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In: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

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Examining Twitter as a source for address research using Colombian Spanish

Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.1.03fos
Abstract
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.
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
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