A Stylistic Analysis of SMS Texts

1 Introduction   

    The 21st century is an information era, and the fast-paced lifestyle has put forward new requirements for our language. People are eager for an easy and private way of communication, thus SMS came into being. Since then, SMS has developed with an amazing speed and has already gained the title of “the fifth media”, distinguishing itself from newspaper, radio, television and network. The language that the short messages use is also genuine and interesting, having its own linguistic features. In an attempt to study the features of the SMS texts, the author executed a Stylistics analysis. 

Stylistics analysis has both narrow and broad sense: the former refers to the stylistic analysis of literature and the latter consists of other kinds of linguistic varieties such as news and law. In this thesis, the two kinds of stylistics are summarized and distinguished, and the SMS texts will be analyzed under the later one from the following aspects: the linguistic description of SMS texts; the textual analysis of SMS texts; and the contextual analysis of SMS texts.