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  • Essay / Morphology, Phonology, Syntax, and Semantics in Social Media

    In this English essay, I will research and evaluate examples of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. I will also give examples of today's modern English language and how it affects gender using two types of social media platforms and how they have changed and developed the English language today. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayPhonology is the way sounds work in language; we find different words that sound the same but with different letters. For example, the words "bat" and "cat" are pronounced the same but start with different letters. Another example of this is the word “meet”, when we change the “m” to “n” it becomes “neat”. Even though these two words are spelled differently, they still sound the same. Morphology is the way words are structured; the way words are broken down to add meaning, for example the word "reflection" can be broken down into three separate words, "thought" and "full", but "ness" is an added adjective that refers to a quality or a condition. When it comes to syntax, it goes hand in hand with morphology since it involves the arrangement of words and sentences. The social networking site Twitter has had a huge impact on the English language today. With its limit of one hundred and forty characters, we see a more creative approach to the English language. By using abbreviated versions of words and even converting words into numbers such as the number "4" for the word "for" or the number "2" for the words "to" and "also", a tweet on Twitter could to be “I”. I'm going 2 shopping 4 for milk.' This could also be an influence of when text messaging was first introduced and having to pay for each letter (Messieh, N. 2016). Replacing words with symbols to take up less space is also popular when using Twitter, replacing "and" with "&" or "at" with "@". For example, “see you soon at school.” When it comes to gender, we see some difference in tweets. Justin Bieber has 90.5 million followers but doesn't tweet often. When he tweets, he is usually always grammatically correct, using capital letters where they should be. “Great evening. See you tomorrow London” (Justin Bieber, 2016) is a good example of how he uses capital letters correctly for “great”, “see” and “London”. Ariana Grande uses Twitter daily. Even though she doesn't always use grammar correctly, she tweets with a lot of love towards her fans. “Once I… haaaave you… I will never, never let you… go” (Ariana Grande, 2016) with this tweet you can see that it is not grammatically correct, she has I misused ellipses, no capital letters and more than one “A”. The only part of his tweet that is grammatically correct is the placement of a comma between "never let you go." With these examples we can see the difference quite clearly: one could suggest that men tweet in a more formal and professional way while women use this platform in a more creative way. Another newer social media platform is Snapchat, a photo messaging app that is less than 100 characters; we see a more creative approach to expressing a simple image with words. Emojis and stickers can be used in snaps that might indicate.