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SMS TEXTING AMONG GSM USERS IN NIGERIA: A MORPHO-SYNTACTIC

Abstract

The gradual shift from the offline to online communication such as text messaging has given way to innovative language-short forms whose morph-syntactic aspects have permeated the linguistic characters of the texters. For about a decade now, there exist a growing body of research on mobile phone text messaging by linguists but only very few have been done in the area of morpho-syntax. The work therefore, examines the aspects of morphology and syntax found in SMS text messages. It adopts a combination of Chomsky (1957) Transformational and Silverstein (1976) Meta pragmatic theories. Through the move-a rule and the pragmatic method of analysis, the study discovers that there are morpho-syntactic variations among texters which are problematic to formal English. It also reveals that movement of constituents from one slot to the other is a common feature in text messages though some of such movements violates move-a rules. Other syntactic differences are reflected in form of subject/agent, object, determiner, to-infinitive deletions/omissions. Wordorder violations, contractions, abbreviations, acronyms, compounding, blends and lack of punctuation also characterize morpho-syntactic elements in SMS texts. Morphologically, there is no hard and fast rule with  regards to the users’ choice of letters in abbreviation. Texters use a combination of letters and numbers in their text messages and in some cases they use only numerals. The texters obviously down-play the orthographic and syntactic rules of the formal English language for their convenience.

Keywords: SMS texts, Nigeria, mobile phone, morpho-syntactic analysis.

1.0 Introduction

Language has been an integral part of communication and human beings being compulsive communicators continue to find new ways of communication in an attempt to bridge the distance between individuals. Internet technology has greatly influenced human life especially in the area of communication. Following the wave of the technology, Wiki (2008) notes that there is an overwhelming access to different forms of media with an increase  in interconnectedness of peoples and races around the entire world. According to Adejub (2010:2), “the entire world comprising six continents and many countries of about 6,881,800,000 (as the estimated population United States Census Bureau) has been reduced to a global village through the dynamism of communication with the aid of information technology (ICT).” ICT is a term used to refer to a range of technologies for gathering, storing, retrieving, processing, analyzing and transmitting information. The SMS (short message service) which serves as the latest way of quick communication since the invention of SMS texts came alongside with the global technology Lexemes are used to facilitate the effectiveness of this device. The effectiveness of this medium of communication depends on the appropriate combination of the words it carries, and in the combination of these words lie what is known as the message. This communication technique is currently in use in all areas of lifeoffices, schools, markets, homes, advertisements, churches, etc. The component service (the phone) is unique for its smallness and mobility. Due to the smallness, there is a limited space which leaves subscribers no choice other than pursue simple sentence structures and other language short-forms to enable them exhaust their message. Crystal (2008) contributing to the small character space of the mobile phone contends that subscribers have created new linguistic forms to enable them maximize the available space and at the same time, make sure they say all that is to be said to the understanding of the receiver. Supporting this view, Rafi (2010) observes that through the new written conventions, texters have developed a written form of sounds that replaces the ability to hear spoken utterances. The study therefore, seeks to examine the morpho-syntactic analysis of the innovative language-form (Text messaging).

1.1 Methodology

The sources of data for our analysis comprise the text messages sent and received by the students of the

University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Our choice of area of study is guided by the fact that University of Nigeria, Nsukka is a federal university where the students comprise peoples from different tribes of the nation. Data was collected from fifty University students comprising both male and female. A total of seventy-five messages (consisting of educational, seasonal, love, religious and other messages that express well wishes) were collected from the participants whose messages were taken in confidence. This guarantees the researcher’s permission to analyze the messages. The samples of the data are found in the Appendix.

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2. SMS Text Messaging: An Overview

The Short Message Service (SMS) is the part of a phone, web or mobile communication system used globally for

the exchange of short text messages between discussants. SMS according to Oladoye (2011:16) was first used in

December 1992 by a 22-year old named Neil Papworth. He says that the concept of SMS was developed by

Friedhelm Hillebrand, Bernard Ghillebaert and Oculy Silaban in 1984, in the Franco-German GSM cooperation.

Since the invention, the mobile telephone has been the latest way to communicate quickly. Text messaging is a general term that is used to refer to the short written messages usually sent through phone and other portable

devices over a network. Ong’onda (2011:1) observes that the terms ‘text messaging’ or just ‘texting’ refers to the

brief typed messages sent using the Short Message Service (SMS) of mobile/cell phones, personal digital

assistants (PDAs), smart phones or web browsers. Uhunmwangho (2009:27) defined a text message as “any

linguistic event, usually a written form of speech that is imbued with meaning”. Doring (2002:7) notes that

“SMS communication allows for a reasonable use of syntactic and lexical short forms, which save character

space, or touches of the handset keys, as compared with using the full forms of words”. In the words of Rafi

(2010:3) it pursues simple sentence structures for communication. They also make use of written sound of words

and in other cases bring code mixing into it. Rafi further observes that SMS syntactic and lexical choices by the

texters are not so different from a child language; for instance a child expresses his feelings through simple

present progressive tense e.g. mom eating for ‘Mom is eating’ and Eating for ‘I am eating’

The equipment in its uniqueness affords most texters a much economized means of communication (Habluetzel

2007), (Thurlow 2003) and (Thurlow and Poff 2011). The Short message Service gives the subscriber the

advantage of choosing a specific number of words that would communicate comprehensively, but briefly, with

minimum cost- Chiluwa (2007:96). Due to the inconveniences caused by the limitation in the time and space that

comes along with the Short Message Service, texters are forced to find new ways for sending text messages.

Letters and numbers are also often combined (or used alone) for compression and convenience. Discussing on

the brevity of the electronic discourse, (Crystal 2001), (Hard af Sagerstad 2002) and (Thurlow 2003) note that

the technical restrictions of text messaging have led to the development of language short forms in SMS

communication.

The sender of a text message is known as a texter. SMS text service itself has different colloquialisms depending

on the region in that it may simply be referred to as a text in North America, India, Australia, Nigeria etc. Our

area of study geographically is therefore, morpho-syntactic analysis of SMS text messaging in Nigeria.

2.1 Nigeria and the SMS Texts

The global technology for Mobile communication notes Alabi (2010a) was introduced in Nigeria in the year

2001 and following the inception, he observes that SMS text messaging has become a major medium of passing

across information from one person to another irrespective of the distance between the ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’.

MTN, which happened to be the first GSM Company in Nigeria, commenced its commercial services in August

2001. In the words of Bodomo (2010:110) mobile phone in Nigeria was introduced in 2001 with the evolution of

Global System for Mobile Communication which two people or more exchange messages by coding and

decoding texts received and sent from their cell phones”. Oladoye writes that the commencement brought the

Short Message Service (SMS) to limelight in the Nigerian communication system; ever since then, text

messaging has taken different turns. SMS text messaging as used by modern handsets is a part of the Global

System for Mobile communication (GSM), as a means of sending messages of more than 160 characters to and

from GSM mobile handsets. In Nigeria, most SMS messages are mobile - to - mobile text messages, although the

standard supports other types of broadcast messaging as well. Linguists and scholars of related fields have

conducted researches on the general use of SMS text messaging since it became a part of the Global System of

communication in Nigeria. Such scholars include: Chiluwa (2007), Egbe (2009), Uhunmwangho (2009), Alabi

(2010ab), Adejub (2010) Oladoye (2011), etc. Chiluwa focused on the effects of the limited interface allowed by

the SMS to the users and the Nigerianess of SMS messages in English. Egbe spoke elaborately on the varying

possibilities offered by text messages and acknowledges that many users sending greetings at Christmas, Easter,

Sallah, anniversaries, wedding ceremonies or events are no longer by the use of cards but through text messages

by the mobile handset. Even invitations to events, meetings and high powered gatherings are sent through the

mobile discourse. Oladoye (2011:46) discussing on the importance of the SMS as a means of communication in

Nigeria comments as follows:

SMS text messaging has become a vital part of our communication system in Nigeria. It serves as a cheaper

alternative for many Nigerians today, in which they pay less, as against the higher costs on oral phone calls. It

has found a place for itself and it has come to stay. Various new devices are now developed to promote its usage

e.g. Blackberries and I-phones. In Nigeria today, people receive invitations to employment interviews, warnings,

announcements, etc via text messages. SMS text messaging is moving fast on a wide range in the Nigerian

communication system and even in the whole of Africa

From the foregoing, there seem to exist a growing body of research on mobile phone texts messaging by

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linguists but only very few have been done on the area of morpho-syntax. Nevertheless, we shall review them as

they constitute our base.

2.2 Empirical studies

Nwankwo (2011) examines the syntactic errors among GSM users and discovers such dominant features as

omissions of punctuation marks, incorrect phrasal combinations, spellings and the use of abbreviations. She

warns that the users of this innovative language should be conscious of these deviations not to transfer the habit

in writing to the formal English. Iloelunachi (2011) studies the relationship between the syntax of the SMS

language style and the language of media. Comparing their syntactic structures, his result reveals that SMS

language format are structured differently from that of formal writing. He therefore, strongly suggests that

learners should be taught on how best to apply the forms with due recognition for formal and informal contexts

while writing. Oladoye (2011) investigates the syntactic and lexico-semantic analyses of selected SMS text

messages among the university of Ilorin students. The result shows that among the word classes, the most

frequently occurring element is the noun with 39.22%. It discovers that all the text messages had noun elements

in them. The most prominent word sequence was the clause which had 20.5%. Ogbonna (2012) made a

sociolinguistic study of the local colouration in mobile phone text messaging in Nigeria. Adopting Hymes’ (1962)

Ethnography of Speaking, she discovers that young Nigerian text composers blend their knowledge of Nigeria

social, linguistic, cultural, political and economic settings with their knowledge of conventions of organization of

SMS messaging within Nigerian context to create different types of messages that are meaningful. The study

reveals that for most Nigerian youths, the major purpose of texts is social bonding and in expressions that are

Nigeria specific. However, the present study examines the morpho-syntactic aspects of text messages as

contained in the messages sent or received by the students of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

2.3 Morpho-Syntax

2.3.1 Morphology and morphological processes

Morphology studies the internal structure of words. It is the way the speech sounds are stringed together to form

words. Morphological processes are those processes employed in linguistics to form new words in a language.

Sanmi (2010) identified eight ways by which words are formed. They include: affixation, compounding

reduplication, acronym, blends, conversion, back-formation, clipping etc. We shall only discuss the

morphological processes of Compounding, Blending and Acronyms

2.3.2 Compounding is neither inflection nor derivation; it is a combination of two or more independent words.

The product of the words formed stands as a free morpheme. According to Lyons (1868), Zwicky (1985) and

Sanmi (2010:59), the compound formed is a morphological complex unit in linguistics; it is unquestionable

among linguists. It can be formed by adding a noun to another noun as in star lights, noun to a verb as in

kickback etc.

2.3.3 Blending

It is a process in morphology where new words are formed by combining the initial and the final segments of

two or more already existing words in a language. Adams (1973) says that blends words made of parts of

morphemes usually formed by joining the parts of two diff’ words together. Sanmi (2010:65) observes there are

two types of blends; the first cannot be analysed into constituents but contains elements which may remind us of

other words similar to them. For instance smog tells us of smoke and fog. Quirk (1986) contends that the second

type of blend consists of words seen as contracted forms of compounds, that is, words in which one element is

fragmentary when compared to its corresponding uncompounded form. Example, Breakfast + Launch → brunch,

carpet + cafetaria → capetaria

2.3.4 Acronyms

They are new words formed from joining the first letters of two sets of words. Oladoye (2011:36) writes that

“when the initial letters are pronounced with the name of the letters of the alphabet, they are called

‘alphabetisms’ but when they are pronounced like individual words, they are called acronyms”. Examples

include: WHO, NEPA, YES (Youth Empowerment Scheme), AIDS etc. The morphological style is languagespecific,

that is, the word formation rule differs across languages. However, in this study we are specifically

concerned with the formation rule in English language

2.4. Syntax

It is the related area of linguistics which studies the patterns that governs the way in which words are combined

to form phrases, sentences or clauses (word-order topologies). It can be seen as constructive rules according to

which words are combined into sentences using the rules of the grammar of that language. The study anchors on

Chomsky’s (1965) syntactic component of grammar. He argues for the innate ability of every normal child in

acquiring a grammar of a language that can generate infinite number of grammatical structures using syntactic

rules and at the same time detects the ungrammaticality in constructions. We shall also apply Chomsky’s (1957)

rules of transformation which was advanced by Baker (19780), Radford (1981) etc. Ndimele (2003:160) holds

that a transformation is a grammatical operation which enables two levels of structural representation (Deep and

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surface structure) to be placed in correspondence. The rule responsible for such operations in syntax is known as

move-alpha. The transformational operations we shall discuss here are movement and deletion.

2.5. Meta Pragmatic Theory: An overview

Metapragmatic theory was propounded by silvestein (1976) and his associates. Leech (1983) says that the theory

involves metapragmatic reasoning and reasonability. He observes that the reasonability of the metapragmatic

denotes ‘user reasonability’. By ‘user reasonability’, he means that it is the users that deem the rules of text

composition reasonable. This contention implies that it is the sender and the receiver of text messages that deem

the content of the text reasonable for the understanding of the intended messages. The key principles of Meta

pragmatic theory include the principles of economy and efficiency. Though this theory seems to belong to the

area of sociolinguistics, but the reason for using it in the analysis of the selected text messages is its ability in

capturing the reasonability and the economy of the texters.

Having made a review of both theoretical and empirical data, we shall examine the morpho-syntactic aspects

of the data on the text messages collected just as the way the words, phrases, sentences and clauses are formed

by the texters in this work. The analysis is based on the standard norms of the structure of a sentence (English

language). It will be discussed under the following headings: movement transformation, Deletion, Word-order

violation, omissions, contractions, abbreviations, acronyms, etc.

3. Morpho-syntactic Analysis

3.1 Movement

From the data, we observe that some messages received or sent by texters in SMS messages (M) show evidence

of moved constituents from their syntactic positions to a landing site. See Mgs 12, 23, 64 and 65. In M64 ‘Your

account’ which is the NP of the sentence moved from its original slot as the pr-verbal NP to a landing site of

post-verbal NP of the verb ‘debited’. This type of transformation is barred because a constituent is not allowed to

move across more than one bounding node. In M.12, the embedded clause was moved to the subject slot and the

complementiser ‘for’ functions as the subject. The structure should be ‘John is tough for one to beat’. In M23,

the subject ‘we’ has been inverted leading to syntactic variation. The variation created by move-a may be a

device by the writer to achieve focus or even a stylistic device.

3.2. Deletion/Omission

Deletion is a syntactic operation that removes constituent in a construction and therefore cause it not to appear in

the surface structure. Many sentences in SMS texts involve discourse ellipsis, that is, contextually determined

omission where the subjects/agents and objects are intentionally deleted or omitted because they are either

implicit in the verb or are known by the interlocutors in the discourse. The elements seen as omissions are

deleted at the surface structure for purposes of economy and user’s reasonability in understanding the rules of

text composition. The data reflected the following types of deletion: subjects/agents, objects, etc. In ‘Ms.1, 3, 5,

9, 20, 2I, 22, 24-30’ there are deletions of the subjects in the text messages of the discussants. From the data, the

subjects deleted are mostly pronouns such as we, he, she especially the personal pronoun ‘I’. M2 shows evidence

of deletion of the agent to the action of the verb ‘transfer’. Texters sometimes omit the object of a sentence

which constitutes an obligatory part of a sentence. For instance, in ‘M36 the object of ‘forge’ is omitted. The

verb ‘forge’ needs an object to complete the sense of the verb yet its object has been deleted. It is natural in

many discourse situations that the discussants under a particular context limit some information to underlying

structure yet they understand themselves. The omission shows that there is a shared context or background

between the interlocutors about the object in question. This also bears out Ong’onda’s (2011:4) postulation that

the stylistic feature of syntactic omissions in SMS discourse relies on the fact that communications with close

friends, partners and family members allows one to organize messages pragmatically as a common background

exists. Articles and determiners are also omitted in texts of SMS users. In Ms2, 32 and 33’ the determiner ‘the’

are omitted while the article ‘a’ is omitted in ‘M34’.

3.3 Contractions

Contraction is a term used for words or group of words whose orthographic letters are not fully represented; they

are shortened for want of time or space. SMS communication makes use of contractions. The words are

contracted by cutting the middle of a word or by attaching the first letter of the first word to the second word and

removing the rest of the letters of the first word. In ‘M.31, 37, 40, 42, 50’ respectively ‘the phrase what is up’ is

contracted as follows: ‘wassup’, birthday as ‘bday’, somebody as ‘sbody’, breakfast as ‘bfast’ fdom as freedom,

gmourning for good mourning. The contracted forms which are derived from two or three sets of self standing

words do not lose their property of a fully independent word. However, if the practice continues overtime, the

fear is that the novice language created by texters may cause some words to lose their property of a fully

independent word and acquire the properties of a morphological affix.

3.4 Violations in Word-ordering

Some sentences found in SMS texts when placed in line with the English word-order, rebel against the standard