#michelle mcsweeney

[allthingslinguistic]

Episode 1: Hyphen-gate - Subtext

Today we're discussing a personal story that involves a bit of a punctuation crisis. Sarah's roommate Hannah and friend Victoria are here to weigh in—is it weird to use hyphens when you're texting someone new?

Subtext is a new podcast about linguistics, texting, and relationships. It’s by Sarah Ellis and Michelle McSweeney, who won the Five Minute Linguist competition at the Linguistic Society of America for her research about the linguistics of texting. 

Here’s the podcast description: 

Relationships are confusing, especially when they're digital. What did she mean by putting a period? Why did he wait so long to respond? We're here to talk about your toughest texting questions (and share a few stories of our own).

The first episode is about hyphens. From the description: 

Today we’re discussing a personal story that involves a bit of a punctuation crisis. Sarah’s roommate Hannah and friend Victoria are here to weigh in—is it weird to use hyphens when you’re texting someone new?

Fischer, Garcia 2015. Singles in America. Match.com

2013. Vandergriff, Emotive communication online

McSweeney, 2018. Can I get a comma?

You can listen to Subtext on iTunes, Google Play Music, or Buzzsprout.

[thelingspace]

Lol beyond laughter

This past weekend was the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, and beyond participating in a panel myself with Gretchen from @allthingslinguistic and a lot of other exciting people, and interviewing some linguists for the future, I heard about a lot of really interesting research! So we’re going to be sharing some of this stuff for the next bit here.

First up: why do people use “lol”? It’s long since moved beyond just signaling that you’re actually laughing; it shows up in a lot of other contexts, too. But is there something that unites all lol’s uses? Michelle A. McSweeney decided to look at this question by checking when “lol” shows up in the Bilingual Youth Texts corpus, a collection of 45,597 messages donated by 15 Spanish/English bilingual 18-21 year olds in New York City. And “lol” is super common in those texts - it shows up 14% of the time. McSweeney went and tagged all those “lol”s with what they were meant to communicate in the text.

So like, "lol” shows up in cases with flirting:

1: What you guys doing?

2: Hablando lol

1: About me I bet

2: Lol un poco

Or with requesting empathy:

1: Me alegro <3 (I’m happy <3)

2: Lol estoy haciendo un ensayo :’(   (Lol I’m writing an essay :’( )

Or with hedging confrontation, trying to defuse tension from situations, etc. But where don’t you find it? Well, you don’t get it in small talk; in expressing love for another person (so no “I love you lol”); in direct statements of fact or questions. So what’s different between these?

McSweeney argues that it comes down to what you want to do with your speech act when you’re texting. It’s a marker that a message isn’t meant to be read literally, that the force of your text should be read in between the lines. Specifically, the illocutionary force, or the intended effect of what the person is saying. “lol” is a mismatch sign. You want your “I love you” to actually mean “I love you”; “lol I’m writing an essay” is more of a sign that you want some friendly support than a report on your activities.

When we talk face to face, or over the phone, there are lots of other markers - in our tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, prosody, and more - that tell us this information. But with text, we’re lacking all of those things. Instead, we’ve morphed “lol” into that kind of marker. Which is perhaps why it shows up so much in our texts. ^_^