Phonological Factors in Social Media Writing

摘要

Does phonological variation get transcribed into social media text? This paper investigates examples of the phonological variable of consonant cluster reduction in Twitter. Not only does this variable appear frequently, but it displays the same sensitivity to linguistic context as in spoken language. This suggests that when social media writing transcribes phonological properties of speech, it is not merely a case of inventing orthographic transcriptions. Rather, social media displays influence from structural properties of the phonological system.