Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring The Use Of Time Delay As A Pragmatic Cue In Text Messaging, Nicklas Phillips

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Text messaging is often used as a stand-in for face to face communication. While texting mimics the rapid back and forth, turn taking nature of oral conversation, it lacks many of the pragmatic cues conversationalists ordinarily rely on to establish common ground and inform their understanding of sometimes nonliteral meaning conveyed to them. To get around this hurdle, texters have developed sets of textisms. These are specific cues that can be used to make up for the lack of pragmatic information in the texting environment. Examples include emoji, emoticons, and punctuation. This is an experimental study exploring whether time can …