Louise-Amélie Cougnon and Jean-Léon Bouraoui
8Orality and Literacy of Telephony and SMS
Abstract: Interpersonal communication has recently experienced an evolution, if not a mutation, through telephony. By providing a communication tool in every household, telephone-mediated communication (TMC) enabled long distance communication between individuals. It subsequently evolved into a mobile tool: while the preexisting mediated distant exchange typical of telephony was kept intact, the reachability of individuals increased. TMC was restricted to oral communication until it offered a new written service in the form of text messaging. From that moment on, the exchange became asynchronous.
This chapter exposes the features of two main telephone functions, (mobile) calls and texting, and highlights each function’s properties from a linguistic point of view, taking into account the evolution of the object “telephone”. Then, this article looks into the question of orality and literacy which remains a highly controversial issue and proposes to overcome the traditional dichotomy.
Keywords: CMC, literacy, orality, SMS, telephony
1Introduction
Interpersonal communication was decisively marked by the international boom of Telephone-Mediated Communication (TMC) in the 20th century, first with the fixed phone in every household, then with the mobile phone in every pocket. The notion of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) emerged in the academic world at the beginning of the 1980s to qualify the new forms of electronic communication, a part of which is TMC. Technology was then considered as a simple vehicle and researchers did not look into its influence on communication and language. Since then, it has become rather absurd to omit the influence of this medium on the nature of communication (Ko 1996; Panckhurst 1999). Studies tend to converge into one conclusion: the evolution of information processing entails changes in the genres of speech and writing.
By providing a communication tool in every household, TMC enabled long distance communication between individuals. It subsequently evolved into a mobile tool: while the pre-existing mediated distant exchange typical of telephony was kept intact, the reachability of individuals increased. TMC was restricted to oral communication until it offered a new written service in the form of text messaging. From that moment on, the mediated distant exchange became asynchronous.
This chapter explores the features of two main telephone functions: (mobile) calls and texting.
We will first highlight the properties of phone conversations from a linguistic point of view, taking into account the evolution of the object “telephone”. This paper also considers the main research questions and studies carried out on phone conversations. We will then present the short message service (SMS) as one form of CMC, detailing its special characteristics. After that, we will look into the question of orality and literacy which remains a highly controversial issue, mainly regarding CMC. We will propose to overcome the traditional dichotomy by applying the models of Koch/Oesterreicher (2001) and Herring (2001). Finally, we will present the results of our own research and the perspectives in this field.
2Defining Telephone Communication
2.1Language and Telephony
The telephone is an object of everyday life which served for a long time exclusively aural communication. Progressively, textual functions have been added: first came SMS, then with the arrival of smartphones, the Voice Over IP systems and the text message services via Internet (such as WhatsApp, Viber, etc.). In this first part, we will elaborate on the oral communication via telephone, transmitted traditionally through cables and waves. We will then focus on communication via SMS.
To raise the issue of the traits of oral telephonic communication, it is necessary to recapitulate some basic aspects of so-called spontaneous oral communication, which we take from Bouraoui (2008). The concept of spontaneous orality is used in linguistics for every oral production that has not been prepared extensively (like, for instance, a talk learned by heart, or a text read from a teleprompter), as opposed to what is traditionally thought of as literacy. The specific features usually attributed to orality have been described abundantly. The following, non-exhaustive list is based on the works of Blanche-Benveniste (1997) and Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1990).
–The linearity of the sentence: once a word has been pronounced, it is no longer possible to go backwards to correct it, to add or to remove elements in its context, in contrast to what is possible in written discourse. This particularity of orality entails consequences on the speaker’s production strategies. For example, every attempt to correct an element ex post provokes an unexpected structure of the utterance. Likewise, the speaker may need to pause in order to plan the progression of their utterance.
–The flexibility of syntax: many constructions considered as defective in written discourse are accepted in oral discourse.
–Cleft sentences are mostly found in the structure “it/this is X who/that/whom/which, where/when Y.” For example “It was Peter who lent us the money (not Paul).” (Thomson/Martinet 1986, 78; quoted in Nowakowska 2002, 4).
–Use of prosody: Prosody is a generic term to designate the variation of acoustic parameters of the voice. It has multiple uses, some of which can influence the structure of the utterance. For instance, there is the possibility to mark the interrogation solely by rising intonation. In this way, the speaker can avoid the use of means belonging to the written register, like in French interrogatives using est-ce que (“Est-ce que tu viens pour les vacances?”) which is substituted by a rising intonation (“Tu viens pour les vacances?”).
–Use of interjections: Interjections are words used to express the speaker’s emotions (e. g., “super!”) or to reproduce sounds (then called onomatopoeia). For a long time, it was thought that interjections could be used in written discourse as well, but mostly to render orally produced utterances or to simulate them (like in comics). As we will see in the second part dedicated to the new means of written communication, interjections occupy a special place in written discourse that goes far beyond imitation of orality (e. g., excessive vowel lengthening).
–Noise: The reception of oral production may suffer various perturbations according to the quality of the channel and the context: noisy environment, “parasites” on a telephone line, etc.
–Finally, disfluencies: as indicated by their etymology, disfluencies correspond to any interruption or perturbation of fluency, i.e., of the “normal” progress of spontaneous oral production. In contrast to other phenomena specific of spontaneous spoken language (such as clitics, for instance), their occurrences are not produced voluntarily by the speaker. The generic term disfluency covers a disparate number of phenomena and presents multiple modes of manifestation which we will present further down. As opposed to mistakes, they mainly occur in spontaneous orality, but not in written discourse. This latter point is contradicted by some precise usages; for instance, the author of a message in an instant messenger (unlike in chat systems) cannot correct themselves since the text appears in real time, character by character, the interlocutor having access to the writing in progress. Note, for instance, the following types of disfluency: hesitation (the classic “euh” or more generally any sound not corresponding to a word and marking a hesitation), silent pauses (a subjective notion of an abnormal long time of silence between two words), repetitions (any repetition of one or more words), and autocorrection (any correction made by the speaker themselves, consisting in an interruption of the ongoing oral production, excluding discursive correction such as “This is Malika no sorry Marika”).
These peculiarities of oral communication must be added to those defined by the medium of the telephone. Actually, the face-to-face situation traditionally associated with oral communication is henceforth replaced by a voice-to-voice which generally allows the speaker to be disinhibited and to release an intimidating discourse usually associated with face-to-face.68 We will note this as well on the levels of syntax and lexis as on the level of raised issues (cf. Cougnon 2008). As Caron and Caronia explain, “‘Être présent’ ou ‘absent’, ‘être ici’ ou ‘là-bas’ […] ne sont que des étiquettes lexicales qui nécessitent une renégociation”69 of communicative properties:
“Les droits, les obligations, les attentes et même les bonnes manières des participants en vis-à-vis doivent maintenant être négociés en fonction des droits, des obligations et des attentes des ‘participants fantômes’” (Caron/Caronia 2005, 6s.).70
This phenomenon culminates on the one hand with the answering machine, which “offers the vocal cues of speech without the opportunity for feedback from the interlocutor, thus truncating the expected parameters of spoken language” (Baron 1998, 134), and on the other hand with the necessity for the phone owners to explain their not answering a phone call immediately, in particular the obligation to justify it (cf. Licoppe/Heurtin 2001; Salovaara et al. 2011).
Finally, oral telephone communication has experienced an important metamorphosis in the passage to mobile phones, which transformed deeply the relationship of humans to communication and the relationships between humans. As Ling et al. (2005, 96) explain, “the transition from exclusively land-line based telephony to mobile telephony has made interpersonal communication more commonplace”. This common character of communication born from mobile phone communication modifies even language in its private nature: we have moved “from one mobile per household, to one per person, to even, in some cases, multiple mobiles per person” (Haddon 2001, 52). The frequency of telephone conversations rises and the accessibility of people is total. These two features engender a pressure on the speaker who is forced to higher and faster output. These phenomena impact interpersonal relationships, personalities and even language itself, which is directly affected by daily stress. A lot of research has already been conducted on adolescents’ use of telephony (cf. Ling 2005; Ling/Yttri 2002; Rautiainen/Kasesniemi 2000; Ling et al. 1999).
The accessibility of the other to entail communication also engenders a completely new phenomenon: the death of silence. As Caron and Caronia (2005, 38) put it: “Les gens semblent pris par une certaine incapacité de supporter un moment de répit, un moment de réflexion, un moment porteur, un moment pour soi… un silence”.71 In this way, messages and calls are decreasingly less carriers of semantic content (dating, planning, daily organization, declarations, etc.), but rather of simple maintenance of interpersonal relationships.
The fact that telephone communication does not occur face-to-face entails consequences from a cognitive point of view. Indeed, several studies show that the use of the telephone complicates the interaction, making it more difficult to access for children younger than 5 years and for the elderly (cf. Ballagas et al. 2009; Hashizume/Kurosu/Kaneko 2008): besides the sole action of oral communication, there are also tasks like the manipulation of the telephone to reach the interlocutor, handle the reference to objects in the immediate context, open and close the dialogue channel beyond any contextual evidence. On the other hand, the telephone user unconsciously creates a mental representation of their physically absent interlocutor, which supposes an additional cognitive load. This phenomenon is particularly important in the case of phone use when driving a car, a context which has attracted the attention of several studies (namely Trbovich/Harbluk 2003). Yet it is known (cf. Scherer 1986) that the cognitive load has a direct impact on the quality of spontaneous oral production: when it is too high, it provokes difficulties in oral production, observable especially in disfluencies.
Finally, from a more technical point of view, the reduction of frequency range and its compression can negatively affect sound transmission: the consequence of which is a degradation of information such as intonation, of which we know the importance in communication.
Taking these parameters into account is thus important for studies on the specific features of oral interactions via telephone. Furthermore, mobile phones have also introduced another revolution, this time in written communication, the particularities of which we will present in the following sections.
2.2Text messaging, a Computer-Mediated Communication Type
2.2.1Some important terminology
Over the last few years, Computer-Mediated Written Communication (CMWC) has become a subject of intensive discussion, both with regard to its practice and to the controversies it triggers in the media, the population and the academic world. CMWC is defined in different ways that sometimes seem incomplete or imprecise. Herring (2007) suggests the following succinct definition: “Text-based human-human interaction mediated by networked computers or mobile telephony.” On their part, Véronis/Guimier De Neef (2006) refuse the designation CMWC in favor of NWCF (“New Written Communication Forms”, in French NFCE or “nouvelles formes de communication écrite”), covering the totality of written communication spread via digital means (websites, emails, message boards, instant messengers, SMS, blogs, etc.); they think that the designation CMWC does not include the domain of telephony (which they do not consider as a computer) and therefore excludes SMS. In addition to this, the designation referring originally to CMC, “mediated” meaning “serve as intermediate” is, as far as they are concerned, a rare use of the participle which competes all too often with the meaning “popularized through the media”. We find their reasoning interesting although our point of view is slightly different.
Concerning the exclusion of SMS from the domain of information technology, the SMS-enabled mobile phone is a technology that presents electronic components and offers similar functions as a computer. It is in some way a mini-computer allowing users to write and to send SMS, offering orthographic autocorrection, punctuation signs and even emoticons. We thus believe, following Bieswanger (2007), that the medium is indeed a computer. Yet we refuse the adoption of the acronym NWCF for several reasons: firstly, the adjective new is only appropriate for a limited time; we think it does not fit for a type such as e-mail which was introduced about 40 years ago and popularized 20 years ago. Then, NWCF does not refer to information technology or to electronic means; it does not make any allusion to the medium of communication. Yet, as Höflich/Gebhardt (2005, 14s.) explain, the vehicle always impacts in one way or another the language: it “n’est pas un simple véhicule (neutre) pour la transmission de messages. [Il] montre toujours un sens méta-communicatif qui a un effet sur le contenu de la communication.”72 The notion of language vehicle is essential, in that it can refer as well to a machine (the medium or channel of communication) as to a human; all types of CMWC are mediated by a machine (a computer or mini-computer). In some cases, such as e-mail and SMS, it is merely the actual mediation; in others (chat, message boards, network sites, etc.), there are two consecutive mediations operating: the one by computer and the human one (we think of moderators who modify by selection or censorship the content of messages).
We wanted to solve this terminological problem proposing CMWC, which not only preserves the acronym and its definition, but also conserves the relevant elements found in literature: it is indeed a form of communication whose realization is written and whose influencing vehicle is the computer, in its broadest sense.
2.2.2A little history
Research on CMC began in the 1970s with the seminal work of Turoff/Hiltz (1977). CMWC started to be a prolific research area in the 1980s, when e-mail and chat massively entered the workspace (cf. Goodman/Sproull 1990; Rice/Hughes/Love 1989). The approach was mainly sociological, focusing on the working environment and often concluding that CMC had a negative influence on human relationships.
From the 1990s on, research – still mainly in sociology – becomes more objective and oriented toward the impact of CMWC on social relationships (familial, intergenerational, loving, etc.) and the construction of identities (children and adolescents) (Rheingold 1993; Devisme/Dussarps 2010; Paragas 2003; Rivière 2002). Some researchers such as Wei/Xiaoming/Pan (2010), Moynihan/Kabadayi/Kaiser (2010) and Bamba/Barnes (2007) analyze human behavior in CMWC situations, e. g., the use of commercial messages via SMS. Toward the end of the 1990s, linguists start to look into the CMWC domain. Authors such as Mondada (1999), Gains (1999) and Herring (1998) engage in defining the linguistic features, mainly stylistic and interactional, associated with these new types of practice. With the rise of the Internet, interpersonal and mass communication intermingle: more heterogeneous forms of CMWC appear, such as message boards, emails and social network chats. The bounds between private and public life (messages addressed to a limited number of persons vs. messages addressed to a community) become blurred. Text messaging appears in this precise heterogeneous environment during the 90’s and is popularized during the 2000’s. Pioneer sociological and linguistic research on SMS starts in the 2000’s in the Nordic countries. The first studies focus on examples of messages without relying on a corpus (Anis 2001; Cortelazzo 2000; 2001; Davis 1991). Since then, research on SMS has attracted the interest of corpus linguistics which converted it into an independent research object (Fairon/Klein/Paumier 2006a; Guimier de Neef/Fessard 2007; Tagg 2009).
Text messaging particularities and, mainly, the simplifications of the graphic code have been studied by a wide variety of linguists, such as Fairon/Klein/Paumier (2006b), Frehner (2008) and Panckhurst (2009). Logically, this simplification process tends to alarm media, parents and educators, who worry about the impact of new written practices on the mastery of orthography. The wave of anxiety entails a new drive and new directions for research, which finally overcomes the simple answers to mediatic or pedagogical requirements simply affecting linguistics (David/Goncalves 2007; Volckaert-Legrier/Bert-Erboul/Bernicot 2006; Thurlow 2003). From now on, research is about finding out whether the daily use of electronic communication profoundly modifies orthography and even language. Bouillaud/Chanquoy/Gombert (2007), for instance, studied the impact of CMC on orthography in general and, more specifically, on children’s orthography in school compositions. Their research, based on the results of dictations in three classes at different levels, suggests that there is indeed a correlation between mastering CMC and mastering orthography, but this correlation is positive, as opposed to what is commonly believed. Panckhurst (1998) studies orthography in emails and proves that users can easily mix intentional variation and spelling errors, allowing themselves so-called controlled variations from the norm that could actually hide important knowledge gaps. Cougnon (2010) equally concludes that in the majority of cases, it is impossible to decide whether it is an actual error or a particular strategy of CMC, especially when the strategy abridges forms, which is simply a way to deal with the requirements of the medium. These more recent studies lead us to consider the existence of an additional competence, a kind of multi-skill (Jaffré 2010) that enables each speaker and writer to deliberately juggle with various codes according to situation, interlocutor and communication method.
More recently, linguistic studies have diversified and raised heterogeneous subjects such as aspects of dialogue (Rivens Mompean 2007), minority languages (Vold Lexander 2007; 2009; Berruto 2005), code-switching (Cougnon 2011; Atifi 2007), diacritics (Van Compernolle 2011), adverbs (Guimier 2009), etc.
2.2.3SMS and CMC
Concretely, we categorize under the name CMWC communication via SMS, e-mail, instant messaging, chat, message board, Social Network Sites, and other types such as MUD (Multi-User Dungeons) which we will not elaborate upon. These different communicative modes have features in common with SMS.
–E-mail: E-mail is the oldest type of CMWC and still one of the most used. It is a system of message exchange between users who have an electronic mailbox. Email was initially very close to the style and format of a “traditional” letter and does not present a style similar to that of SMS, which is shorter and refined. Yet SMS shares with e-mail its formulae of politeness, opening and closure of the message, which are (as opposed to what is commonly believed) particularly present in SMS (cf. Cougnon 2015).
–Instant messaging and chat: Chat is a service of live, collective textual communication via Internet and based on a common subject or interest. Instant messaging is an interpersonal textual communication service created in 1996 allowing each user to entail a dialogue with the persons of choice by request. Most instant messaging and chat messages are limited in characters (normally between 2,000 and 5,000): this particularity is similar to SMS which is limited to 160 characters. As opposed to e-mail, these forms work mainly on the conversational mode of short questions and answers, which is also the case for SMS.
–Message board: Online discussion forums or message boards appeared in the late 1990s. They are public sites similar to interactive platforms on which the visitors can contribute to discussion subjects linked to fields of interest (ecology, video games, etc.) or to specific target groups (young parents, “emo” adolescents, etc.). The spontaneity of conversation brings message board communication close to SMS.
–Social Network Sites: Social Network(ing) Sites (SNSs) are online services allowing individuals to create a (semi-) public profile and to establish relationships with other individuals signed up in the same system. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are representative examples of SNSs. The reason why we are particularly interested in the phenomenon of SNSs, which were not initially created as a means of communication, but as a platform for social relationships, is that the services have since evolved: most of them do indeed encourage conversational exchanges similar to chat and SMS.
The use of SMS started to spread significantly only at the end of the 1990s. This communication system linked almost exclusively to the mobile phone allows sending messages in packages of 160 characters (this limit can be exceeded, the provider charging then a 2nd SMS). This type of communication, even though asynchronous, is also defined by the immediacy of exchange, which entails a promptness of reaction and thus a coarse style (i.e., without rereading) and a virtual absence of formal requirements (conventions) which leads to a more familiar register. Its organizational norm is specific in comparison to other CMWC types: it is the only service that requires no previous inscription and that does not filter the messages. It allows for mobility, being the only CMWC type that can be practiced whatever the place and the situation, given that the only requirement is a mobile phone.73 SMS is also to be distinguished by its encoding system which does not pass via a computer keyboard. Character encoding in SMS can be done in two ways: either by the multi-tap technique or by a system of autocompletion (predictive text entry).74
2.2.4SMS Properties
In the following, we will specify the features of the written code of SMS.75
a)Abbreviations: The phenomenon of abbreviation can be explained by the necessity for rapidity imposed by the context of SMS (because of its use amidst daily practices), next to the difficulty of encoding via a keyboard, the constraints of space and costs encouraging a brief style, at least in time, if not also in the number of characters. To categorize these phenomena related to abbreviation, we will base our analysis on the typology developed by Tatossian (2008) and Berruto (2005), which we will complete and adapt to the specific context of SMS:
–Graphic abbreviations without phonic incidence: apocope (dim for sp. dime), aphaeresis (lut for fr. salut), syncope (forgt for en. forgot)
–Graphic abbreviations with phonic incidence: phonetization, i.e., graphic representation of phonetic values by a character (kb for cat. que bé), by number (6 for it. dove sei), by sign (pl@ for fr. plate) and by a spelling nearest to the actual pronunciation, to a regional accent or to a special style (fr. representation of /ca/, /co/, /cu/, /qu/, /k/ by /k/)
–Specialization of characters: creation of acronyms (tvtb for it. ti voglio tanto bene)
–Management of white space: tendency to delete white spaces (loveme for love me) and punctuation signs such as the apostrophe and the hyphen (can t for can’t)
b)Emoticons: an emoticon or smiley consists in a combination of characters, mostly punctuation signs that represent (head inclined 90° clockwise) facial expressions and emotions like bursts of laughter, winks, pouts, etc. The concept of the little smiling face, initially yellow, was reused lately as a badge representing the music style house. Consequently, when computer scientists wanted to disambiguate the tone of their first messages exchanged on private servers, aiming to “materialize feelings” (Dejond 2006, 28; translation by the authors), they immediately thought of the little face and the most simple way to schematize it by means of a keyboard.
c)Punctuation, uppercase writing, echo characters: The context of SMS, as well as in other CMWC types, shows particular uses of punctuation signs. We already mentioned the possibility of facial expressions by emoticons. They can also hold a more intense expressive function than in traditional written contexts, adding some paralinguistic information like in the case of multiplication of one sole character. Punctuation in its rhythmic function is observed to be underused. The writers focus exclusively on the expressive and prosodic functions (exclamation and question marks, ellipsis, etc.) The extension does not only concern punctuation, but also the Latin characters: following Tatossian (2008), we will name this phenomenon caractères echo (echo characters). It often occurs with interjections (like sp. nooooooo). This multiplication concerns vowels as well as consonants, which leads us to conclude that this phenomenon does not only represent an imitation of orality but also an intensification of transmitted emotion. The use of uppercase characters can represent either alphabetical pronunciation (in the logic of phonetization of each character) or contribute to expressivity; there is actually a certain implicit convention common to all different CMWC types, suggesting that uppercase text parts should be understood as being shouted. This convention offers thus crucial paralinguistic information. As Marcoccia (2004, 2s.) explains, it is a verbal-amplification through paralinguistic information.
3About Orality and Literacy
3.1A Historical Distinction between Orality and Literacy
Following the major theories in the field, researchers working on the new communication media (cf. Collot/Belmore 1996; Yates 1996) soon tried to situate the new written practices in an intermediate space between orality and literacy, considering a continuum whose extremities would be written discourse (and asynchronous types of CMWC) on the one hand and spoken discourse (and synchronous types of CMWC) on the other. Anis (1998) suggests considering electronic communication as a “hybrid” between written and spoken. These conceptions follow the traditional dichotomous model presenting written and spoken as two opposed manifestations of a sole phenomenon: language. In the traditional conception, CMWC is typically a written manifestation of language. Table 1, adapted from Baron (1998, 137), illustrates some fundamental points of the dichotomous model spoken/written.
Table 1: Properties of the traditional dichotomy spoken/written (adapted from Baron 1998, 137)
| Writing (Endophoric) | Speech (Exophoric) | |
| SOCIAL DYNAMICS: | separated in time and space objective monologue | face-to-face interpersonal dialogue |
| FORMAT: | durable scannable planned highly structured | ephemeral linear access spontaneous loosely structured, including repetitive |
| GRAMMAR: | complex syntax deals with past and future | simpler syntax deals with present |
| STYLE: | formal expository argument-oriented decontextualized abstract | informal narrative event-oriented contextualized concrete |
As a reaction to this dichotomous model, another movement tried to reverse radically this tendency, exposing the similarities between CMWC and orality. For the case of French, we mention e. g., Anis (1998), Luzzati (1991), Marcoccia (2004) and Panckhurst (1998; 2007). Some linguists, among them Ko (1996), stated a clearer convergence of CMWC and spoken discourse, based on the fact that both forms of communication take place in real time, as opposed to older written communication forms like letters and postcards.
Likewise, other authors sought to approach the new communication media to what we call colloquial language, a solution often used to elude the spoken/written dichotomy. Gadet (1989, 3) defines colloquial language as follows: it is not a formal language, of course, but not an oral language, as it can be written. It is not the “language of the people” either, as it is not socially located. It is more of a familiar language that every speaker can use in his daily life, when he’s not observed: it is the everyday language.
Finally, CMWC has also been characterized as being “produced spontaneously” (cf. Cougnon/Fairon 2010). The occasionally high frequency of less formal traits in such writings, associated with other tendencies (the desire to transmit a certain form of expressivity, the dialogic context, the absence of normative authority, the desire to belong to a sociocultural group, etc.) has indeed supported this notion.
All these tendencies show a traditional and dichotomous conception of communicative modes. The modern perspective which we prefer, and which we will present in the following, considers these modes on a continuum according to the communicative situation.
3.2A Modern Perspective
As Höflich and Gebhardt (2005, 23) put it, “un e-mail ou un SMS peut ressembler quelquefois plus à une lettre et d’autres fois plus à un appel téléphonique.”76 Indeed, some characteristics of SMS production seem to stem from orality, showing features of spontaneous or even colloquial communication. It is therefore difficult to define SMS in terms of genre. Following Charaudeau/Maingueneau (2002, 280), we believe that to describe SMS, and CMWC in general, we must take into account “l’ancrage social du discours, […] sa nature communicationnelle, […] les régularités compositionnelles des textes [et] les caractéristiques formelles des textes produits.”77 From a discursive perspective, the functionality of CMWC “à l’implicite, sur présupposés partagés, sousentendus et inférences conversationnelles” (Gadet 2004, 36),78 comparable to the functionality of spoken discourse (as opposed to written discourse which tends to decontextualize, imposing explicitness), is manifest and recurrent, but these features are neither regular nor omnipresent; they do not represent a constitutive trait.
It is too dichotomous to split communication into “oral” and “written” (cf. Cougnon/Ledegen 2010) since it risks confounding the medium of communication with the properties of language. We follow here Gadet stating that:
“Il faut avant tout opposer le médium […] et la conception […]. Le médium relève de la dichotomie, la conception du continuum. Aussi un énoncé d’oral médial peut-il avoir des caractéristiques discursives d’écrit, ou l’inverse” (Gadet 2004, 33).79
We situate ourselves therefore in continuation of Véronis/Guimier De Neef (2006), who base their conclusions on the works of Blanche-Benveniste and refute the argument that these new forms of communication stem from an “oralized written” or from a “written orality”. For them, the question is all about registers and frequencies; they explain:
“Lorsque l’oral devient formel, on y retrouve les tournures caractéristiques de l’écrit […], et à l’inverse l’écrit informel utilise les tournures fréquentes à l’oral (double marquage, clivées, etc.)” (Véronis/Guimier De Neef 2006, 239).80
As the studies on e-mails conducted by Panckhurst (1998; 1999) show, we find in these writings informal traits alternating with formal traits, like the negation particle “ne” which can be omitted or maintained. Furthermore, certain specific traits of written discourse are always present; this is the case, for instance, for interruptions of communication, an option that does not require agreement of the interlocutor or previous notification. Moreover, some fundamental traits of orality are absent, for instance hesitations and (non-functional) repetitions; in sum, everything that can be erased in writing.
We will not speak either of informal, colloquial or spontaneous communication. The designation “spontaneous” would imply that there is no linguistic or extralinguistic constraint influencing the language and that the SMS user would express themselves completely freely. Yet there are at least the constraints of adaption to the interlocutor: in this sense, there is a clear difference between formal messages addressed to elderly persons or with a different status, and the messages addressed to classmates and other individuals of the same status. Likewise, the informal or colloquial character of this communication type depends largely on the communicative situation in which the speaker is engaged.
To conclude, we suggest to adopt, as explicated previously, the terminology CMWC.
In terms of communicative parameters, these writings are situated mainly toward the pole of linguistic immediacy (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 2001), as opposed to linguistic distance. This hypothesis is equally corroborated by Weininger/Shield (2004) in their analyses of simultaneous electronic exchanges. We therefore fully support the theory of a conceptional continuum between “communicative distance” and “communicative immediacy”. Nevertheless, we bear in mind that even though some phenomena of CMWC are clearly situated toward the pole of immediacy, a large number of other phenomena are positioned rather toward the pole of distance. Hence our hypothesis: a certain number of linguistic phenomena can be assimilated to distance, others to immediacy, which entails the importance of a continuum to situate intermediate phenomena. This conclusion is also valid for the characterization of telephonic communication. Our hypothesis states the impossibility to categorize CMC and phone conversations as all unified, labeled spontaneous language, oral language or colloquial, immediate or distant, given the amount of existing variations among CMWC that we want to highlight. In the table of parameters characterizing the communicative behavior of interlocutors, elaborated by Koch/Oesterreicher (2001), we note for instance that even if SMS is clearly a private form of communication (1), the interlocutor (2) is not necessarily an intimate and emotionality (3) is not constantly high (informative SMS of the type I’ll be at the train station in 20m).
Table 2: Parameters characterizing the communicative behavior of interlocutors related to the situational and contextual determinants (adapted from Koch/Oesterreicher 2001, 586)
| Immediacy | Distance | ||
| 1. | Private communication | 1. | Public communication |
| 2. | Intimate addressee | 2. | Unknown addressee |
| 3. | High degree of emotionality | 3. | Weak degree of emotionality |
| 4. | Attachment to situation and action | 4. | Non-attachment to situation and action |
| 5. | Inclusion of situational reference | 5. | Exclusion of situational reference |
| 6. | Face-to-face interaction | 6. | Space-time separation |
| 7. | Dialogicity | 7. | Monologicity |
| 8. | Spontaneous communication | 8. | Planned communication |
| etc. | etc. |
Likewise, the communication via telephone is situated mainly toward the pole of immediacy because it is a rather private and dialogic form of communication and the interlocutors are usually familiar with each other; yet, on the other hand, this is not always the case and the communication may be prepared and thematically fixed, which would situate it toward the pole of distance.
3.3Features of Orality and Literacy: a Faceted-Communication Scheme
Instead of forcing the resemblance of CMWC with written or spoken discourse, we prefer to name its concrete features. As we have done above with Koch/Oesterreicher’s (2001) model, we propose to detail these specificities by means of the faceted classification scheme by Herring (2001), which is specifically adapted to CMC. Herring believes that language is necessarily affected by technological variables such as synchrony, granularity (the possible length of a text), etc. This is why the author proposes a faceted classification scheme (cf. Herring 2007) of different CMC types corresponding to the medium and the communicative situation. We will complete this classification system.
A first set of parameters comprises technological characteristics, such as the protocols, the servers and the clients of a CMWC service, the material, the software and the interfaces presented to the users. This does not mean that the author admits a strong influence of the medium on the actual communication, quite the contrary, but she insists on the importance to include all the characteristics that may allow defining at the best the specific circumstances entailing a specific communication type. The second set of facets comprises social features such as information about the participants, their relation among each other, the objective and the subject of the communication and the language used.
The following table uses Herring’s facets in order to compare (oral) telephony and (written) SMS. The bold lines mark the differences between the two types, showing that they are indeed rather close to each other.
Note the 4 “variable” lines highlighting the flexibility of the features of these two communication types corresponding to the communicative situation, the addressee, etc.
Table 3: Facets of SMS and telephone communication
| Facet | SMS | Telephony |
| Anonymacy | Identity revealed | Identity revealed* |
| Objective | Multiple | Multiple |
| Communication channels | Text, image | Voice |
| Characteristics of participants | Variable | Variable |
| Quoting | No | No |
| Delay of response | Variable | Immediacy |
| Filters | Yes: number blocking | Yes: number blocking |
| Format | Linear order of messages | Linear order of messages |
| Norms | No group moderation, no charter, but implicit politeness conventions | No group moderation, no charter, but implicit politeness conventions |
| Private/public | Private | Private |
| Conversational structure | 2 or more** | 2 or more** |
| Subject/theme | Variable | Variable |
| Permanency of transcription | Persistent by default | Non persistent by default |
| Synchrony | Asynchronous | Synchronous |
| Maximal size | 160 characters (additional costs in case of exceedance) | No |
| Tone | Variable | Variable |
| Message transmission | Message by message | Message by message |
* Exceptions are possible.
** Recent systems allow for grouped sending of SMS and for conference calls.
4Perspectives
The field of CMC is in full effervescence in the academic world. Worldwide, a growing number of research groups are collecting data originating mainly from their environment and their students. Corpora of considerable size and collected in an objective way are by now rare, especially for the case of SMS, a particularly private material. The international project sms4science81 coordinated by the UCL (Belgium) offers large SMS corpora (counting, for instance, more than 1 million messages only in the Francophone corpus) in French, Italian, English and German; these corpora are perpetually extended. The corpora can be consulted as a whole or split by country: Belgium, France, Canada, Switzerland, etc. There is also the corpus of the National University of Singapore comprising 45,000 messages in English and 31,000 in Chinese. Caroline Tagg (2009) from the University of Birmingham elaborated an important SMS corpus in English.
The studies we conducted personally led to two major conclusions with respect to this chapter: the convergence of the digital and the mediatic, and the development of a pluricompetence.
Firstly, we have to state since the beginning of the 2000s that people have tended to fuse their media of communication: first including the possibility to send SMS from the computer (via special web services) or to make phone calls (via applications such as Skype). Next, the arrival of smartphones allowed for the use of instant messaging, e-mail and social network sites on the small screen. The mix has been effectuated up to the applications, which, as we can see in the case of Facebook, have fused chat messages and mails. As a consequence, it has become difficult to attribute specific features to a particular type of CMC: the constraints of the restrained keyboard are now also found in all smartphone applications, phone conversations can have the quality offered by the mobile WiFi or also be adorned with a high definition video from a mobile cable computer. Thus, we pose ourselves the question whether a classification of different CMC types can in the future still be pertinent.
Secondly, we have worked a lot on the potential “bad influence” of new communication media on the orthographic competences of young generations, and on the general decline of linguistic competences. To do so, we analyzed corpora of SMS (cf. Cougnon 2015) and Facebook messages (cf. Maskens et al. 2015). We compared the speakers’ productions in different communicative situations. The results obtained by now show that there is a large graphic variation in the speakers’ productions, especially among younger people, but there is no actual incompetence: in the majority of cases, we observe that the speakers do master orthography and that they play with language with the goal to shorten or to transmit expressivity.
Research perspectives in this field are still numerous with regard to the quality and quantity of data collected in the corpora mentioned before. At present, we believe that a totally original research perspective would be to concentrate on diachronic aspects of CMC: How did this communication evolve through time, even in only a few years? It would imply to elaborate a new corpus of data from a previously-studied region in order to apply scrupulously a similar methodology to an identical population. The question is to find out whether such a study is methodologically possible.
Another perspective concerns the possible convergence between new means of communication (like WhatsApp and Viber) with the already more traditional ones: Is Twitter a mode whose linguistic practices have evolved on the basis of SMS or Facebook? In which way do WhatsApp messages and Facebook instant messaging resemble each other, and are they both to be seen in the tradition of telephony or of written letters? The project Thumbs4Science82 tries to answer these questions (among others) concerning discursive traditions.
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