It is understood that, in order to be alive, language must constantly be changing. The social media site Twitter reveals the way words are used in informal language in a public setting online – thus also revealing the way language changes on the internet. This linguistics project observes and records the uses of “huge” and “huge-ass” in Tweets in order to discover if there is significant evidence that they are used differently or in different contexts. The researchers hypothesized that Tweets containing “huge-ass” would also include less serious content while “huge” would be used in Tweets containing more formal or sincere content. Understanding the differences between these two usages can shed light on the methods of human language as well as the specific linguistic behaviors of writing on social media. This project utilized Essential Access of the Twitter API as well as a handwritten program to draw a random sample of Tweets containing “huge” and “huge-ass” for several weeks, coding those Tweets for the occurrences of stacked adjectives, serious topics, ads, pop culture references, and other curse words. In this case, the data reveals a strong correlation between the uses of stacked adjectives, pop culture references, and other curse words in conjunction with “huge-ass,” as opposed to a strong correlation between the presence of ads in conjunction with “huge.” It suggests that Tweets containing “huge-ass” also contain more emphatic, emotional, or less formal language geared towards a smaller audience while Tweets containing “huge” are geared towards a much broader and more general audience. Information about word usage on a public forum such as Twitter suggests a profound sense of confidence in the effectiveness of content-based algorithms by content creators, opening the door for more study regarding the rhetorical environment of social media and how it effects the sharing of ideas.
Author: Melaine Hamon
Advisor: Aaron Shield, Speech Pathology and Audiology
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