Linguistic Features of English in Twitter

Maria Cecilia  M. Jalbuena,

Linguistic Features of English in Twitter

Abstract:

This paper looked into the tweets of five prominent personalities in each of the following fields - education, entertainment, social life, politics and personal level -and analyzed the tone as well as the typing styles embedded in the lexical, grammatical and rhetorical features of the tweets. The content words or lexical features of English used in the five categories of tweets studied were neutral number nouns, singulars and plurals and proper nouns; unmarked adverbs, adverb particles and wh-adverbs; unmarked adjectives, comparatives and superlatives; the base form of the verb “be”, past form of the verb “be”, -ing form of the verb “be”, infinitive of the verb “be”, past participle of the verb “be”, -s form of the verb “be”, base form of the verb “do”, infinitive of the verb “do”, infinitive form of the verb “have”, base form of the lexical verb, past tense form of the lexical verb, -ing form of the lexical verb, infinitive of the lexical verb , past participle form of lexical verb and -s form of the lexical verb. Majority of the Twitter users from the five categories used lexical verbs followed by nouns, adjectives and adverbs in their tweets. The dominant grammatical features of English used in Twitter are prepositions; indefinite, personal, reflexive and wh-pronouns; auxiliary verbs, the base form of the verb “be”, past form of the verb “be”, -ing form of the verb “be”, infinitive of the verb “be”, past participle of the verb “be”, -s form of the verb “be”, base form of the verb “do”, past form of the verb “do, infinitive of the verb “do”, infinitive form of the verb “have”, base form of the lexical verb, past tense form of the lexical verb, -ing form of the lexical verb, infinitive of lexical verb, past participle form of the lexical verb and -s form of the lexical verb; conjunctions; articles and interjections. Among the tweets analyzed, more posts utilized formal rather than informal language. More emoticons than punctuation marks were used by Twitter users to express themselves. Moreover, the Twitter users analyzed had more positive than negative sentiments in their tweet posts. Future researchers can expand this study and look into the other grammatical features of Twitter English that may be a basis for instructional materials development.