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Part of
Corpus Approaches to Social Media
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Daria Dayter
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 98] 2020
► pp. 89–110

Chapter 4
Patterns of intra-individual variation in a Swiss WhatsApp corpus

Analysing real-time change and long-term accommodation

| Universität Leipzig

Analysing written data from a large WhatsApp corpus, which was collected in Switzerland in 2014, this study examines how individuals may change their linguistic behaviour over time and how such changes are connected to the language use of the interlocutor. Therefore, this is one of the very first studies analysing intra-individual real-time change and long-term accommodation processes in written digital data. Focussing on WhatsApp chats that are primarily written in Swiss German, evidence for the possibility of rapid changes within the language use of individuals on several linguistic levels is presented: dialectal variation, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, punctuation, lexis, and use of emojis/emoticons. Furthermore, based on multiple examples from the corpus, several different types of long-term accommodation processes in two-person chats are distinguished.

Keywords: accommodation, intra-individual variation, real-time change, WhatsApp, written Swiss German
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background: Aspects of intra-individual variation
  • 3.Properties of WhatsApp text messaging with a focus on Swiss German
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Change over time: Examples on different linguistic levels
  • 6.Types of long-term accommodation in two-person chats
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.04fel
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