A Linguistic Introduction to the Discursive Conventions of Twitter

Abstract

This paper provides an inductively-derived overview of some of the pertinent linguistically-related, empirically-observable discursive phenomena to be found on Twitter, a pupular microblogging site use do publish and exchange messages constrained to 140 characters. A corpus of 11,187 "tweets" derived from 100 public Twitter users over a 48-hour period forms the basis for a Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis approach to the study of user habits, the communicative function of tweets, and three principal "conventions" that help users manage their discourse: use of the "@ symbol", "retweeting" and "hashtagging". The findings reveal that Twitter is used in diverse ways such that users neither constitute a homogenous mass, nor can be easily categorised according to their habits. However, Twitter serves as a key medium for inter-user communication, the maintenance of social relationships, and the exhibitionistic practice of identity performance.