Apragmaticanalysisofabbreviationsinsocial Mediachats

Student: Princess Iwinosa Iyawe (Project, 2025)
Department of Languages and Linguistics
University of Benin, Benin City, Edo State

Abstract

This research will explore the use of abbreviated language in social media
chats and the pragmatic meaning that can be derived from these shortened
form of words. This analysis will focus on the use of abbreviations,
acronyms, initials, contractions and clipping, in social media chats and how
they can be used to convey meaning beyond the literal text. This research
also shows how these abbreviated words can be used in sentence to
communicate and pass information, using the pragmatic theory of J.L Austin
(speech act theory).
The research provides a brief overview of pragmatic as it relevant to the
study. According to Brasdefer (2015:3) pragmatics is “the study of language
use in context, with actions that are accomplished and negotiated during the
course of social interaction”. His understanding of pragmatics includes both
a social component which embraces socio-pragmatic and cultural
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expectations, and a cognitive component for the interpretation of social
action, be it intentional or not, this cognitive context might include
utterances and non- verbal information such as prosodic information,
gestures and laughter.
In conclusion, the research will then describe the data used for analysis, the
sources of the social media chats and methods used to collect and analyze
the data

Keywords
apragmaticanalysisofabbreviationsinsocial mediachats
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