English. It also reveals that movement of constituents from one slot to the other is a
common feature in text messages though some of such movements violates move-a rules. Other syntactic
differences are reflected in form of subject/agent, object, determiner, to-infinitive deletions/omissions. Wordorder
violations, contractions, abbreviations, acronyms, compounding, blends and lack of punctuation also
characterize morpho-syntactic elements in SMS texts. Morphologically, there is no hard and fast rule with
regards to the users’ choice of letters in abbreviation. Texters use a combination of letters and numbers in their
text messages and in some cases they use only numerals. The texters obviously down-play the orthographic and
syntactic rules of the formal English language for their convenience.
Keywords: SMS texts, Nigeria, mobile phone, morpho-syntactic analysis.