Denis said during an interview Wednesday that the IM research sample encompassed a million words and the study was the largest of its kind. It focused on characteristic features of computer-mediated communication and examined four features of grammar: intensifiers, future tenses, quotes and deontic modality.
In a power point presentation, the researchers showed that the teen IM users seem equally at ease with writing the terms "gonna" and "shall" for the future tense, though shall was no more common in IM than in other forms of speech.
"What that tells us is that they have a fluid mastery of the language," Denis said. "They're using it creatively and vibrantly and, most important, they're using it correctly."
Users showed more use of the personal pronoun "I" and less use of the second and third person pronouns "you" and "he, she" and "they" in computer mediated conversations than in written language, according to the researchers' presentation.
The researchers came up with the idea after Tagliamonte became interested in the language of her four children, who Denis described as "avid users of instant messaging."
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