Cover not available
Part of
It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research
Edited by Bettina Kluge and María Irene Moyna
[Topics in Address Research 1] 2019
► pp. 75–98

Examining Twitter as a source for address research using Colombian Spanish

The present study aims to describe pronominal address use in Colombian varieties of Spanish in a specific context of computer-mediated communication, namely Twitter. This description will serve as a discussion of Twitter as an exciting new source of linguistic data for address research. A large corpus of tweets was compiled, including memes, reported speech, and conversations. Twitter data on the geographical preference for pronoun use were in line with patterns observed using traditional data: Cali and Medellín used vos significantly more frequently than did the Colombian capital of Bogotá, which in turn used usted significantly more frequently. However, in contrast to traditional data, tú was shown to be used most frequently overall in the corpus due to the medium’s informal nature. Along with its abundance and geographical information, a strength of Twitter data is the possibility of isolating the effect of emotional and social characteristics on pronoun choice in a naturalistic setting. The expression of strong emotions significantly correlate with the use of the pronoun tú in the corpus.
Keywords: address term systems, Twitter, Colombian Spanish, computer-mediated communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Linguistic research on social media platforms
    • 1.2Characteristics of Twitter data
    • 1.3Advantages and challenges of using Twitter data
  • 2.Pronominal address terms in Colombian Spanish
    • 2.1Regional differences
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Collecting bulk data
    • 3.2Building the corpus
  • 4.Quantifying tuteo, voseo, and ustedeo with Twitter
    • 4.1Overall dataset
    • 4.2Tweets by region
    • 4.3Positive and negative emotion
    • 4.4Social characteristics of speakers
  • 5.Types of tweets containing address terms
    • 5.1Conversations between users
    • 5.2Memes containing address
    • 5.3Reported dialogues containing address
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.1.03fos
References (50)
References
Barberá, Pablo. 2013. Introducing the streamR package. [URL]
Barbosa, Luciano & Junlan Feng. 2010. Robust sentiment detection on Twitter from biased and noisy data. Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters, 36–44. Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bartens, Angela. 2004. Notas sobre el uso de las formas de tratamiento en el español colombiano actual. Centro Virtual Cervantes: Coloquio de París. Paris. [URL]
Benavides, Carlos. 2003. La distribución del voseo en Hispanoamérica. Hispania 86 (3). 612–623. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bieswanger, Markus. 2013. Micro-linguistic structural features of computer-mediated communication. In Susan Herring, Dieter Stein & Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, 463–488. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 9). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burger, John D., John Henderson, George Kim & Guido Zarrella. 2011. Discriminating gender on Twitter. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 1301–1309. (EMNLP ’11). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Calderón Campos, Miguel. 2010. Capítulo 4. Formas de tratamiento. In Milagros Izquierdo & José María Enguita Utrilla (eds.), La lengua española en América normas y usos actuales, 225–236. València: Universitat de València.Google Scholar
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dynel, Marta. 2014. Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 73. 37–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. Participation as audience design. In Christian Hoffmann & Wolfram Bublitz (eds.), Pragmatics of social media, 61–82. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 11). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eisenlauer, Volker. 2017. Social network sites/facebook. In Christian Hoffmann & Wolfram Bublitz (eds.), Pragmatics of social media, 225–244. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 11). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Estrada Arráez, Ana & Carlota De Benito Moreno. 2016. Variación en las redes sociales: datos twilectales. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 28(2). 77–111.Google Scholar
Farina, Matteo. 2015. Facebook first post telling. Journal of Pragmatics 90. 1–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flores-Ferrán, Nydia. 2004. Spanish subject personal pronoun use in New York City Puerto Ricans: Can we rest the case of English contact? Language Variation and Change 16 (1). 49–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foster, Daniel. 2016. Interpreting the distribution of mixed use of pronominal address forms in Colombia using Twitter. Unpublished master’s thesis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of talk. (Conduct and Communication). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Gonçalves, Bruno & David Sánchez. 2017. Learning about Spanish dialects through Twitter. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (RILI) XIV (28). 65–76.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Christian. 2017. Log in: Introducing the pragmatics of social media. In Christian Hoffmann & Wolfram Bublitz (eds.), Pragmatics of Social Media, 1–28. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 11). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2007. Processing internet-derived text – Creating a corpus of usenet messages. Literary and Linguistic Computing 22 (2). 151–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hummel, Martin, Bettina Kluge & María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop (eds.). 2010. Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico. Mexico City/Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.Google Scholar
Jang, Ji Son. 2010. Fórmulas de tratamiento pronominales en los jóvenes universitarios de Medellín (Colombia) desde la óptica sociopragmática: estrato socioeconómico y sexo. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura 15 (26). 43–116.Google Scholar
. 2012. Correlaciones entre la selección pronominal, el origen urbano/rural y la edad: el caso de jóvenes universitarios de Medellín (Colombia). Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura 17 (2). 145–166.Google Scholar
. 2013. Voseo medellinense como expresión de identidad paisa. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura 18 (1). 61–81.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel & Christopher Martin. 2009. Speech and language processing: An introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition. Pearson/Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Kluge, Bettina. 2016. Forms of address and community identity. In María Irene Moyna & Susana Rivera-Mills (eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas, 325–334. (Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 2006. New resources, or just better old ones? The Holy Grail of representativeness. Language and Computers, 133–149.Google Scholar
Lipski, John M. 1994. Latin American Spanish. (Linguistics Library). New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Millán, Mónica. 2011. Pronouns of address in informal contexts: A comparison of two dialects of Colombian Spanish. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Montes Giraldo, José Joaquín. 1967. Sobre el voseo en Colombia. Thesaurus: Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 22 (1). 21–44.Google Scholar
Moreno, Pilar Mestre. 2010. Alternancia de formas de tratamiento como estrategia discursiva en conversaciones colombianas. In Martin Hummel, Bettina Kluge & María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop (eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico, 1033–1050. Mexico City/Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.Google Scholar
Moyna, María Irene. 2015. Voseo/tuteo variation in Uruguayan popular songs (1960–2010). Romanische Forschungen 127. 3–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. Introduction: Addressing the research questions. In María Irene Moyna & Susana Rivera-Mills (eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas, 1–12. (Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murillo Fernández, Mary Edith. 2004. El polimorfismo en los pronombres de tratamiento del habla payanesa. Centro Virtual Cervantes: Coloquio de París. Paris. [URL]
Newall, Gregory. 2016. Second person singular forms in Cali Colombian Spanish: Enhancing the envelope of variation. In María Irene Moyna & Susana Rivera-Mills (eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas, 149–169. (Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nguyen, Dong, Rilana Gravel, Dolf Trieschnigg & Theo Meder. 2013. How old do you think I am? A study of language and age in Twitter. Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 439–448. Cambridge (MA): AAAI. [URL]
Oliveira, Sandi Michele de. 2013. Address in computer-mediated communication. In Susan Herring, Dieter Stein & Tuija Virtanen (eds.), Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication, 291–313. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parkinson, Hannah Jane. 2014. Subtweeting: what is it, and how to do it well. The Guardian. July 23. [URL]
Penny, Ralph. 2004. Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Placencia, María Elena. 2010. El estudio de formas de tratamiento en Colombia y Ecuador. In Bettina Kluge, Martin Hummel & María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop (eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico, 341–374. Mexico City/Graz: El Colegio de México/Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.Google Scholar
Recktenwald, Daniel. 2017. Toward a transcription and analysis of live streaming on Twitch. Journal of Pragmatics 115. 68–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reed, Darren J. 2017. Performance and interaction on SoundCloud: Social remix and the fundamental techniques of conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 115. 82–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma & Andreas H. Jucker. 2003. Diachronic perspectives on address term systems. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Travis, Catherine E. 2006. The communicative realisation of confianza and calor humano in Colombian Spanish. In Cliff Goddard (ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context, 199–230. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uber, Diane Ringer. 1985. The dual function of usted: Forms of address in Bogotá, Colombia. Hispania 68 (2). 388–392. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. Forms of address: The effect of the context. In Manuel Diáz-Campos (ed.), The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics, 244–262. (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics). Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vandergriff, Ilona. 2013. Emotive communication online: A contextual analysis of computer-mediated communication (CMC) cues. Journal of Pragmatics 51. 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walker, Terry. 2007. Thou and you in early modern English dialogues: Trials, depositions, and drama comedy. (Pragmatics & Beyond). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weyers, Joseph. 2016. Making the case for increased prestige of the vernacular: Medellín’s voseo. In María Irene Moyna & Susana Rivera-Mills (eds.), Forms of address in the Spanish of the Americas, 289–304. (Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zappavigna, Michele. 2012. Discourse of Twitter and social media: How we use language to create affiliation on the web. 1st ed. UK: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
. 2017. Twitter. In Christian Hoffmann & Wolfram Bublitz (eds.), Pragmatics of social media, 201–224. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 11). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Schoenmakers, Gert-Jan, Jihane Hachimi & Helen de Hoop
2024. Can You Make a Difference? The Use of (In)Formal Address Pronouns in Advertisement Slogans. Journal of International Consumer Marketing 36:2 ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo
Gutiérrez Maté, Miguel & Patricia Uhl
2023.  No quiero batirme con vos... ni reñir contigo . Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 36:2 ► pp. 499 ff. DOI logo
Schüpbach, Doris, John Hajek, Heinz L. Kretzenbacher & Catrin Norrby
2021. Approaches to the study of address in pluricentric languages: methodological reflections . Sociolinguistica 35:1 ► pp. 165 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.