The Language Characteristics And Social Functions Of Text Messaging Of Chinese University Students

The thesis examines the language characteristics and social functions of text messaging of Chinese university students. It first of all introduces the definition of the SMS and its short development history, reviews past study and research on the Computer-mediated Discourse (CMD), and gives a brief summary of the major research conducted on the SMS at abroad. The research target is a corpus that is made up by 1,050 pieces of message recorded directly from the mobile phone screens of 210 students from 10 Beijing universities.Through the statistics resulted from quantitative study on the corpus, the thesis describes the language characteristics of the SMS in a few facets like message length, punctuations and new linguistic forms. It is shown that even if the SMS language has its own uniqueness, it has not reinvented an impenetrable new language which cannot be mastered unless through systematic study. The thesis then categorizes the whole corpus according to the SMS's two basic social functions of information exchang and relationship maintenance. As a result, the function of relationship maintenance takes a more important role in the university students' interpersonal communication.On the basis of quantitative study and taking the social functions of the SMS into consideration, the thesis gives an analysis on the possible causes leading to the language characteristics of the SMS and points out its basic function as communicating in a direct and convenient way. The thesis still gives proper consideration to the influences the non-standard SMS language has exerted on conventional language through the discussion on the question whether the SMS has damaged the SMS users' learning process of conventional language. Through comparing spoken and written language the thesis comes to a conclusion that the SMS, as a kind of spoken communication in written medium, is a hybrid of spoken and written language. In the last the thesis discusses the influence of the SMS language and the behavior of sending and receiving text messages have exercised on the construction of its users', especially young people's, social identity in an attention to differentiate themselves from others. And the thesis also gives a brief discussion on other SMS-related social behaviors.