Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique: Volume 59 -

Hybridité et variation dans les SMS : Le corpus Texto4Science et l’oralité en français montréalais
Hélène Blondeau, Mireille Tremblay, Patrick Drouin
Published online by Cambridge University Press:

06 January 2016, pp. 137-165
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This article presents an analysis of a Montreal French corpus of text messages and considers the link between text messaging, and both spoken and written language. This corpus is part of a larger corpus of text messages sent by mobile phone (Texto4-Science). Our study focuses on two morphosyntactic variables for which an important sociostylistic variation has been reported in Montreal French: the alternation between the strong pronouns nous/nous autres ‘we/us’ (as non clitics), and between the subject clitics on/nous ‘we’. Their comparison in the text messages corpus and in spoken corpora shows that while text messages tend to approximate spoken language, they are not a perfect reflection of it. Generally, the hybridity of text messages can be conceived in the following manner: text messages obey a double standard (spoken and orthographic) and allow for occasional transgressions (formal markers associated with the written language and nonstandard spelling reflecting the spoken language).

Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique