Offsetting love and hate: The prosodic effects of the non-standard 1sg in tweets to Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn over four days of the UK general election

Abstract

Abstract There is no punctuation in English endowed with attenuating qualities which could function as the contrary of “!”, and in a language with no speech levels, such paucity of expression can come at a cost, especially online. This paper on the non-standard 1sg in English — i — aims to demonstrate that the use of this novel form is both conscious and meaningful, indeed it is a variation carrying its own linguistic mechanisms. Using linguistics and statistics we will see: a) how the use of the lowercase variant, which in English is an aberration, can have prosodic effects on the utterance, and thus signify a feeling. And, b) how textometry allows us to reveal the use of this non-standard 1sg in a contrastive corpus of tweets addressed directly to (@) Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, over four days of the UK general elections, by testing its frequency with several collocations, among others: slurs and hate speech, hapax, and conjunctions. The results obtained tend towards the confirmation that the non-standard 1sg is used not only to signal youth, but also as a precautionary implement deployed when weighing in on divisive topics, amounting to publishing a statement with a caveat.