Date Approved

2024

Degree Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department or School

English Language and Literature

Committee Member

T. Daniel Seely, PhD

Committee Member

Eric Acton, PhD

Abstract

In digital modes of communication, speakers may struggle to convey their tone and emotions to their readers and interlocutors. This complication leads to questions surrounding the state of the conventions for conveying tone in digital utterances (e.g., tweets). This thesis explores one such way that speakers overcome this struggle, tone tags. Tone tags are linguistic items consisting of a forward slash and an alphabetic character or characters that serve to represent some word or phrase, generally used to indicate the intended spirit of the utterance. This thesis serves as an analysis of these items, including necessary context, an explanation of how tone tags relate to pre-existing features of English, and a linguistic analysis of tone tags collected from various social media platforms, specifically in regard to their syntactic distribution and semantic scope. The thesis ends with the conclusion that tone tags, while related to other lexical items (e.g.,adverbs), seem to project their own syntactic category with a range of unique properties.

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