1

MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE LANGUAGE USED BY

IGENERATION JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN TWITTER

A Thesis Proposal
Presented to the
Faculty of the Graduated School
Bataan Peninsula State University
City of Balanga, Bataan

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts in Education,
Major in Language Education

By:

Czarmaine B. Ledina
November 2020
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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION OF THE PROBLEM AND ITS BACKGROUND

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

In our current technological age, where people mostly rely on different devices to

explore new ideas and people, communicate and cascade awareness, change being drastic

is an understatement. Alterations on people’s lifestyle has been one of the predominant

observable impacts of technological advancements. Every year, varied brands launch new

units of devices that would elevate the competition in the market that causes the resources

of the people to be in complete abundance. Not only are these products available at the

expense of the people, but these are also very affordable, so much that each member of

the family has his or her own device to access the internet, or social media per se.

Moreover, in a well-sustained family, each member may have more than one type of

device. Example, in a family of five, the parents may each own two mobile devices for

work and for personal use, a tablet, a laptop or a computer set, etc.

It is not implied, however, and was not given enough emphasis that people in

today’s world are living in what is called as digital world. Everything that people do

today has some sort of digital technology involved in the process, like doing business

transactions through e-mails, financial transactions in banks, online shopping, academic

works and scholastic searches, in storing records in different institutions, in the field of

medicine, and so. Ultimately, people has relied much of its activities in the use of

technological devices that are now readily available and accessible to them, and Filipinos

are not an exemption to this.

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In the Philippine setting, much would agree with the claim of the latest statistical

report released by We Are Social, a creative agency, and Hootsuite, a social media

management platform, shows that Filipinos ranked first in terms of internet usage and

also that of social media. Further, this was supported by the article Digital 2019: Global

Digital Overview which states that the average time that Filipinos spend using the

internet in any device amounts to 10 hours and two minutes in total. Apparently, it also

discovered that four hours from this summation was spent in social media on a daily

basis. Surprisingly, Philippines consistently topped this statistics for four consecutive

years.

On a not so similar note, taken from theworldbank.com, Philippines was

considered the 13th most populated country in the world that has an estimated population

of 108.11 million by 2019. Alongside this, from the demographic age structure of the said

country, people under 0-14 years old amounts to 33.07% of the total population, as 15-24

year old have 19.17%, while the 25-54 age range has 37.11%, 55-64 year old elderly has

6.04%, and 65 years above has 4.61%. These percentage distribution of age structure

shows that if combined together, the population of 0-24 year old amounts to 52.24% or

more than half of the population. This being said, it implies that half of the population in

the Philippines are born in the year 1995-to present.

From socio-economic political agendas, the dominance of these younger member

of the population creates a sub-cohort of the generations already existing during their

birth, they are now called as the Generation Z, or somehow termed as the I-Generation.

I-Generation is a universal term that scholars use to refer to the arising

mainstream of youth today particularly born in the latter years of 1995 to present (2020).
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They are considered the product of technological advances that is abundant today, not to

mention the impact of the internet. Persons belonging to this generation have imprints of

technology even before they are born, or even conceived by their parents. These imprints

are most commonly the ultrasound examination, photos of the child inside the wound of

mother, photos of the mother during conception, video recording of the child moving

inside of the mother, video recordings during labor, or in severe cases, more advance

technology such as implants of zygote on a surrogate mother or so. According from an

article published thru the website of Psychology Today entitled Welcome to the

iGeneration!, this generation has a massive influence from technology that its name was

derived from one of the largest selling phone company—Apple Inc. IPhones, IPods, and

many more are products of Apple that is mostly used in United States (although this may

also apply to Philippine setting).

Going back to the previously presented ideas, as the Philippine population is now

dominated by the I-Gen, the claim that Filipinos topped the highest number of hours

spent in the internet, or in social media seemed to be more profound.

There are many studies recently conducted about how the internet alters the most

basic practices of men. Even the simplest thing as writing and reading had been affected

and modifications on these processes had not been avoided to such extent that this

resulted to series of debates among researchers and scholars in the field of linguistics.

One of the many changes that took place within this demographic cohort is their

word-formation that concerns morphology. This is concerned with the systematic

relationship between the words used and the meaning of words with respect to how these

are constructed. This comprises two sub-aspects, word formation and word inflection.
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Relevantly, this study also has an important role in the process of a person’s language

acquisition. The most basic concept of morphology is the idea of having a “word”.

Communication begins with constructing ideas mentally in one’s mind and stating these

ideas through words arranged in sentences to make substantial meaning from the sender

of the message to the receiver.

Because of the use of technological devices, I-Gen unknowingly altered the

manner of their word formation, mostly in social media.

One of the most influential multi-platform social networking site (SNS) today is

Twitter. Twitter was launched in the year 2006 and begun as a microblogging tool with a

small number of patrons, until it became a world-wide phenomenon that impacts the

socio-political stance of the people, such as in business, news, education, entertainment,

sports, and so. Researchers now view Twitter as ground for exploration particularly with

the language that its members use. In it, a member may tweet (a post of short message) up

to 280 characters (including letters, spaces, and punctuation marks) and may use hashtags

to know about the current trends in news, and other significant topics. These restrictions

in the number of characters is an essential factor that contribute to the alterations in

language use.

Further, as of 2019, the number of active Filipino Twitter users is projected to

reach 10.4 million, up from 5.5 million in 2014 (Statistica Research Department, 2016).

This is twice the number from five years ago, consequently, this also suggest that the as

the number of morphologically altered words arise, the larger the corpus of word

alterations there may be, as supported by numerous researches from other countries.
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With this, the researcher believes that analyzing the morphological alterations of

the language use of I-Gen is a necessity and can contribute to a new pool of knowledge in

the field of language instruction in educational institutions.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The study entitled “Morphological Analysis of the Language Use of Junior

High School Students of the I-Generation” intends to answer the following

questions:

1. What are the words used by the Junior High School students in Twitter?

2. What are the morphological processes that occur on these words as they are used

in Twitter?

3. What is language periodical that may be devised to compare the standard use of

words against the language use of students in Twitter?

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

This research study aims to critically analyze the words of the junior high school

students used in various media which they may also incorporate on instruction as teachers

face them in the classroom today, especially on their language learning. Therefore, the

researcher gathers that this study will be yielding results that will have greatest effect to

the following entities:

Language Students - this study is primarily conducted on the basis of language utility of

students in terms of social media and their integration of this language use during

classroom instructions. Seemingly, the most significant beneficiary of this

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research are the students for the research in turn will be critically analyzing how

the data gathered will yield better results as to maximize the effects of language

learning.

Language Teachers - the research intends to identify the relevance of the language use

of the students to their language learning in terms of morphology, therefore

teachers will be one of the major beneficiaries of this study for they are the ones

who will have direct influence on the students’ language learning.

Department of Education - since the study is meant to use various media in the

classroom, educational department and other institutions concerned with the

academe with benefit from the study because they may find the data relevant to a

larger mass.

Curriculum Planners - planning a curriculum is a difficult task to do for there are too

many factors to be considered in the process, such are the students’ needs and

interests. Therefore, this study may provide insights about the integration of such

devices to classroom instruction.

Other Stakeholders - included in this group are the parents and as well with the

community. This group are part of the beneficiaries because the end of the

changes will meet the needs of the students as it addresses the needs of the

community.

Future Researchers - This study may yield possible concerns in the exterior variables

that were not given focus on and which may be another problem yet to be

research about. So in turn, this may provide other those ideas to explore on.
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SCOPE AND LIMITATION

This study which is entitled “Morphological Analysis of the Language Used by

IGeneration Junior High School Students In Twitter” aims to focus on identifying the

words used by junior high school today, the morphological processes that occur on the

words used as well with the change in meaning of these words, as well with the

promotion of a better language usage in a classroom setting. This study involves selected

Junior High School students who are living in Mariveles, Bataan purposively considered

as subjects of the study for Academic Year 2019-2020. It also wants to yield results

which will be beneficial to the students, language teachers, also to other members of the

community, future researchers and others as well. Further, identifying language usage of

the adolescents as it helps in contextualizing language instruction today. Moreover, the

purpose of the study is present morphological analysis of the IGen language which often

influences the cases that these words appear, and their functions. The researcher has

found it significant to study the problem to create relevant assumptions regarding

linguistic competence of junior high school students under the I-Generation.

Notes in Chapter I

Brian Mastroianni. How Gen Z is Changing the Wold of Tech Today. March 10, 2016
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-fuels-a-change-in-generations-with-
the-rise-of-gen-z/
Center for Generational Kinetics (2016). Gen Z Social Media Usage and Trends
Infographic. http://genhq.com/igen-genz-social-media-trends-infographic/
Fich, Jeremy. What Is Generation Z, And What Does It Want? Fast
Company.https://www.fastcompany.com/3045317/what-is-generation-z-and-
what-does-it-want. May 04, 2015
Generation Z. Wikipedia.com. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z
Haspelmath, Martin. Understanding Morphology. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig. 2002.
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J. Audring and F. Masini. Introduction: Theory and Theories in Morphology, The Oxford
Handbook for Morphological Theory. December 21, 2018
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668984.001.
0001/oxfordhb-9780199668984-e-1
Kemp, Simon. Digital 2019: Global Internet Use Accelerates from wearesocial.com.
January 30, 2019. https://wearesocial.com/blog/2019/01/digital-2019-global-
internet-use-accelerates
Larry D. Rosen Ph.D. Rewired: The Psychology of Technology. Welcome to the
iGeneration! March 10, 2010 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rewired-
the-psychology technology/201003/welcome-the-igeneration.
Philippine Age Structure. Index Mundi fr. CIA World Factbook. December 7, 2019
https://www.indexmundi.com/philippines/age_structure.html
Population, total – Philippines. The World Bank.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=PH
Rosell-Aguilar, F. (2018). Twitter as a formal and informal language learning tool: from
potential to evidence. Research - publishing.net.
https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2018.22.780
Statistica Research Department. Number of Twitter users in the Philippines from 2014 to
2019 (in millions). https://www.statista.com/statistics/490561/twitter-users-
philippines/. February, 2016
Wesley Douglass Camp (1915–1991), Preface to What a Piece of Work Is Man: Camp's
Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B.C. to the Present, 1989
Whittaker, Zack. Defining the 'iGeneration': Not just a geeky bunch of kids. ZDnet
http://www.zdnet.com/article/defining-the-igeneration-not-just-a-geeky-bunch-of-
kids/ June 20, 2010 -- 16:48 GMT (00:48 GMT+08:00) | Topic: Apple
Who are Generation Z? The Latest Data on Today's Teens Saturday 10 December 2016
09.00 GMT https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/10/generation-z-
latest-data-teens

CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURES AND STUDIES

RELEVANT THEORIES

Morphology is considered to be the grammar of words. As of today, it is viewed

as both young and old, in its most conventional and contemporary meaning. Morphology,
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although appeared alongside other branches of the study of language such as lexicon,

syntax, phonology as early as linguistics started as a study, has only been formally

introduced as another particular discipline in language during the half of the nineteenth

century. There are numerous accounts that addresses the currency of studies involving the

internal structures of words that are present today which were derived from the

continuous development of human language. However, as neologism arise from the

varied contextual use of language, linguists also find the field of morphology as a rich,

fertile ground for exploration and research.

From varied works involving morphology, the researcher believes that some of

the most note-worthy theories relevant to the study at hand are to be mentioned;

Relational Morphology

A theory that is derived and is based on the mentalistic perspective framework of

Parallel Architecture. PA is a framework for understanding the organization of language

and its place in the larger ecology of the human mind. It has become considerably

successful in accounting other fields of language such as semantics, syntax and their

interactions (Jackendoff 1983, 1990; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005). Relational

Morphology may be seen as a relatable theory of Construction Morphology which is

concerned more on the schematic and semi-schematic constructions of words, such that it

is focused on usage-basedness and with regards to the notion of schemas, or prior

knowledge of words and its usage (Masini and Audring, 2002). However, the difference

between the two of these cluster of theories is that the prior-mentioned is based on its

focus about lexical relations, its inclusion of non-symbolic structures, and its formalism.
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In the introduction of this theory, Jackendoff and Audring of The Oxford

Handbook for Morphological Theory in 2016, the pair asked three fundamental questions

that relates to the development of this theory; first, it seeks to know the different

linguistic units that one may store into his/her memory as a schema, second, to

understand how these units are operationally combined online to make novel utterances,

third, how these units are being acquired by learners.

As mentioned above, PA is primarily committed in thoroughgoing mentalism,

where the speaker’s knowledge of language is associated with the linguistic structures

that elicit meaningful psycholinguistic concerns on structure and memory,

comprehension and production of language, and finally, its acquisition. This also further

comprises inflection, derivation, compounding, from word units being productive or non-

productive. It also carries out interactions between other fields of language such as

syntax, semantics, and phonology, that these also concerns itself to the issues on lexical

processing and language acquisition.

Relational Morphology or RM views the use of language in a modern linguistics

perspective, where the notion of Humboldt’s often-cited phrase “infinite use of finite

means”. It suggests that instead of analyzing language by breaking and deconstructing

large morphological units into smaller pieces, it theorize to analyze language according to

store word units in memory, one form or another. Through this, codifying the static

relations among different words and their constituents as a schema will become easier.

Schemas have a number of functions in this theory. Jackendoff and Audring

(2016) laid out three major advantages of the use of schema in a morphological view.

First, having schemas and words in the same ‘place’ results in the network in which
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unproductive schemas can be linked to their instances without having to generate them.

Second, productive schemas can also be in the sma ‘place’ as their instances, so they can

be related to stored words. Third, PA and RM believes that is a schema is an oven

variable, it has a generative function that is used in generating new and novel

expressions. In addition, all schemas – productive or non-productive – have a relational

function. The relationship links to existing lexical units that have already been stored in

memory, as lexicon, and capture generalizations among them. Further, RM notes that

productive schemas are “ordinary” schemas that have “gone viral”.

In a sense, when one encounters a new word, he/she seeks to find patterns from

his/her schema which the newly-encountered-word may fit. With the absence of schema,

there are infinite number of ways that this word may be similar to existing words, along

one dimension with one word, to another dimension with another word, a third dimension

with a third word, and the number goes endlessly. A schema codifies dimensions of

similarity that have been found significant, as if “precompiling” the parallels among all

its instances.

The researcher believes that Relational Morphology is one of the most significant

and relevant theory to the topic at hand. Because of the presence of the complexity and

unfiltered language use in varied social media platforms today, the notion of “infinite use

of finite means” an understatement of possibilities of language processes that may occur.

Undergeneralization and overgeneralization of processes and rules are being committed

ever so often that may lead to ambiguity of meaning and intention. Therefore, it is

considered that relations between the speakers’ prior knowledge (called schema) of

words and its processes and rules are connected to how they use language.
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Construction Morphology

Directly associated with the Construction Grammar, this theoretical framework

shares as number of similarities with Cognition Grammar so that it focuses more on

usage-basedness and the notion of constructional schemas. It assumes that the structures

within morphology is an independent and sole layer of data. The central unit of analysis

is the construction, intended as a sign, a form–meaning pairing. It can be fully specified,

for instances, these constructions associate to words, or they can be partly or fully

schematic. Schematic or semi-schematic constructions are the counterpart of rules in

more procedural models or frameworks that are already present in the field. Since they

serve as templates for the creation of new words, all constructions are situated in a

network which joins together the lexicon and the grammar in a constant and highly

structured environment. Just like what is mentioned in the previous theory, construction

morphology also shares a number of similarities with relational morphology as to their

approach to language analysis. As the same basic architecture is assumed for

morphological and syntactic constructions, the model has a specific affinity with in-

between phenomena such as multi-word units.

From the works of Booij (2010), in construction morphology, complex words are

seen as constructions on the word level. The notion ‘construction’ is an interconnection

of form and meaning, it is developed under the belief of Construction Grammar where an

insightful account of the properties of complex words is an essential task to accomplish.

Morphological patterns provide recipes for coining new (forms of) words which

are represented as constructional schemas, theses expresses generalizations about sets of

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pre-existing words with complexities and forms. These schemas form part of a

hierarchical lexicon with generalizations on different levels of abstraction, these account

for holistic properties of complex words that are not derivable from their components,

and these can be unified into complex schemas that may state or express the co-

occurrence of certain types of word formation. The design of constructional schemas is

also suitable for phrasal lexical units with almost word-like functions e.i phrasal names,

particle verbs, and periphrastic expressions.

The theory of CM aims at a better comprehension of the connection between

syntax, morphology, and the lexicon, and other semantic properties of complex words

which will be further discussed in the next sections of this chapter. It provides a

framework in which both the differences and the commonalities of word level constructs

and phrase level constructs can be accounted for. There are two basic approaches to the

linguistic analysis of complex words. One of these methodologies is the morpheme-based

approach, which a complex word is seen as a concatenation (combination or mixture) of

morphemes. In this approach, morphological analysis is conceived of as the ‘syntax of

morphemes’.

The idea that word formation patterns can be seen as abstractions across sets of

related words is rooted in a venerable tradition. For instance, the German linguist

Hermann Paul wrote in his famous Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, published in 1880,

that the language learner will start with learning individual words and word forms, but he

will soon gradually derive words from the concrete words(s) he has learned, and coin

these with new words and word forms according to his already known abstract schemas.

This enables the language user to be creative both in word formation and in inflection
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(Paul 1880 [3rd edition 1898]). This tradition in the theory of CM to be continued in the

paradigmatic approach to word formation (Schultink 1962; Van Marle 1985), and in

some other recent works in varieties of non-transformational generative grammar like the

Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Riehemann 1998, 2001).

As such morphological schemas depend on relationships between words, this

morphological model has been called the network model (Bybee 1995), and the notion

‘network’ is indeed a proper term for conceptualizing the set of relationships between

words in a lexicon (Bochner 1993). Schema is said to license the discrete nouns in –ness

in the corpus of English lexicon. Complex words, once coined, will be stored in the

lexicon of a language (which generalizes over the lexical memories of the individual

speakers of that language), if they have idiosyncratic properties and ⁄ or have become

conventionalized.

CM assumes that complex words, i.e. the outputs of morphological operations,

can be listed in the lexicon. Morphological schemas consequently have two functions:

first, these express predictable properties of existing complex words and specify how new

ones can be coined (Jackendoff 1975). This conception of the grammar avoids the well-

known rule versus list fallacy (Langacker 1987), the unwarranted assumption that

linguistic constructs are either generated by rule or listed and that being listed excludes a

linguistic construct from being linked to a rule at the same time.

Construction morphology is a significant theory that the researcher believes to be

most relatable to the study at hand. Because of the notion of construction, and how words

are to be ‘constructed’ and ‘reconstructed’ based on his or her schema, and how

morphemes are view to be units of languages that may be coined to not only to a certain a
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list of words already existing in the repertoire of language, but to infinite number of

words that these units may be attached to or associated to. Further, since Construction

morphology and Relation morphology already share a number of similarities, the

researcher believes that these reinforces the foundation of the study at hand.

Digital Social Discourse

From the works of Blitvich and Bou-Franch in their “Introduction to Analyzing

Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions:” in January, 2019, there was the

consistent focus on the computer-mediated discourse in the contemporary media with

regards to sociolinguistics or in language and digital communications. This has been

discussed in terms of three waves, since Androutsopoulos (2006), was inspired by

Herring’s (1996) foundational work called for “a shift of focus from medium-related to

user-related in Bou-Franch, P. & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, (2018).

While studies within the first wave contained mainly descriptive linguistic

approaches and were carried out in the 1990s, the 2000s saw the consolidation of a

second wave of computer-mediated discourse studies which brought into the picture

socially-oriented language researchers concerned with linguistic variability, social

diversity, issues of identity and community formation and maintenance: in sum, a

collection of studies more specifically concerned with the study of digital social practices

(Georgakopoulou, 2006; Herring & Androutsopoulos, 2015). Recent research claims that

a third wave should further take into consideration issues of “translocality”, the complex

ways in which diverse local practices come together in global spaces (Tagg & Seargeant,

2014), “transmediality”, or how users go beyond different media, or devices to access

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these media, and should move to integrating multimodal analyses of the sociocultural

practices of the people with the use of computer-mediated communication

(Androutsopoulos, 2015). Further, Georgakopoulou and Spilioti (2016) recently called

for researches that help develop critical and ethical agendas, thus placing the focus on

ideologies about the media and as enacted, challenged and negotiated in the digital world

(Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011; Thurlow, 2017).

Heavily influenced by S. Herring’s work entitled “The Co-Evolution of

Computer-Mediated Communication and Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis”, this

view in contemporary linguistic phenomena uses the computer-mediated discourse

analysis or CMDA which was devised for textual interactions. This theory in the analysis

of textual representations of language believes that through the innovations made with the

technological advances, linguistic analysis almost always must also be ever changing and

must follow through the changes that these innovations occur, whereas, multimodality

and interdisciplinary modes and semiotic relationships between sounds, symbols and

meanings are being treated in interfaces.

Consequently, a chapter by Jewitt (2016) included in the handbook these authors

co-edit introduces key concepts and tools of multimodal analysis that can be of use to

scholars of digital communication, and provides guidance on how to collect and

transcribe data and on how to analyze single modes and carry out analyses across modes.

Multimodality entered linguistics through the groundbreaking work of Kress and

Van Leeuwen in Reading Images (1996) and Multimodal Discourse (2001). Although

much of the work in multimodal discourse analysis (for a comprehensive review see

O’Halloran 2013) has been based on Halliday’s systemic functional theory, combining
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approaches to discourse with multimodal frameworks of communication has occupied

center stage in the work of scholars of different persuasions. Among others, Lemke

(2011, 2012) has been at the fore of these efforts by bringing together discourse analysis

and visual semiotics to provide ways of analyzing the interconnecting creation of

meaning through the discourse and images and analyzing hypertextuality and traversals

as digital technology mediated ways of meaning making.

Language and social media researchers seem to agree on the centrality of the

social processes of self-presentation and relational management when communicating in

online environments. Thus, a significant number of studies focuses on media practices

that aim to construct who we are and how we relate to others. Previous research in

discourse analysis sees identity practices as essentially discursive and relational, i.e. as

socially constructed. Identities emerge in interaction with others, and are constantly

changing, as different aspects become salient in interaction and individuals engage in

processes of negotiation, identification and disidentification with others (Bucholtz &

Hall, 2005; De Fina et al. 2006).

Social media create new spaces for online identity performances and negotiations,

and the study of the processes behind the “formation of new forms of social organization

and social interaction” (Castells 2000, p. 693) needs to pay special attention to the role

played by the social and technological affordances (Herring 2007). The availability of

multiple semiotic modes for identity construction, alongside users’ agentive choices to

employ certain resources, are issues that will affect identity construction and negotiation.

In their analysis of Facebook, for instance, Tagg and Seargeant (2014, 2016) focus on

issues of identity and community as the two crucial dynamics for the discursive
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construction of social networking sites. Self-presentation processes and relational

practices are interconnected, they argue, through the audience design strategies that

online users employ to communicate through a collapsed audience. The influential notion

of context collapse - or the bringing together of different social groups into the same

digital space for interaction - in relation to social networking sites (Marwick & boyd,

2011) is of importance in this respect, as users face the need to change the way they act

and interact socially in addressing their imagined networked audiences (Page, 2012).

Resources like choice of language or subject, or strategic uses of ambiguity and

vagueness, and so, have been discussed as means of orienting to imagined audiences, and

choosing or blocking specific addressees in multilingual, translocal communities where

contexts collapse. Nevertheless, to move the field forward, further studies of ways of

doing sociability, of entextualizing identity and relational practices in social media, are

still needed.

For Thurlow (2017), a critical perspective on digital practices within the field of

critical discourse analysis should examine the ways in which micro-level practices

construct social worlds and how macro-level structures and ideologies shape our

communicative practices, i.e. how texts and the worlds are mutually shaping/shaped (by)

each other. It must be noted, however, that the focus of much critical discourse analysis is

on what is known as ‘elite discourses’ (van Dijk, 1989) and, therefore, on the top-down

processes of ideological hegemony to the neglect of the “’bottom-up’ strategies of those

who may contest or subvert these ideologies” (Bucholtz, 2003, p. 58).

RELATED LITERATURE
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This section is a compilation of relevant literatures about morphology and its

varied processes that the researcher believes to build fundamental scaffolding on the

subject of the study. A number of accounts are read and analyzed as to the needs and

considerations of the study, and with this, the following mentions are significantly

considered.

Morphemes

As to the study of language, morphology, as mentioned, deals with the internal

structures of words. From this, a word is constructed with units of language that possibly

affect its meaning, and from the list of units of language, this study focuses on the

morphemes.

Based from Zapata (2007), in the ‘Types of Words and Word-Formation

Processes in English’ clarified that the smallest units of language that have a meaning or

a grammatical function and form words or parts of these words are now termed as

morphemes. There are two large groups of morphemes, (1) the free morphemes, and (2)

bound morphemes; morphemes are depends on the way morphemes occur in an

utterance. Further, Aronoff and Fudeman (1997) in their book ‘Morphology and

Morphological Analysis’ argue that a morphological research frequently begins through

the identification and study of morphemes, often defined as the smallest linguistic pieces

with a grammatical function.

From the published work of Iriskulov (2006) on ‘Theoretical Grammar of

English’, he said that the smallest meaningful unit is called morph. These morphs which

have identical meanings are grouped into one morpheme. Meaning, the morphs and

morphemes are speech and language units that have both form (or shape) and meanings.
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The smallest unit of language that has significant meaning is called a morpheme while the

smallest meaningful unit of speech is called a morph. The notion of allomorph (the

variants, or options, or alternates of a morpheme) in linguistics is not uncommon. In this,

linguists understand the morphs that have identical meanings and that are grouped into

one morpheme. In a more advanced discussion, Radford defined that morpheme is

smaller units of word.

Furthermore, Plag (2002) said that, it is possible to decompose complex words

into their smallest meaningful units. For instance, ‘mentee’ may be examined to consist

the verb ‘mentor’ and the ending -ee, while the adjective unpleasant can be analyzed as

being derived from the word happy, and the attachment of the affix un-. Another example

would be decolonialization which can be segmented into the smallest parts de-, colony, -

al, -ize, and -ation.

Therefore, by these definitions of morpheme, it may take account the different

descriptions of linguists of what morphology is.

Morphology

Haspelmath (2002) provides a brief overview of the study of morphology in his

“Understanding Morphology”, he states that morphology is the oldest yet youngest field

in linguistics. Without them knowing, he states that early linguists are basically

morphologist who study the development and use of language through analyzing the

structural changes that occur within a word which apparently makes it as the oldest

among other fields in the study of language. However, it was only in the nineteenth

century that the word morphology was invented, and it was considered as a sole

independent field in language considering the different processes and interfaces that it has
 22

with the use of words. He later defined morphology as the study of systematic covariation

in the form and meaning of words.

According to Booij G.E. (2016), on his work “Morphology: the structure of

words”, morphology deals with the systematic correspondence between the form and

meaning of words. This study of regularities encompasses the domains of inflection and

word formation. Inflection regards the expression of morphosyntactic properties,

sometimes required by a specific syntactic context. Nevertheless, word formation has

something to do with the construction of new (complex) words by varied morphological

mechanisms like compounding, affixation, truncation, and segmental and tonal

alternations.

Further, on Booij’s work, he expressed that there are theoretical debates on

grammar and natural languages that morphology covers. First, he mentions that there is

no certain format as to the existence of morphological regularities. Second, there are

varied models concerned with the positions of morphology in the architecture of

grammar. Nonetheless, these issues are common in most published works on morphology

since it may be integrated to almost all fields in the study of language such that there is a

consideration for different domains in the meaning making.

As illustrated in the works of Audring and Masini (2018), phonology, syntax, and

semantics are three of the most relevant fields in language that may involve morphology.

In this sense, consider this figure:

 23

As seen in the figure, the horizontal connection between morphophonology,

morphosyntax, and morphosemantics are established through the use of the arrows

connecting each of the three. This signifies the morphological internal linkage between

these, since a word contains all of these types of information. This level of structure

houses all properties that cannot be subsumed under phonology or lexical semantics.1

This includes grammatical features, such as case, gender, or tense, as well as properties

such as inflectional class, the heartland of ‘morphology by itself’. In some theoretical

models, this layer also encodes the building blocks of words: roots, stems, and affixes.

Morphology, as understood in this narrower sense, contrasts and interfaces with word

phonology and word meaning.

Now, as much as morphology is present in almost all languages, not every

language has the prominence of morphological processes. This is seen in the work of

Haspelmath (2002), where he states that what one language expresses morphologically

may be expressed by a separate word or left implicit in another language. Say that in

Filipino, words like pag-unlad, papaunlarin, umunlad, umuunlad, pagpapa-unlad,

denotes only one thing which is to progress, that their usage differ in the manner and

presentation in the context of the per se, and are derived with the use of affixes such as

pag-, papa-, -in, um, umu, and pagpapa-. However, in other languages, much like Yoruba

(a language in western Nigeria) prominence of morphology is very low where it uses a

separate word to express the same thing. Say for example, “okunrin” which means '(the)

man, uses “dwon” to denote plurality, expressed as “dwon okunrin” ‘(the) men.

Looking back into the development of morphology as a field in the study of

language, consider this brief discussion:

 24

Characteristics of the iGeneration

With the current state of the world, technological advances seemed to overthrow

other conceptual innovations around the globe. This phenomena brings about alterations

in the norms of humanity, which happens to be unstable and ever changing. One of the

greatest issues that had become a by-product is its impact on the younger subgroup of our

society today, the iGeneration.

By definition, these subgroup does not bare any difference when compared to the

Generation Z, or what we call as the post-millennial.

According to wikipedia.org, iGeneration is the demographic cohort after the

millennial, which researchers typically use starting birth years that range from the mid-

1990s to the late 2010s. A relatively important aspect of this generation is the prevalent

usage of the internet from a very young age; they are typically thought as being too

comfortable with the use of technology and interaction on social media websites instead

of personal or face-to-face interaction is a significant portion of their socializing.

However, American writer editor and website blogger Zach Whittaker, together

with Elliot Harrison, finds the definition of iGeneration from Wikipedia and others from

Google as old, outdated, and simply not accurate which is written by a contribution of

multiple writers over many regions and over time. Therefore to give a more precise and

evaluated meaning, Whittaker and Harrison defines iGeneration as: a subgroup of

younger people who already exists where members actively engaged with technology in

its development, progression, and its use in the workplace so that technology can evolve

within the means of the generation.

 25

The word iGeneration is most like derived from the popular products of Apple, a

company manufacturing mobile devices such as iPod, iPhone and iMac. However, the

company does not want to own the rights to the term. Although it was in the year 2006

when this term hit the rotation when Stanford rapper MC Lars used it in his song

iGeneration. However, there are disputes to this claim for Jean Twenge also claims to

first use the term as it “popped into her head” which she intended to use for her 2006

book Generation Me. Other claims also contests but this were in the latter years of 2009

and 2012.

Through many scholastic articles and studies found in the Internet, few of many

commonalities may be derived from their conclusions. iGeneration have altered methods,

attitudes and values among its members. Usage of Internet through World Wide Web is

one of the many factors for this modifications. Social media networking became a means

of isolated socialization-allowing the members to access their friends, colleagues, and

family’s social lives from the comfort of their computers or mobile devices.

Another great advert to this phenomena is the progression of various educational

and professional advancement in various fields. Because of technological advances there

was an emergence of another deceitful phenomena called information explosion. This

brings about many changes from the way we harness knowledge and use these to

advocate innovations from various industries. Such changes are online shopping, online

businesses, online publishing and online streaming, online channels, so on. Nevertheless,

iGeneration are very communicative, at least electronically.

To prove how sociable they are online, there are more than sixty social media

networking sites available in the Internet as of 2017 demographic survey (Chaffey, 2017)
 26

among these are the five most popular sites according to the number of active users,

Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, QQ and WeChat.

Subsequently, because of the concerns regarding the alterations made by the

emergence of iGeneration in the society, educational paladins and institutions have had

troubles adjusting to their perspectives. Today, the academe is also facing a great

challenge in addressing the changing needs of the youth in terms of teaching and

learning. Various pedagogical approaches and methods were proposed and then

advertised to the main stream of educational administrators, teachers and others which

are part of the school stakeholders.

It was the entrance of the school year 2012-2013 when the K-12 Basic Education

Program (curriculum) in the Philippines proceeded which lead for the integration of

various media in classroom instruction to be highly suggested amongst the members of

the institution. However, majority of educators are still half-hearted about embracing this

recommendation entirely.

On a seminar held by Phoenix Publishing House, entitled Revitalizing Teaching

for the Next Generation Learning, educators are gaged to describe the characteristics of

iGeneration learners. A list was made as a result of this pole where some of the qualities

that had garnered the most count are the following: interactive, assertive, cooperative,

manipulative, and demonstrative. Educators also find the students today as adventurous,

experimental, self-sufficient, visual and mostly technologically inclined. With these being

said, learners of the iGeneration are called post-digital natives where learning are mostly

gained through usage of various digital devices like desktop computers, laptops, mobile

phones, smart phones, tablets, recorders, projectors, smart TVs, so on. Learning became
 27

an ultimately different experience through the incorporation of these media in the

classroom instruction.

Moreover, according to a Northeastern University Survey, 81% of iGeneration

members believe obtaining a college degree is necessary in achieving career goals. As an

iGen enters high school, and they start preparing for college, a primary concern is paying

for a college education without acquiring debt. Students have been reported as working

hard in high school to acquire higher marks in their scholastic achievements in hopes of

earning scholarships in universities and also with the hope that their parents will not pay

huge sum of money for their college costs not covered by scholarships. There were also

reports on interest in ROTC programs as a means of covering college costs.

According to NeaToday, a publication by the National Education Association,

two thirds of iGen entering college are concerned about affording college. One third of

them plan to rely on scholarship grants, while one quarter hope that their parents will

cover the bulk of college costs. As of today, the amount of students attending college is

incredibly high for most iGen, according to NeaToday, 65% say that the benefits of

graduating college exceed the costs.

iGeneration college students prefer intrapersonal and independent learning over

group work, yet like to do their solo work alongside others in a social manner when

studying. They like their learning to be practical and hands-on and want their instructors

to help them engage with and apply the content rather than simply share what they could

otherwise find on their own online. This generation is revolutionizing the educational

system in many aspects.

 28

From an article written by Jeremy Finch, iGeneration members are too poorly

labeled as “screen addicts”. Further, to counterfeit this stereotype, he states that iGen do

not have attention problem, but they have what he calls as an eight minute filter since

they have grown in a fully digitalized world, they have adapted to quickly sort enormous

amount of information. This filter tries to examine or assess the content of any stimuli

that is in front of them either through surfing the internet or through personal encounters.

With this regard, teachers are expected to incorporate the usage of technology in

their instruction, more so in language teaching. Since students have the ability to filter

information in such a short period of time, a challenge was posted on the shoulders of the

teachers to keep the instruction visually and mentally stimulating. And as technology

continues to grow and become more accessible and affordable to the market, educational

developers seek to address these changes on language instruction.

RELATED STUDIES

Morphology in Twitter

In a study conducted at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, that is entitled

“A Study of the Morphological Processes of Neologisms in the Media” by Joyes Sheela

A/P Subrayan Michael, the findings reveled that similar to Seng’s (2006) finding that 53

per cent of the new words in the sample data of his research are nouns. This study also

finds that 58 per cent of the Neologisms selected are nouns. The implication is that most

of the new words that are being formed in this era are nouns.
 29

The study also shows that Su’ (1993) focus on compounding as the main process

used in word formation in her research corresponds with the findings of this study where

compounding is the most frequently used process found among the selected samples, that

is, 48.57 per cent. The implication here is that, most of the new words formed and used in

the local media are formed the process of compounding, resulting in the copious use of

compound nouns. This shows that although researchers today seem to focus more on the

73 process of blending, the local Malaysian media seemed to use more words formed

through compounding.

The samples selected for the purpose of this research, was limited to one

established newspaper, The Edge, and collected over a period of three months. This may

be considered a short period of time for new words to be introduced to the mass audience

yet the number of examples collected show that new words are being used daily in the

local media today.

Papers like The Edge, which covers various fields in news writing, including

business, investments and politics are required to keep up with the times and use words

relevant to the current society’s perception and understanding of the world around them.

This observation implies that the future for Neologisms, at least for now, is still very

bright and that the use of morphological processes in word formation is an ongoing

process. Based on the findings of this study, there are no new or unknown morphological

processes that have been introduced as yet. The only consideration is that there are some

Neologisms that are formed through a combination of at least two morphological

processes.
 30

From the research entitled “The Language of Twitter: Linguistic innovation and

character limitation in short messaging” from the University Of Leeds Undergraduate

Dissertation, by Bethan Davies, it was determined that one of the underlying factor that

contributed to the changes in morphological processes in twitter is its character-

restrictions. The study tries to identify a number of linguistic features of Twitter

messages, and, in a way compares it with the results of other previous studies into text

messaging and instant messaging like those of Ling and Baron (2007), where it explores

the extent to which character limitation may have an influence on the linguistic features

of such media. Numerous instances of linguistic alterations that appear to be unique to

messages posted on Twitter are also identified.

The study determines that character limitation may have been influential in the

production of linguistic alterations in short messaging, but acknowledges that there are

certain contradicting elements of evidence that mean caution is advised when making any

definitive claims on this regard. Finally, this research also closes that there are a number

of altered elements of linguistic units us within Twitter messages, but that other linguistic

features are positioned approximately in the medium closer to traditional, standard

written language.

In this study, the researcher tries to compare if tweets have any similarities with

those of text messaging, and it was proven to have shared a number of likeness, including

high percentage of contractions. Features that have been observed in text messaging, such

as logograms, pictograms, abbreviations and acronyms (Crystal, 2007 and Katamba,

2005) were also identified within messages posted on Twitter, albeit to a relatively small

degree.
 31

While one might expect language use on Twitter to fall somewhere in between

that of text messaging and instant messaging, and certain facets examined such as mean

sentence length would go some way to confirming this theory, this does not in fact appear

to be true. Instead, it can be concluded that language use on Twitter is markedly more

standard and formal than either of the two media with which it is compared. The results

demonstrate a considerable amount more standard punctuation, a low number of

logograms and pictograms, and a complete lack of logograms in which a character is used

to directly represent a phonetic sound, features that have all been observed within text

messaging and instant messaging. Where the data did diverge away from standard

language, it was often in ways that have been observed across a range of genres; as such,

it would not be reasonable to ascribe these features to the fact that the medium is Twitter

itself. Therefore, in many ways, it could be said that Twitter is in fact closer to traditional

written language than it is to spoken language, when some commentators have suggested

that computer and technology mediated communication generally sit more in the

direction of speech (Bellmore and Collot, 1996).

The study also allows us further insight into the effects of character limitation on

Twitter messages and perhaps short messaging services more generally, although the

nature of the results means it is difficult to draw any absolute conclusions. It may have

been expected that, if character limitation did indeed have a substantial effect on

linguistic choices within short messaging, features such as abbreviation, initialism and

the omission of standard punctuation would be prevalent; in fact, this was not the case,

with these features only appearing in relatively small numbers across the data.
 32

When compared to 160-character-limited text messaging and even to negligibly

character-limited instant messaging in Ling and Baron’s (2007) study, the data collected

from Twitter in this study showed a strong tendency to avoid such features. As such, it

may be tempting to assume that character limitation to not play a significant effect in the

linguistic features of short messaging services, as the features are not consistent across all

media that impose a character limit. Nonetheless, other linguistic features identified

within the data are geared towards the opposite conclusion. The observed mean message

length on Twitter was consistently found to be higher than text messaging, which, as a

character-limited medium, was in turn found to be higher than instant messaging

transmissions (Ling and Baron, 2007). While it may seem counter-intuitive to assign

character limitation to higher message lengths, and while the difference in length between

Twitter messages and text messages did appear to be predominantly large. Ling and

Baron’s view that character restriction could in fact drive up average message lengths

means this is worthy of consideration.

Additionally, although their use is by no means restricted to short messaging

services, the fact that contracted forms were indeed prevalent may well be related to the

140-character limit, and while abbreviations and acronyms were not found to be

particularly widespread and were frequently those found across a range of genres and

media, the fact that they were present at all is worth noting.

Perhaps more enlightening in this context, however, are the features that were

identified in Twitter messages in this study, but not by Ling and Baron (2007) in their

study of text messaging and instant messaging. Instances of pro-dropping, while not

unique to Twitter, are most likely demonstrative of users being aware of the imposed
 33

character limitation while understanding that this stylistic choice rarely makes their

messages more difficult to understand.

Furthermore, the use of URL parsing to reduce the number of characters in

hyperlinks suggests the same level of awareness of the character limit on Twitter users’

part. As such, although certain elements of the evidence contradict one another, it is

possible to conclude that character limitation is indeed likely to play a role in the

linguistic choices of users of short messaging services.

The results also allow for conclusions to be drawn regarding the extent to which

Twitter users appear to be developing a linguistically unique style. Once more, specific

aspects of the evidence may have conflict with one another. Generally, the prevalent use

of standard grammatical constructions and lexical items would lead to the impression that

language use on Twitter is not particularly unique, and, overall, this is perhaps the

conclusion that should be drawn. Nevertheless, certain elements of the data stand out.

The use of hyperlinks as part of short messages is perhaps more in line with what may be

expected of bulletin board posts, and certainly positions Twitter as closer to those than

text messaging in this respect. Additionally, the use of URL parsing, although not strictly

limited to Twitter, is a relatively new phenomenon within computer and technology

mediated communication.

Finally, the use of hashtags is something that is certainly unique to the Twitter

service. Perhaps most interesting is the discovery of some users’ linguistic creativity

within these hashtags, using them not in their intended manner to link messages of the

same existing topic, however, to make ‘bluff’ topics within their messages, which may or

may not progress into more typical hashtag topics. While this was by no means a frequent
 34

observation within the data, it does suggest that Twitter users are utilizing the features of

the medium to become linguistically creative within it. However, the factthat Twitter is a

service in its relative infancy, and the fact that no previous linguistic studies have been

conducted in relation to it, means it is best to proceed with caution when drawing any

absolute conclusions at this stage, particularly given the conflicting evidence previously

noted. Such conclusions are perhaps best considered tentative, and as groundwork for any

further research on the topic.

Additionally, it is important to take into consideration the financial disparity when

comparing Twitter messages with text messages, as Ling and Baron (2007) noted in

relation to their comparison of text messaging and instant messaging. While text

messages typically cost around ￡0.10 per transmission, Twitter is a free service, and as

such there are fewer reasons why a user would not want to spread a communication out

across numerous individual messages. While the number of instances of this occurrence

were not recorded, due to the way in which the data was managed, it is perhaps possible

to speculate that users would tend to spread a diffusion across multiple messages when

there is no financial repercussion for doing so, although it is also worth noting that many

text messages are sent as part of a monthly payment plan whereby the user would be

billed the same amount per month regardless of the number of text messages sent.

Finally, it is worth also considering the possible methodological limitations of the

study, and the implications that they may have on the results and any conclusions drawn.

As mentioned, the initially planned methodology, whereby a larger self-selecting sample

would be collected and a subsequent random sample taken in order to balance the spread

of participants, was not possible due to a lack of volunteers. Additionally, the fact that
 35

potential participants were made aware of the study via a personal website and posts to

social networking sites could mean that the spread of participants was rather twisted, with

only those participants involved with such sites given the opportunity to participate in the

study. It was observed in the data, though not measured, that conversational topics tended

to veer towards technology and entertainment. While it is possible that Twitter users tend

to fall into the same interest categories, there is still a very real possibility that the

participants of this study were not necessarily holistically indicative of the full range of

Twitter’s user base. As such, it is once again best to proceed with caution when assuming

the results of the study to be absolutely conclusive.

Nevertheless, the study provides new empirical information with regards to

language use and linguistic creativity within messages posted to the Twitter service, and

provides grounding for further research. Possible linguistic innovations have been

identified, and although some evidence is contradictory, the nature of character limitation

has been investigated, and tentative conclusions drawn.

Similarly from this study, there is another research written by Fernando Rosell-

Aguilar that discusses how students learn language through Twitter, this is entitled

“Twitter as a formal and informal language learning tool: from potential to evidence”. It

was stated in this study that the recent doubling of the character count from 140 to 280 is

likely to have an effect on the way users express themselves. It may reduce the number of

acronyms and abbreviations used as well as the number of instances of ‘bad’ grammar

(skipping articles or prepositions, for example). This may also direct to more reflection

and less concise posts, therefore addressing the concerns some researchers had expressed

regarding the 140-character limit (Grosseck & Holotescu, 2008).

 36

The alterations to the way active Twitter users express themselves after the move

or shift from 140 to 280 characters is another topic that may seem an interesting area for

further investigation. Although this research has focused on the learner experience of

using Twitter for language learning purposes, it is worth mentioning that language

teachers also engage in the sharing of resources and experiences through hashtags such as

#Langchat and #MFLtwitterati, which are examples of teachers seeking and supporting

each other for continuous professional development through Twitter.

From all the concepts regarding morphology, its definition, history and theoretical

views, as well with the common characteristics of an IGen, to the phenomena that are

now evident in Twitter and some researches, that were mentioned in this chapter, the

researcher believes that all these will serve as foundation to the relevance of the claims

and assumptions that the researcher will arrive in the results and discussion of the study.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
 37

This presents the illustrated framework of the study whereas the relation of the

variables are shown in the traditional Input-Process-Output Diagram in Figure 1.

As seen in the Figure 1, presented are the Input, Process and the Output, whereas

the Input indicates that it is composed of the recent developed words of the youth today

through the use of social media site, particularly Twitter, while the Process is composed

of the morphological analysis of the language use of students. Further, the end product of

the research therefore is located on the Output, where the language-use extension

programs in school.

Further, the framework of the study is patterned to the classification of

word formation according to Matthew (1991). This classification deals with five

morphological processes that occur in words ones these words are altered in form and

structure. Once the smallest unit of linguistic measure which has a meaning, called

morpheme, undergoes a certain change, it may fall under these categories; (1) Affixation,

whereas a bound morpheme or an affix is attached to a morphological base, or a root

word in this sense, in order to create either a different form of the morphological base or

a new word with a different definition, (2) Conversion, happens when the word’s

function has been transformed into another but there is no obvious change in form, (3)
 38

Reduplication, if the root or stem of a word, either part or whole, is repeated exactly or

with a little change, (4) Modification, is when there is a change in the meaning of the

word or words because of blending, compounding and the like, (5) Subtraction, if the

word was shortened, truncated or abbreviated but the meaning stays the same or does not

change in any way. From a more recent study conducted by Magtanong (2018), three

word formation processes Borrowing, Natural Linguistic Progression, and Word

Postering are included as classifications for the analysis of the study.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

The following terms have significant operational meanings with regards to the

subject of this study, therefore, the researcher believes that identifying these will help in

better understanding the undertakings of the study at hand:

Relational Morphology - A theory that is derived and is based on the mentalistic

perspective framework of Parallel Architecture. It suggests that instead of

analyzing language by breaking and deconstructing large morphological units into

smaller pieces, it theorize to analyze language according to store word units in

memory, one form or another.

Parallel Architecture - is a framework for understanding the organization of language

and its place in the larger ecology of the human mind, is primarily committed in

thoroughgoing mentalism, where the speaker’s knowledge of language is

associated with the linguistic structures that elicit meaningful psycholinguistic

concerns on structure and memory, comprehension and production of language,

and finally, its acquisition.

 39

Construction Morphology - this is a theoretical framework that shares as number of

similarities with Cognition Grammar, it focuses more on usage-basedness and the

notion of constructional schemas. It assumes that the structures within

morphology is an independent and sole layer of data. The central unit of analysis

is the construction, intended as a sign, a form–meaning pairing.

Schematic or Semi-Schematic Constructions – serve as templates for the creation of

new words. These are prior knowledge in language that have already been stored

in one’s memory that become the basis for his reconstruction of words.

Construction - is an interconnection of form and meaning

Digital Social Discourse – this view in language deals with the contemporary

multimodal discourse used in new media, including those of varied social

networking sites (SNS). This framework believes that interactions between

different linguistic units share semiotic relationship with each other which was

brought about by the alterations in media.

Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis or CMDA – is a framework devised for

textual interactions. This analysis of textual representations of language believes

that through the innovations made with the technological advances, linguistic

analysis must also be ever changing and must follow through the changes that

these innovations occur, whereas, multimodality and interdisciplinary modes and

semiotic relationships between sounds, symbols and meanings are being treated in

interfaces.
 40

Social Networking Sites – are social media platforms that offer interactions between

members through the use of hypertextuality, such that it employs the use not only

text, but of graphical symbols such as emojis, GIFs, memes among others.

Morphemes – are smallest, indivisible, irreducible units of language that have significant

meaning in the construction of words and word forms.

Morphology – Many linguist share their personal views on this, however, let us agree

that morphology is the study is the study of internal relationships of words and

word forms with respect to the structural, lexical basis of the words.

IGeneration – or IGen, is the by-product of the technological advancement in today’s

current contemporary means known as the digital world. This younger sub-group

of population is seen as having technological imprints of some sort from the time

they have been conceived to birth, and as they grow mature in their age. They also

are considered to be comfortable in the use of any devise to ease basic human

activity, such in terms of communication, business, entertainment, etc.

Neologism – it is a term linguist use to denote the newly-formed words in contemporary

mass media, and almost any other media that is arbitrarily considered and

understandable to a larger mass of audience or linguistic community.

Twitter – is one of the predominant media platform through social networking sites that

have greatly influence language learning and acquisition of students. Twitter was

launched in 2006 and have begun as a micro-blogging site that allows sharing

video clips, textual messaging, either through tweeting or retweeting ideas and

threads. It has previous character restriction of 140, until in 2017 when its

management doubles the amount to 280.

 41

Acronym – this is one of the subclassification of Subtraction, words categorized under

this are often formed by a sequence of illegal letter strings that are taken from

initial letter of words or phrases that are joined together.

Omission – a word process that is classified under Subtraction, this is often done by

shortening or omitting syllables from the original word and having minimal

changes in the spelling or lexicon of the word.

Alphanumeric – another word formation under Subtraction, this is a process that is

distinguished with the use of numbers as replacement for either the sound of its

correspondent, or the symbol.

Association – still under Subtraction, word process that is deals with the association of a

sound of a syllable or word to the sound of a letter to represent it in the sentence.

Compounding – categorized under Modification, words considered to be compounded

have their own meanings separately but are combined to create a new meaning

that the students feel more appropriate for their sentences.

Blending – second subclassification of Modification, blended words are taken from two

different but associated words that have created new words which may or may not

have the same meanings.

Intentional Misspelling – Modification that is distinguished by the alteration that

happened to a word when it undergoes changes in the manner of how it is

presented, not necessarily shortened, but the orthographical composition deviates

from its original word structure.

Reversal - word process that is done by spelling the words inversely. Still under

Modification.
 42

Redefinition - the words did not undergo unnecessary changes concerning additional

morphemes e.i. a phonologically null suffix to the base., however, new function or

meanings have been linked to the terms. This is one of the two subclassifications

of Conversion.

Category Extension - is one of the two subclassifications of Conversion where a word is

affixed with a morpheme to change its function to achieve appropriation in a

sentence.

Affixation - It is the process of word formation where the stem or root word is connected

to a bound morpheme, in this case, to inflection.

Borrowing - is a word formation where a user derives words from its language origin

and adapts it into his or her linguistic orthography

Natural Linguistic Progression – words classified under this word formation process

have been repeatedly used throughout generations and have went on to have

several changes in form and in the manner, these are presented in the spoken

language.

Multiple Alterations - words which have undergone different processes of word

formation.

Notes in Chapter II

Anderson, S. A short History of Morphological Theory. Dept. of Linguistics, Yale

University. https://cowgill.ling.yale.edu/sra/short-history.pdf
Audring, J., and Masini, F. Introduction: Theory and Theories in Morphology. The
Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. December, 2018.
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668984.001.
0001/oxfordhb-9780199668984-e-1
Beaulieu, T., Sarker, S., and Sarker, S. Analyzing Online Discourse: Some Theoretical
Ideas and a Visualization Approach. Thirty Sixth International Conference on
Information Systems, Fort Worth 2015.
 43

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/27ab/432218fdd9d55bd61987be0fa30339231568
.pdf
Blitvich, P., & Bou-Franch, P. Introduction to Analyzing digital discourse: New insights
and future directions. January, 2019. Palgrave, Macmillan.
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_Digital_Discourse_New_Insights_and_Future_Directions_New_Insights_and_F
uture_Directions
Booij, G. Construction Morphology. University of Leiden. Language and Linguistics
Compass 3/1 (2010): 1–13, 10.
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morphology-lg-linguistics-compass.pdf
Booij, G. Morphology: the structure of words. University of Leiden.
https://geertbooij.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/booij-2014-morphology-
routledgehandbook1.pdf
Brian Mastroianni. How Gen Z is Changing the Wold of Tech Today. March 10, 2016
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Center for Generational Kinetics (2016). Gen Z Social Media Usage and Trends
Infographic. http://genhq.com/igen-genz-social-media-trends-infographic/
Davies, B. The Language of Twitter: Linguistic innovation and character limitation in
short messaging. University of Leeds,
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linguistic-innovation-and-character-limitation-in-short-messaging.pdf
Desjardins, J. A Cross-theoretical and Cross-linguistic Survey of Lexical Integrity and
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theoretical_and_Cross-
linguistic_Survey_of_Lexical_Integrity_and_the_Morphology-Syntax_Interface
Fich, Jeremy. What Is Generation Z, And What Does It Want? Fast
Company.https://www.fastcompany.com/3045317/what-is-generation-z-and-
what-does-it-want. May 04, 2015
Generation Z. Wikipedia.com. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z
Haig, G. Word-class distinctions and morphological type: agglutinating and fusional
languages reconsidered. 2014, citable as 2006
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_type_agglutinating_and_fusional_languages_reconsidered
Haspelmath, Martin. Understanding Morphology. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig. 2002.
Hattem, D., and Lomicka, L. What the Tweets say: A critical analysis of Twitter research
in language learning from 2009 to 2016. E-Learning and Digital Media 2016,
 44

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ritical_analysis_of_Twitter_research_in_language_learning_from_2009_to_2016
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January 30, 2019. https://wearesocial.com/blog/2019/01/digital-2019-global-
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iGeneration! March 10, 2010 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rewired-
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Maxwell, M. Two Theories of Morphology, One Implementation. Summer Institute of
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5 Morphology and Word Formation
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University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. 2014.
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Spencer, A. Word Formation Vs. Syntax. Natural language and Linguistic Theory, 2005.
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philippines/. February, 2016
 45

Rosell-Aguilar, F. (2018). Twitter as a formal and informal language learning tool: from
potential to evidence. Research - publishing.net.
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Formation_Processes_in_English
Zwicky, A. Some Choices in the Theory of Morphology. Oxford Press, 1992.
https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/some-choices-morphology-theory.pdf

CHAPTER III

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, the researcher discusses the following components; research

method and design used, population and sampling technique, description of the

respondents, the instruments used, and the narrative of the data gathering procedure, all

of which are aimed to determine and understand the words used by I-Generation, and the

functions of words in a sentence.

RESEARCH METHOD AND DESIGN

 46

This research falls under the qualitative research method, or design because of the

nature of the study. Qualitative research method has been defined by many all through

the course of its existence, and even as of now there are still many who attempts to

understand and explain what it is. Commonly, qualitative research is seen to be a

‘subjective’ approach because of the manner of its data collection, such as interviews,

observation, and the like, where the researcher has the freedom to give his or her personal

interpretation of the collected data. As it was defined from umsl.edu, under the College of

Education, “a qualitative research is a systematic subjective approach used to describe

life experiences and give them meaning” that is uses elaborate explanations and

descriptions regarding the subject of the study.

However, qualitative research is an inquiry-based approach that seeks to

understand cases, phenomenon, ideas and concepts through an in-depth discussion of

how the variables are connected with one another, and how it affects other underlying

variables in the study. It often uses small amount of sample sizes as its subjects or

respondent, nevertheless, data collected are still true to its purpose and unbiasedly taken

into consideration. Qualitative research involves many processes not to prove, evaluate,

or measure levels, or significance, it involves the creation of new theories and therefore

raw and undisturbed findings will arise.

According to Jennifer Mason in her book Qualitative Researching, 2nd edition

(2002), qualitative research is grounded in a philosophical position which is broadly

‘interpretivist’ in the sense that it is deals with how the social world is given

interpretation, how it is being understood, experienced, produced or constituted by the

people. While different versions of qualitative studies might be assumed or approach

 47

these elements in different ways (e.i, focusing more on social meanings, or inferences, or

performs, or discourses, or processes, or constructions), all will see at least some of these

as meaningful elements in a complex – possibly multi-layered and textured – social

world.

These elements are based on methods of data gathering, which are both flexible

and sensitive to the social context where data are produced (rather than rigidly

standardized or controlled or taken wholly abstracted from ‘real-life’ contexts). Based on

methods of analysis, understandings of complexity is being involved in the process of

explanation and argument building, also detail and context. One of the many goals of a

qualitative research is to produce rounded and contextual understandings on the basis of

rich, nuanced, and detailed data. Emphasis is centered more on the ‘holistic’ forms of

analysis and explanation in this sense, rather than on charting surface patterns, trends, and

correlations. It often does use some form of quantification, but statistical forms of

analysis are not seen as central.

This study is examined through morphological analysis (MA) where the

following are being discussed: word formation, the lexicon, inflection, interfaces,

morphological classification, affix ordering, and diachrony, processing complex words,

morphological productivity, and tools for morphological research. MA, in this sense,

focuses on the word formation processes that the iGeneration junior high school students

use in their Twitter account.

POPULATION AND SAMPLE OF THE STUDY

 48

Because the research is qualitative in nature for the questions asked, and the

intended manner of data gathering instruments and procedure, the researcher believes that

using purposive sampling is fitting for the study.

As Ashley Crossman defines, a purposive sample is a non-probability sample that

is selected based on characteristics of a population and the objective of the study.

Purposive sampling is also known to be a critical, selective, or subjective sampling

technique. This type of sampling can be very advantageous in situations when there is a

need to reach a targeted sample quickly, and where sampling for proportionality is not the

chief concern.

On this note, the researcher then assumes that purposive sampling under

homogeneous sampling is what this research uses for it is one that is selected for having a

shared characteristic or set of characteristics.

Particularly, the researcher considers 50 IGeneration junior high school students

having active Twitter accounts as the subjects of the study. Because of the abundance of

possible materials to be used, the researcher narrows down the criteria for considering

tweets as subjects for the study. These are; (1) post coming from an account of a junior

high school student, (2) those that are written in either English or Tagalog medium so

long as the words subjected for analysis are written or stated in English, (3) are publicly

posted in Twitter from June 2019, to June 2020, (4) tweets with photos, emojis and any

other graphic images may be considered, as long as these contain captions that comply

with (2) criteria, (5) replies to tweets of the subjects of the study may also be considered,

given that the persons who replied is also another subject of the study, (6) threads is also
 49

set as part of the study, and (7) retweets of JHS students which may or may not be posted

by another subject of the study.

RESEARCH INSTRUMENT

This study aims to identify the words that the I-Generation use and determine the

function that these words take role in sentences. As the researcher decides to use

qualitative research design, having homogeneous purposive sampling, since the nature of

the study falls under the linguistic morphological analysis, the researcher believes that

one of the most appropriate means of gathering materials is through the social media

platform Twitter.

Twitter is one of the many social networking sites where Filipinos mostly

participate in. In the year 2011, Philippines ranked first in the number of active members

of the site, consistently, in the following year, about 5.5 million Filipino active members

are registered in Twitter. In a recent analysis made by Statistica, a statistical portal or site,

Filipino Twitter users have reached 10.4 million, which was twice of the number five

years ago. In the recent chart published by Pew Internet, Twitter ranked third in the daily

SNS usage, having an average percentage of 42%, following after Facebook and

Instagram.

There are already some existing studies about how Filipinos use Twitter as a

means to convey messages in communicating with others, one particular is the analysis of

how it is being used in times of disastrous events, such as tropical storms. In these

researches, it was found that 80% of the tweets coming from the Philippines are in

English, while 20% of these are in other Filipino languages.

 50

For these reasons, Twitter is seen to be an appropriate platform to use in

analyzing the language use of junior high school students under the I-Gen, and the

morphological processes that these words undergo as they are used in varied processes

and with different functions.

Taking tweets as materials for the study is considerably appropriate for these are

seen to be posted in a manner as if one person is taking to another or a certain crowd,

where the language use appears to be conversational and is delivered the same way as if it

were spoken or in oral communicative sense.

Then, tweets of Junior High School students who participate in the study will be

screen captured using a mobile device, Samsung A20, through its auto-generated feature.

Another device to be used is Lenovo Ideapad 330 for the analysis of data. Tweets that are

written in both English and Tagalog, or those that use code-switching post between

English and Tagalog, will be considered as a material for the study, given that the words

subjected for analysis are stated or written in English.

As mentioned in the study of Magtanong (2018), from Allen (2016), screenshots

or photographs of screens were developed to describe the experience of using computer-

aided design on an interactive computer. In addition, Latour (2014) calls screenshots as

iconographic conventions which can be used in research. There were a number of studies

which employ the use of screenshots as a tool in their research, among others are;

Akbarov and Tankosic (2016) as they used it on their study on the impact of social

networks and technology on English language learner, Mercado (2017) with her research

on the language on social media, Lacap (2017) employed it on her study on the features

of literary and rhetorical devices in Philippine entertainment and political memes, and
 51

Apostol (2017) made use of it on her research on Facebook as a platform for social

expression.

DATA GATHERING PROCEDURE

Prior data gathering is made to assure that the basis of the study is valid. From

this, the researcher drafts an initial introduction of the study, after which is the

arrangement of the researched documents relevant to the study, succeeding with the

initial draft of the methodology where the specifications of the study is given.

The researcher decided to use social networking site as its source for analysis

where the main platform that she considers is Twitter. Tweets coming from Junior High

School students of the IGen are the primary subjects of this study, where the language use

of the subjects are screen captured into photos and presented as a tool for the study.

Initially, the researcher seek consent from the subjects of the study through a

letter which will be read to them, and a sheet of paper dedicated for the list of participants

attached after the letter. Written in the paper are all considerations that the study

undertakes. Once participants of the study are accumulated, data collection will follow

through. A sample copy of the consent form will be provided in the Appendices.

The researcher browses through the Twitter accounts of the participants and

contemplate on the criteria for selecting valid materials. These materials are trimmed

down into smaller number by selecting those that meet the criteria set by the researcher.

Then these will be subjected for morphological analysis through identifying the

morphological processes (such as affixation, conversion, reduplication, modification, and

 52

subtraction) that occurred on the words used and the functions that these words take in

the sentence.

Analyzed data will be consolidated, and then subjected for verification. After

such, finalization of the paper will be constructed according to the framework of the

study.

DATA ANALYSIS PROCEDURE

Morphological analysis is a framework for critical examination of word

formation, and the manner of language use of a certain group of people in a particular

context. In this sense, the researcher deems to gather materials for the study through

Twitter accounts of IGen junior high school students from Llamas memorial Institute.

Tweets of the students will be taken a screenshot and use these as tools for the study.

Once necessary data are gathered, these will be subjected to morphological

analysis by examining the word formation of the language used by the students. Tweets,

which fall under the criteria set by the researcher, will be screened for words which has a

morphological alteration in form or meaning.

Following the classification of Matthew (1991), the morphological processes used

in this research are the following: (1) Affixation, whereas a bound morpheme or an affix

is attached to a morphological base, or a root word in this sense, in order to create either a

different form of the morphological base or a new word with a different definition, (2)

Conversion, happens when the word’s function has been transformed into another but

there is no obvious change in form, (3) Reduplication, if the root or stem of a word, either

part or whole, is repeated exactly or with a little change, (4) Modification, is when there
 53

is a change in the meaning of the word or words because of blending, compounding and

the like, (5) Subtraction, if the word was shortened, truncated or abbreviated but the

meaning stays the same or does not change in any way.\

Addition of three word formation processes is also considered because of the

recent inclusion of Magtanong (2018). These are; (6) Borrowing or loaning of words

from another language and adapting it to the lexicon of the targeted language, (7) Natural

Linguistic Progression deals with the overuse of a term that through time it undergoes

contraction and commonly shortened into one to two syllable(s), (8) Word Postering is

when the symbols are used to create an illustration of what people would do if they are

physically together.

The words altered will be categorized, if words used in these tweets do not fall

under any of these classifications, then, a new morphological process will be devised to

address the alterations made in these words. Consequently, words will be analyzed

structurally to identify the transition of the words altered from its original morphological

form to its altered form. Identifying the meaning and function of these words will also be

relevant to the study, this will help in the understanding if the change in word’s form also

elicit change in its meaning. The researcher will evaluate the results of the analysis

through the use of downloadable dictionary applications in mobile phones through the

access of the app store, example is the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary, and Oxford

English Dictionary.

ESTABLISHING TRUSTWORTHINESS OF DATA

 54

Because of the nature of this study, the researcher considers this as a qualitative

research. Unlike quantitative research that has a number of strengths in coming up with

accurate numbers and precise estimations due to its numerical and statistical qualities,

qualitative research has a number of weaknesses in the aspect of being trustworthy

because it does not any metric tool to measure the results’ validity and or reliability.

Trustworthiness is a characteristic of research that may be ensured through

achieving four properties of research, particular to its methodology. According to

Phillimore and Goodson (2004), a qualitative research design has a conventional for-

pillared criteria, these are creditability, transferability, dependability, and confirmability.

The creditability of the research is achieved through standardizing the criteria that

the research materials should adhere to such that tweets should be; (1) post coming from

an account of a junior high school student, (2) those that are written in either English or

Tagalog medium so long as the words subjected for analysis are written or stated in

English, (3) are publicly posted in Twitter from June 2019, to June 2020, (4) tweets with

photos, emojis and any other graphic images may be considered, as long as these contain

captions that comply with (2) criteria, (5) replies to tweets of the subjects of the study

may also be considered, given that the persons who replied is also another subject of the

study, and (6) threads is also set as part of the study, and (7) retweets of JHS students

which may or may not be posted by another subject of the study. Once the criteria has

been set, the researcher then consolidates data through the use of screen captured photos

using a mobile phone, Samsung A20, and a downloadable application, Screenshot

Assistant. As the researcher analyzes the data gathered, she validates the meaning and

function of the altered words through using Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Oxford
 55

English Dictionary downloadable mobile applications. These precautious steps are

considered to ensure the truthfulness and accuracy of the materials, instruments, and

results of the study.

Through the given theoretical background of the study, and also of the studies

alignment with other studies concerning morphological analysis, the researcher ascertains

the transferability of the study. By taking and considering other local and foreign

literature and studies that are already available at the expense of the researcher, and

following the pattern of a previously categorized morphological processes, the results of

the study is viewed to be a possible avenue for other researches in the same field.

Confirmability of the study is gained through consistently noting down significant

matters that concerns the language use of the students in their SNS accounts in Twitter.

Changes in the manner of their language use over the 12-month scope of the study is also

taken into consideration. These notes will be contemplated about and the important once

is included and stated in the results and discussion of the study where the words altered

will be looked upon and analyzed in isolation according to its context.

Lastly, through regular consultation with an expert in the field of linguistics, the

dependability of the research is attained. These consultation with an ESL instructor is a

helpful step in assuring the accuracy of the materials gathered, the analysis that these

materials adhered to, and the results that the analysis yielded by the end of the study.

Further, the researcher secures all the materials, compiles these and consistently pursue

congruence with the research methods, materials and tools so as to assure that the study

may be repeated, or duplicated in a different platform or local to examine whether same

phenomena occurs in terms of the language use of the IGen in their SNS accounts.
 56

Notes in Chapter III

Cheek, J. (2008) ‘Research Design’, in: Given, L.M. (ed.). The SAGE Encyclopedia of
Qualitative Research Methods. London, SAGE, pp. 761-733.
Crossman, A. Understanding Purposive Sampling: An Overview of the Method and Its
Applications. July, 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/purposive-sampling-
3026727
Green, J. & Thorogood N. (2010) Qualitative Methods for Health Research. Third
Edition. London: Sage Publications.
Mason, J. Qualitative Researching, 2nd Edition. SAGE Publications London • Thousand
Oaks • New Delhi. 2002
http://www.sxf.uevora.pt/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Mason_2002.pdf
Qualitative Research: Research Design. http://www.emgo.nl/kc/qual-research-design/
Statistica Research Department. Number of Twitter users in the Philippines from 2014 to
2019 (in millions). https://www.statista.com/statistics/490561/twitter-users-
philippines/. February, 2016
Wanjiku, K. Application of Qualitative and Quantitative Research Approaches
https://www.academia.edu/11953924/Application_of_Qualitative_and_Quantitati
ve_Research_Approaches

CHAPTER IV

PRESENTATION, ANALYSIS, AND INTERPRETATION OF DATA

In this chapter, altered words collected from Twitter are presented, analyzed, and

then interpreted to answer the established research questions.

Since one of the main goals of the study is to identify the words and

morphological processes that occur to the altered words, and ultimately device a short

periodical that may address the difference of the words used by iGen Junior High School

students in Twitter to its correct or standardized meaning, the presentation of data then

will be accorded to the research questions.

 57

For better understanding of the presentation of the data, it will be divided into

three partitions, first is dedicated to present the totality and distribution of words

according to the classification of the word process it undergone, next part is designed to

analyze what morphological processes occurred on these words as they are used in

Twitter, and interpret what caused these words to undergo such processes, and lastly, this

part is set to device a periodical that would differentiate the language used by iGen

against the correct meanings or use of these words.

The researcher had gathered data for a month using 50 JHS students’ Twitter

accounts as subjects for the study. In total, the researcher was able to extract 687 altered

words which are categorized into morphological processes. These are generally classified

into eight word processes: Subtraction, Modification, Conversion, Affixation, Borrowing,

Natural Linguistic Progression, Multiple Alterations, Association, and Phrasal

Alterations.

Part I: Totality and Distribution of Words According to Word Process

679

3189

Disregarded Regarded
Classification
 58

Figure 3. Number of Posts with Altered Words

Given in the figure presented above, the researcher was able to gather a total

number of 3,868 posts that contains the reoccurrence of altered words which JHS

students use in their Twitter account from June 2019 to sJune 2020. It must be taken into

consideration that the researcher has already preset a criterion for the selection of 50 JHS

students’ account to be used as subject of the study.

Also, from the same figure, it is shown that 3,189 posts where disregarded for the

study because it may have contained the same altered word that has already been

considered by the researcher. However, on the right most side of the chart, it may be seen

that 679 posts where considered for the study. This constitutes to 17.55% of the total

number of posts gathered.

With this number, the researcher believes that the gathered data is enough to make

assumptions about the alterations made in the construction or formation of the words

used by students in their Twitter account.

 59

Word Formation Processes

Multiple Alterations
9%
Natural Linguistic
Progression Subtraction
4% 36%

Borrowing
13%

Affixation
7%

Conversion
10% Modification
22%

Figure 4. General Classifications of Altered Words

This figure presents the distribution of the altered words according to its general

classification. From what is seen, Subtraction of elements in a word is the most common

word process that occurs in the language use of students, where it constitutes to a total of

36% or a total of 241 altered words classified under this. Following this is Modification

of the elements having the 22% or 146 altered words. Then, having 13% or a total of 86

altered words is Borrowing. After this is Conversion consisting of 68 altered words and

having 10% of the total. Multiple Alterations has 60 altered words or the 9% of the

totality. Affixation has 6% with 44 counts, while Natural Linguistic Progression has 26

counts constituting to 4%.

Initially, the researcher’s basis is that of Matthew’s Theory of Morphological

Process (1991) where he gives five classifications of morphological processes. However,

as the study progressed, it is seen that the language use of students in Twitter lean

towards subtraction of elements in words and modification of its contents. More so, in the
 60

study conducted by Magtanong (2018), he has identified additional classification of

processes that were not mentioned by Matthew, these are Borrowing, Natural Linguistic

Progression, and Word Postering. These word processes are adapted in the current study

and addition of new processes are given, which are Association, and Multiple Alterations.

Given below is a more particular figure that features the specific morphological

processes that the altered word undergone.

Word Formation processes

Multiple Alterations Acronym
9% 13% Omission
Natural Linguistic 20%
Progression
4%
Borrowing
13%

Alphanumeric
Affixation 2%
7%
Association
Category Intension 1%
1% Compounding
5%
Redefinition
9%
Blending
5%
Reversal
1%
Intentional Misspelling
11%

Figure 5. Specific Classifications of Altered Words

From the figure above, it is seen that there are 15 specific classification of word

processes that the researcher identified in analyzing the altered words. Among these,

Omission gained the highest number of frequencies having 134 altered words classified

under it. It is followed by Borrowing that has 13% of the total, having 86 counts under it,

while Acronym has 85 counts constituting to 12%. Then, with 77 frequencies comes

Intentional Misspelling with 11%. Redefinition and Multiple Alterations both have 9%

having 61 and 60 counts, respectively. Next is Affixation with 6% of the total, and 44
 61

words under it. Compounding and Blending has the same percentage of 5%, having 32

and 31 counts, respectively. Following this is Natural Linguistic Progression with 4%, or

26 altered words. Having 12 altered words, Alphanumeric gained 2% of the total, while

Reversal, and Category Extension, Association have 1% which has 6, 7 and 10 counts,

respectively.

As mentioned, this figure emphasizes that the language use of students in twitter

lean towards achieving concision. However, more than concision, language use of

students is now more creative and inventive in terms of using English words, say for

example borrowing words which may or may not have corresponding Filipino term and

spelling these words in Filipino, but retaining its original pronunciation.

Since the language used in Twitter is seen as oral conversational discourse rather

than mere written speech, deviation of words from its usual morphological process is a

common reoccurring phenomenon among students.

Part II: Morphological Analysis on the Language Use of Students in Twitter

Morphological processes in the digital world, especially in SNS are ever changing

now more than ever. These processes that occur as the words used in sentences in these

brief or short burst of inconsequential information (J. Dorsey, Twitter Founder, 2011) are

deviating from the common structural forms of words and undergoes certain alterations in

its composition, may it be in meaning or in its interactional relationships with

orthographical external structure.

Table 1
 62

Phrase Structure Rules

N Noun

P Pronoun

V Verb

Adj Adjective

Adv Adverb

C Conjunction

P-Inf Part of Infinitive

Prep Preposition

Int Interjection

der Derivational Morpheme

inf Inflectional morpheme

Abb Abbreviation

A Article

 Rewritten as

To determine the structure of words altered in Twitter, the following labels were

adapted from Phrase Structure Rules (Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman, 1998):

 63

As the table presents, the first column are initials or abbreviations of the functions

of the words (parts of speech) that is on the second column. These initials or

abbreviations will be used in the analysis for a more convenient means of representing

the use of the words in the language use of the JHS students.

Table 2

Subtraction (Acronym)

Acronym Meaning
ABG Asian bad girl
AF as f*ck
B baby
BFF best friends forever
BRB be right back
CC curious cat
CP cellphone
CTTO credits to the owner
DL download
 64

DM direct message
DP profile picture
F f*ck
FA flight attendant
FF following
FT featuring
FYI for your information
G game/go
G God
GBU God bless you
GBUA God bless you always
GC group chat
GG good game
HBD happy birthday
HMU hair and make up
IDC I don’t care
IDGAF I don’t give a f*ck
IDK I don’t know
IDM I don’t mind
IG Instagram
ILY(all) I love y’all
ILYSB I love you so baby
ILYSM I love you so much
ILYT I love you too
ILYVM I love you very much
IMY I miss you
IMYS I miss you so
IMYSM I miss you so much
JGH just got home
JWU just woke up
 65

KJ kill joy
LF looking for
LMAO laughing my ass off
LMFAO laughing my f*cking ass off
LMS long messages
LOL laughing out loud
LQ love quarrel
LSS last song syndrome
MF mother fucker
MV music video
OG original
OL online
OMFG oh my f*cking God
OMG oh my God
OP out of place
OPM original Pilipino music
OTP one true pair
OTW on the way
PM personal message
PPT power point
RIP rest in peace
RK rich kid
RN right now
SHS senior high school
SS screen shot
SS stay strong
STFU shut the f*ck up
SY school year
TBH to be honest
TB to be
TC take care
 66

TF the f*ck
TL timeline
TY thank you
TY,L thank you, Lord
TYSM thank you so much
VB volleyball
VBALL volleyball
VC voice/video call
VM voice message
W with
WP wattpad
WT with
WTF what the f*ck
WTG with the gang
YT youtube

Because of the character restriction of tweets, the manner on how JHS students’

tweet are shortened by eliminating or omitting characters in their text. These characters

may be punctuation marks, letters, or spaces at most. In this case, the words altered given

above are words or phrases whose initial letters of every word are taken and combined to

create an acronym. For example, the words I don’t care, I don’t know, and I don’t mind

and are then expressed as IDC, IDK, and IDM. These are expressions that are often used

to respond to a particular question. These words are commonly used in Twitter as

acronyms to provide brevity and conciseness for both the person who tweeted, and for his

or her followers.

Usually, words or phrases that have undergone acronym have two to three word

components only, however, in some cases, these phrases may contain more than three
 67

words, such as GBUA, IDGAF, ILYSM, and TYSM which are interpreted as God bless

you always, I don’t give a fuck, I love you so much, and Thank you so much accordingly.

According to researches, shortening of words through the use of acronyms for

word groups or phrases is one of the preliminary observed morphological phenomena in

Twitter since its onset, having only 140 characters, and not much changed when the

characters allowed to be used are doubled to 280 in 2017. Acronyms are effective mode

of expressing oneself in a very limited number of characters, messages are conveyed and

expressed in whole and therefore it is understood, or at least conceptually.

Playfoot and Izura (2012) mentions that a distinctive characteristic of acronyms is

their configuration do not obey any orthographic or phonological rules. These headwords

are often formed by a sequence of illegal letter strings that could potentially become part

of a language users’ reservoir of word choices. Because of this, the researcher infers that

the familiarity of JHS students on the occurrence of these words in Twitter and other SNS

or social media platforms becomes a factor on how they manifest these acronyms on their

own tweets or how they would retweet posts from other accounts in their own wall.

To Filipinos, using acronyms is a known phenomenon in naming many different

things, like establishments, forms, businesses, agencies, etc. either in private or in public

institutions. In school, students are also being taught to strategize their study skills using

acronyms to name and remember concepts and ideas. Carrying over, reading, writing,

speaking and listening to acronyms is no longer a barrier in understanding each other

since Filipinos are already acquainted with its existence, specially members of the iGen.

Table 3

Subtraction (Omission)
 68

Omission Meaning
(am)fee (ang)feeling(era)
abt/ bout about
acads academics
acc/acct account
ad(s) advertisement
aniv anniversary
anotha another
anw anyway
app application
auto automatic
bb/ bby baby
bc/ bcoz/ bec/ cos/ cus/ cuz because
bday birthday
bes bestfriend
bro brother
btch bitch
bye/ k bye goodbye
cam camera
chillin chilling
convo conversation
couz cousin
deac deactivate
dffrnt different
docu document
dyin dying
em them
ep episode
f.request friend request
fam family
fame famous
 69

fav/ fave favorite

fck f*ck
fckn/ fckin/ fuckin f*cking
fest festival
fic fiction/ fictional
followin following
fr from
gdmghty/ gnight good night(y)
Gen generation
gov/ govt government
grad graduation
hatin hating
hittin hitting
ig instagram
integ integrity
inv invitation
jelous jealous
jk/ jok joke
killin killing
Kpop korean pop
laylo lay low
lil little
lt/ lit/ lite lit
livin living
lobat low battery
lods lodi (idol)
lookin looking
lovin loving
mens menstruation
merch merchandise
missin missing
 70

MNL manila
mofo mother f*cker
mor more
msg message
nega negative
notif(s) notification(s)
nvm never mind
nxt next
of cors of course
og original
ok okay
peeps/ pips/ ppl people
Ph philippines
pics(s)/ picts picture(s)
pimps pimps
pls/ plz please
prep preparation
priv private
pt point
reax reaction
reps reply
rlly really
rt retweet
Samgyup/ samg/ samgy samgyupsal
sched schedule
sec second
seein seeing
sesh session
sht sh*t
srsly seriously
subj subject
 71

subs subscription
sup what’s up?
tats tattoo
t'best the best
tho although
til until
tmrw/ tom tomorrow
tourna tournament
tric tricycle
twt tweet
twtr twitter
univ university
urself yourself
vapin vaping
vids(s) video(s)
w/o without
wer where

From Table 3, it can be seen that Subtraction by Omission has the greatest

number of words altered that are used in Twitter having 134 entries under it.

Looking into the word bc, bcoz, bec, cos, cus, and cuz, these word alterations

mean only one word: because. The altered word bc was shortened by taking the initial

letter of the two syllables. Bcoz was shortened by using the initial letter of the first

syllable, adding the sound of the second syllable. Bec was then shortened using the three

initial letters. Cos, cus, and cuz have the same cases where the last syllable was used,

eliminating the sound of the be.

Similarly, the altered words acc and acct both mean account, bb and bby mean

baby, bye and k bye corresponds to (okay) goodbye. Meanwhile the altered words gov and
 72

govt mean government. While the word people have three-word alterations peeps, pips,

and ppl. The word fav, or fave where the word being altered is favorite, the word was

altered by shortening the pronunciation from being a three-syllabic word, into one, with

the sound of v added to the syllable fa. This has the same meaning but ultimately

different orthographical composition, and the word forevs that is short for forever only

with the addition of s to the earlier syllable forev to give it a more flowy or spontaneous

pronunciation. For another instance, looking into the corpus, consider examples letter g

where the word seriously is only stated in five-letter presentation such as SRSLY that

when analyzed, vowels e, i, o, u are omitted, but if read, it would still elicit the same

grammatical meaning and function of the word, same with pls which mean please, and

bb for baby. Then, tmrw and twtr also has the same process in omission because all the

vowels in the words are eliminated. Then there’s subj meaning subject which is directly

cut with only the first syllable.

From this, it may be inferred that the process of subtraction by omission of

characters is one of the predominant factors affecting the language use of IGen in

Twitter. Consequently, altered words under omission represent more informal language

use or considered as internet slang. In turn, after being subjected to word formation

processes, tweets contained relatively more articles, conjunctions, and prepositions (Boot,

e.t.al, 2019). The results of the study show that the language users in Twitter adapt their

texts to overcome limit constraints. Therefore, the study assumes that this was brought by

the character restriction of 280. Even though the number has increased, Twitter users

have already adapted a system of linguistic arbitrarily constructed corpus of new words
 73

that are relatable, acceptable, comprehensible, and easy-to-access words that their social

digital community would also use.

Table 4

Subtraction (Alphanumeric)

Alphanumeric Meaning
4 for
3ggered triggered
4ever forever
4lyf for life
b4 before
rel8 relate
s4d sad
sh8t shit
sw8 sweet
tw8t tweet
wat2do what to do?

It may be seen from the Table 4 that Subtraction using Alphanumeric is also a

common word formation process in the language use of students in their Twitter

accounts.

This process is distinguished with the use of numbers as replacement for either

the sound of its correspondent, or the symbol. Given as example is 4, where the sound

four is associated with that of for. Same goes for 3gerred, where the sound of tri is

associated with the sound of 3 which is three.

This phenomenon described as a type of neography (Danet and Herring, 2007),

proved to be characteristic for SNS or social media platform. This is most appropriate

assumption especially on forums such as Twitter, also because no other references were
 74

taken apart from the examples given in the tweets. Twitter serves as a rich corpus for the

emergence of new words, hence it is also a forum of subcorpus with a relatively high

frequency of the shortenings discussed. Numbers used in the middle or at the end of

specific words substitute letters and make the texts either shorter or more appealing to

read. Because some numbers can be used both graphically and phonetically, a

neographic creative writing style has emerged among new generations.

In Philippine setting, Shortening under Alphanumeric has been associated with

the language used by the emergence of a demographic cohort of population during the

2010 where social media and SMS messaging is at its initial on-set, this cluster has been

known as Jejemon. According from The Jejemon as Symptom and Slippage: Notes on

Issues of Power and Identity in Media Literacy and (Mass Communication by Christian

Tablazon, Jejemon is primarily characterized through the curious language it employs-or

better yet, performs-a codification largely shaped and determined by its symbiosis with

technology, or with the new media and social media. Jejenese (or Jejemon’s language) is

encoded in a manner that demand excessive use of sticky caps, punctuations, and other

symbols, and interplay between abbreviation and overly stylized and extended spelling.

With this in mind, the researcher believes that the language use of students in

Twitter is largely influenced by the Jejenese , this also suggests that shortening of words

has been common since the beginning of the decade which endured over time and

transcended from and to various media. In Twitter, students mostly use words having

alphanumeric process intentionally to achieve a certain emphasis on their point.

Table 5
 75

Subtraction (Association)

Association Original Word Meaning Function

b Be become V
d The referring to a specific thing A
ez Easy not difficult to do Adj
k Okay affirmation N
n And links to add information C
qt Cutie attractive or pretty in a childish way Adj
r Are one of be-verbs V
ur Your referring to someone’s possession P
ur You are referring to someone’s state/condition P
y Why question for asking reasons P

Shown in the Table 5 is a list of altered words considered to have undergone a

new word formation category that is Association. It is a word process that is deals with

the association of a sound of a syllable or word to the sound of a letter to represent it in

the sentence. This may be viewed as Omission, because characters in the word are being

omitted, but when analyzed, these letters carry the whole meaning of the word with the

association of its sound to the syllable or word.

Looking on this list, consider example ez which means easy. The omission of the

letter a in the first syllable does not only mean that its sound will be completely omitted

too, but it is associated or transferred to the sound of e. As for the second syllable being

represented by the letter z, English words which have consecutive sounds of a vowel and

the s sound converts the sound of s into z. This is why, when the word easy is

pronounced, it become ee-zee (with the sound of long e, and z). Similarly, the word cutie

is represented with the letters q and t or qt. Originally, cutie would have been ct if
 76

omission is the word process that it had undergone, instead, because the sound of the

syllable is regarded, it become q and not c. In conclusion, the letters that represent the

word greatly relies on the sound, rather than the exact characters in the syllables or

words.

In spoken English, omission of sounds is a usual phenomenon from short words

having two to three syllables. Commonly, the last sound of the words is retained to carry

or represent the meaning or thought of the sentences. Say for example, the altered word k

for okay. In recent English language use, speakers commonly associate the sound of k for

okay to mean different things. One of these associations is another altered word kbye

which means Okay, goodbye. From this example it could be inferred that omission of

characters is not the only phenomenon being processed in the sentence but the association

of the sound of the letter k to the entirety of the word itself.

Through an article published in Language Tutoring, Walker (2012) says that one

of the best ways in learning a language is through letter association where the alphabetic

system of the learners’ first language is written side by side with the targeted language so

the sound of the letter could be associated with the word that it represents. This is much

the same with the association of the sound of the letters in the altered words listed in

Table 5, whereas words are associated with the meanings of the words. This is further

manifested why the letter A is associated with the word apple because the initial sound

pronounce in it is the ah.

The association of letters to words has been a pre-existing phenomenon in the

field of linguistics. Early studies of Anderson (1965) and Vetter (1967) have proven that

when presented to a phonetic stimulus, learners respond spontaneously with the word
 77

they associate with the sound of the letter. In Davies and Otto’s comparative study

entitled Children's Word Association to Individual Letters, the two states that learners

associate words with the initial phonetic sound of the word with the letters, that is why

when subjects of the study are presented with the letter u they have written the word you.

Further, in a study conducted by Clarka and Arakia (2011), single letter words

that refer to the use of “b” for “be”, “r” for “are”, “c” for “see”, etc were not flagged as

spelling errors when analyzed under Hunspell and Aspell spelling checkers.

Normalization with CECS removed these problems in virtually all cases in their study.

Table 6

Modification (Compounding)

Compounding Structural Pattern Meaning Function

(toyo) culture (toyo)+culture  N+N a girl having a tantrum N
to ignore someone or
autoignore Auto+ignore  Adj.+V something instantly without V
thinking too much
to stalk someone on his or
autostalk Auto+stalk  Adj+V her account instantly V
without thinking too much
to refuse on someone’s
autopass Auto+pass  Adj+V offer instantly without V
thinking too much
reading the message or post
backread Back+read  Adv+V V
from a certain point
betraying a friend without
backstab Back+stab  Adv+V V
him or her knowing
 78

a state mental incapacity to

breakdown Break+down  V+Adv N
function well, or be stable
not supporting a person,
cancel culture Cancel+culture  V+N product, event, or anything N
trivial
to not support a person,
cancelled out Cancel+out V+Prep product, event, or anything V
trivial
to give care to someone
careback Care+back V+Adv V
who is cares for him or her
to lure someone into a
catfish Cat+fish N+N relationship with a fictional V
identity
songs that relaxes or calms
chillsongs Chill+song  Adj+N N
someone
to have a romantic
comeback Come+back  V+Adv relationship again with an V
ex-partner
to be attracted with the
crushback Crush+back  N+Adv person who is attracted to V
him or her
a time fit for intimacy
cuddle weather Cuddle+weather  V+N N
between couples
conversation about serious
deeptalk Deep+talk Adj+V matters about life and N
choices
a story worth to be shared
epic fail Epic+fail N+V because of its terrible or Adj
humorous ending
followback Follow+back  V+Adv to follow or add the social V
media account of someone
 79

who follow or support him

or her
a beautiful physical
glow up Glow+up  Adj+Adv N
transformation
worsening state of physical
glowing down Glow+down  Adj+Adv V
transformation
to use someone’s
conscience to persuade
guiltrip Guilt+trip  N+N V
them into agreeing to an
offer, or proposal
a person, or thing that
happy pill Happy+pill Adj+N serves as a source of N
happiness
a continuous or consecutive
losesstreak Lose+streak  V+Adj round of losing in an online N
game
having unnoticeable profile,
lowkey Low-key  Adv.+N Adj
intention, or purpose
to mention or address
shoutout Shout+out V+Prep someone in a live or V
recorded video
a mistress or a person
having an affair with a
sidechick Side+chick Prep+N N
someone who is already in a
relationship
to speak with someone,
trashtalk Trash+talk  N+V usually in online games, V
with mockery and sarcasm
to attract someone either
turn on Turn+on  V+Adv V
romantically, or platonically
victim blaming Victim+blame  N+V to blame the victim for V
 80

allowing himself or herself

to be wronged
a person who is usually
warfreak War+freak  N+N involved with verbal, or Adj
physical argument
a place, may be physical or
virtual (online games),
warzone War+zone  N+N N
where people clash or battle
against each other
a continuous or consecutive
winstreak Win+streak  V+Adj round of winning in an N
online game

Table 6 shows words considered under the process of Modification categorized as

Compounding. These words have their own meanings separately but are combined to

create a new meaning that the students feel more appropriate for their sentences.

Compounding is one of the most common means in the English language in

creating a new word. Joining words together makes new meanings. However, simply

considering the separate meanings of the combined words is not enough, because there

are instances where the literal meanings of each word is different from the desired or

intended meaning.

Look into the word catfish. It is composed of two words, cat and fish, both are

known separately as animal, not to mention that there is also another marine animal

known as catfish. But, in the sentence I got catfished… has an entirely different meaning

which is being lured into believing that you are in a relationship with a fictional character

usually through the internet. Another one is the sidechick which came from the words
 81

side and chick. If we consider the meanings of these words separately, sidechick would

mean a little chicken on the side (of something). This is not the case, however. A chick

connotatively means a girl who is seemingly very attractive, and side from side dishes

mean something that is served aside from the main course or dish of the meal. Therefore,

a sidechick suggests a girl or lady who is a mistress.

Also, from this list, it may be observed that the function of the compound word in

the sentence does not fully follow the function of its origin. Say the word guilttrip where

guilt and trip are nouns, but when the new compound is used in a sentence it becomes a

verb. In the sentence Bakla ata to(,) gini-guilt trip kaibigan ko… the one who posted the

tweet used gini- which corresponds to Filipino progressive tense (an action that has

happened before and still continuous to the present) in the beginning of the altered word.

This suggest that through the involvement of time, it is proof that guiltrip is a verb,

despite guilt and trip being nouns.

Compounding is one of the most frequent word process alterations in Twitter due

to its simplicity and inherent obviousness while decoding words used in the tweet, these

does not require no extra-linguistic context. One of the lead roles of compounding in the

word formation of new vocabulary use can be associated with the drastic growth of

multifaceted concepts in varied areas of public life over the recent decades, especially

with the use of SNS. New words or compounds are formed from two or more stems that

convey the complex concepts in a concise form. This can be attributed particularly with

desire to economize language efforts, which is a universal phenomenon among all other

languages aside from English, as well as to the semantic capacity of compounds. The
 82

meanings of these altered words are mostly motivated by their structure (Klymenko,

2019).

With this, compounding is said to be one of the most frequently used word

formation process in Twitter by JHS students because of its simplicity and relatable word

structure that can be easily understand or comprehend by readers of the post. Despite the

change in function, the meanings of the words when combined is made contextual and

relevant to the sentence, therefore it is said to not require much linguistic analysis.

Table 7

Modification (Blending)

Blending Structural Pattern Meaning Function

Breakfast+Lunch+Dinner having only one meal the

brunchner N
N+N+N entire day
chillax Chill+Relax  V+V to relieve stress or worry V
Do not (don’t)+You (cha) restrain someone from
dontcha V
V+P doing something
Do not (don’t)+Know 
dunno unknown to somebody V
V+V
to provide a thing to
gimme Give+Me  V+P V
someone
to say a state of being
gonna Going+to  V+P-Inf using be at the end of the V
phrase, or go somewhere
to get someone’s back, or
gotchu Got+you (chu)  V+P V
expressing support
to say a state of being
gotta Going+to  V+P-Inf using be at the end of the V
phrase, or go somewhere
 83

ima/ imma I am+going+to+(be)  P+V to say a state of being V

about to say something, or
issa It+is+a  P+V+A V
for confirmation
state of being in good
itchokey It+is+okay  P+V+V V
condition.
a classification of
kinda Kind+of+a  N+P+A Adj.
something
lavyu Love+you  N+P confession of love V
leggo/ lezgow Let+us+go  V+P+V convincing someone to go V
convincing someone to
lemme Let+me  V+P allow him/her to do V
something
Mamser/ title for both man and
Ma’am+Sir  N+N N
mamzer woman
Mishu/ misyu Miss+you  V+P missing somebody V
things that people do
quaranthingz Quarantine+things  N+N N
during a quarantine
trying to spend what a
spaving Spending+saving  V+V V
person has saved
tenchu Thank+you  V+P saying thanks to a person V
trying to become or do
tryna Trying+to  V+P+Inf V
something
a video recording of a
particular event, usually
vlog Video+blog  N+N N
uploaded in a social media
site.
wanting to become or do
wanna Want+to V+P+Inf V
something
wanting to become or do
wannabe Want+to+be V+P+Inf+V V
something
wazzup What+is+up  asking for a condition or Adj.
 84

Adj+V+Adv state of being

asking for a condition or
whatcha What+do+you  Adj+V+P Adj.
state of being
confirmation from a
yezzer Yes+sir  Adv+N question, request, or Adv.
command.

One of the classifications of Modification where 31 altered words are known to

have undergone is Blending. From the table above, it can be seen that Blending is a very

common word formation process in the language use of JHS students. These words are

taken from two different but associated words that have created new words which may or

may not have the same meanings.

Look into the word brunchner, when analyzed, this word comes from breakfast,

lunch and dinner which are the three basic or necessary meals of the day. However, it

does not mean having the three meals, but the opposite. Brunchner means having only

one meal throughout the entire day. This is why the three words are combined together

because the act of having these meals are also combined or blended together. Another

example is the word chillax, it means to relieve stress or worry, in short, to calm down.

However, when broken down, chillax came from chill and relax, where the word chill

originally means “to cool”. Associated with a person’s mood, chill now has been

converted to mean a tension-free state of mind where the idiomatic expression “cool

down” is considered. Therefore, the word chillax has deviated from its literal meaning of

being cold or cool as to temperature but means to calm down.

From more recent word formations, quaranthingz has made its way to social

media sites, including Twitter. It literally means things that one does during the period of
 85

quarantine. Needless to say, quaran came form quarantine, and blended with the word

things. This altered word has caught attention of the people on the internet known as

netizens which is also a result of blending of two words: internet and citizen(s). Another

good example of this word formation considering the meanings of its origins is the word

spaving. This word is derived from spending and saving now means spending what was

saved, now this is quite literally the same as its original meanings combined. This is the

same as the word vlog which means to video record a particular event or scenario instead

of writing it as an article or blog.

Other words from the list share the same phenomena of blending two or three

words together with minimal changes in its orthographic symbols or spelling, aside from

the involvement of omission and character substitution, such as the words dunno, gimme,

imma, kinda, lemme, misyu, tryna, wanna, and yezzer.

According to Bauer (1983:236), Blending is a combination of two word formation

processes: compounding and abbreviation, and merges features of both these phenomena.

The semantic connection of blends with the lexicalized pattern is evident from the

relation among the semantically related components. Mentioned in the study of

Klymenko (2019), the rapid growth of new Twitter blends in current years can be

attributed to the simplicity of the process that is in convenience of conveying complex

concepts with concision.

Blending is seen as a creative process that manifest the desire of the language user

to provide emotional coloring, originality, humor. Hence, the formation of these altered

words also proves the tendency to add emotion and diversity to the language, enhancing

its stylistic features.

 86

Table 8

Modification (Intentional Misspelling)

Intentional Structura
Meaning/Purpose Function
Misspelling l Pattern
(sana) oil/ ol/ hoping or wishing everyone (has
(sana) all V
owl/ ul/ hope ol something)
angwy angry angry: to sound as if a child V
Babe/ baibe/ bebi/
baby term of endearment; to sound sassier N
bibi
a malicious or offensive term used to
beeches bitches N
address women; to sound less offensive
a term used to address a colleague or
Bois/ boiz boys N
friend; to sound sassier
associated with the past tense of birth
bornday birthday N
which is born; celebration of one’s birth
brother; a friend, colleague, or
Bruh/ vro brō N
acquaintance; to sound sassier
sister; a friend, colleague, or
Ces/ siz/ ziz sis
acquaintance; to sound sassier
an informal term used to address young
chix chicks N
girls or women
confirmation of idea; to sound as if a
Chrue/ truu true
child
a term used to refer to a person whom
Crust/ crux crush the speaker is attracted or infatuated N
with
an intense feeling or emotion, either
Deadz/ dedz dead N
love or embarrassment
diz this to refer to n person, object, or idea; to V
 87

sound sassier
a feeling of enthusiasm or eagerness;
eggsoyted excited N
used to sound more appealing
a person whom the speaker is
Frenz/ furiends/
friends affectionate towards; used to sound N
fwends
more appealing
derived from “oh my god”; used as an
gash god Int
expression; to sound sassier
used to address a group of people,
geys guys N
usually acquaintance
Ghorl/ ghurl/ used to address young women, often
girl N
ghourl known to the speaker, seldom offensive
gudbye goodbye bidding farewell to another person N
hape happy used to achieve sarcasm N
an expression used to greet another
Helu/ henlo hello Int
person
used to sound as if of a pet (dog/ cat,
hooman human N
etc)
Huwao/ wao wow an expression of awe or amusement Int
to cease from doing something; to
Ithtaph/ staph stop V
sound as if of a child
used to express even transition of ideas;
itmoth smooth often referring to banat or punchlines in N
filipino courtship
iz is a linking verb: to sound sassier V
an empowered woman inspiring other to
kween queen N
believe in themselves
a strong feeling of affection; to sound
Luv/ Wav/ wuv love N
sassier
luvlots love lots an expression of giving too much love Int
to another person (verbally); to sound
 88

sassier
lyf life having existence N
lyk like attraction to something/ someone N
a lady or woman; to sound as if a person
mess miss N
with strong provincial english accent
a term used to address a mother or
momma mommy N
mother-figure
myghad my god an expression derived from oh my god Int
past tense of may; it means possibility
myt might V
of happening
taken from a trending (video) meme
nu nu nu no where the speaker has a strong Adv
countryside accent
nyt night a description of time Adv
confirmation; to sound as if a person
oki okay Adv
with strong provincial english accent
a photograph; to sound as if a person
pixur picture N
with strong provincial english accent
usually stated with an empirical
plez please V
sentence; to sound sassier
a description for a person having
sekc sexy Adj
attractive qualities
to give or divide to others; to sound as if
sher share a person with strong provincial english V
accent
unwanted things or events; to
sheyt shit intentionally sound slang when read N
mentally
Soreh/ sowi/ suri/ an apology; to sound sassier; sometimes
sorry N
zori/ xori with sarcasm
suu so an intensifier of the quality of Adv
 89

something
thingz things an object or idea; to sound sassier N
tnx thank(s) an expression of gratitude Int
Yas/ yezz yes confirmation; to sound sassier Adv
an expression used to greet another
yow (hey) you Int
person

As previously mentioned, Modification is the process of word formation that

refers to the alteration that happened to a word when it undergoes changes in the manner

of how it is presented, not necessarily shortened, but the orthographical composition

deviates from its original word structure.

What is shown in the table above is the list of altered words which have

undergone the process of Intentional Misspelling, a sub-classification of Modification.

This is used when the person tweeting has a specific purpose on the choice of his or her

words in the tweet, and the manner on how these word choices are presented

orthographically throughout the tweet.

With a specific purpose in mind, the students have intentionally misspelled these

words to achieve varied goal. One of the most common purpose is to (1) to sound as if a

child, where the speaker may seem weak, vulnerable, or cute. Say the word angwy which

means angry. In the tweet “No talk im angwy”, the poster wanted to look vulnerable and

longing for affection and tenderness. Next purpose is all about (2) sounding less

offensive, whereas malicious term such as bitches would have lesser offensive impact on

the readers when spelled as beeches. Following that is the purpose of the poster to (3)

sound sassier. As an example, the word sister has three intentionally misspelled words

which are ces, siz, and ziz where the sound of s is changed to c and z to become more
 90

appealing not only to the eyes of the readers but also to their ears when the tweet is

mentally read. Then, (4) to sound more appealing to the readers, words are altered to

“hook” them into reading the whole tweet. Given is the word eggsoyted which originally

spelled as excited. This is changed to become more attention-grabbing and odder.

More recent purposes have sufficed, one of these is (5) to sound or seem as

though the words are from domestic pets like dogs, cats and so. Nowadays, in social

media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, video clips if pets have been an

entertainment, to make these more appealing to audiences, pet owners write captions to

their pets’ reactions and be more amusing, so words such as helu, henlo, and hoomans are

used to represent the perception of these pets. Another one would be (6) to sound as

though a person with strong English “provincial” accent, say the use of the word mess

instead of miss. Following this is (7) to sound trending, or the use of an accent often

heard from video memes like the word nu nu nu that means no. Being used as one of the

most common video meme is an audio recording of a man with strong country-side

English accent, in this video the man continuously says the word “Nu nu nu, (laughter)”

implying humorous video clips. Lastly, (8) to sound sarcastic. Sarcasm is often achieved

in Twitter using words that are misspelled such as soreh that means sorry. This suggests

that the poster of the tweet is not sincere with her apology, but the opposite, being

unapologetic.

Ultimately, these words undergone the process of modification in such a way that

the student intentionally misspells to achieve a more desirable form to their peers or to

the community they have in their accounts.

Table 9
 91

Modification (Reversal)

Reversal Structural Pattern Meaning/Purpose Function

Filipino term that

ebeb Bebe  1234 = 4321 N
corresponds to baby
a state of being in good
efas Safe  1234 = 4321 N
condition
someone who is an
lodi Idol 1234 = 4321 N
inspiration
orb Bro  123 = 321 brother; a sibling or friend N
rold Lord  1234 = 3214 god, divine being N
an immediate superior, or
ssob Boss  1234 = 4321 N
a friend/ acquaintance

In the Table 8, a short list of altered words are presented to show words that the

JHS students used in their tweets, these words are then classified as those that have

undergone Modification thru Reversal.

Reversal is a word process that is done by spelling the words inversely. This is

achieved by simply spelling the words backwards and letters may or may not follow the

same sequence as to what comes first. Look into the examples, there is the presence of

the word efas which means safe. When analyzed, nothing much happened to the word

except that it has been spelled backwards, it still means the same, and carries the same

order or sequence of characters, though inversely. However, for ebeb or bebe (a Filipino

correspondent for the word baby in English), it is different. Aside from the reserval, the

word itself is only a derivation from the English term baby which is adapted into Filipino

orthography bebe. After being subjected to derivation, the word was then reversed

leading to ebeb. Another good example of variations of cases is the word rold which
 92

means Lord. This is a different case because if referred to the structural pattern shown in

the table, it follows this patter 3214 whereas the characters r and l where the only

characters that changed their position, and not the entire characters or elements of the

word. Odd enough, this pattern still makes sense in the mind of the students.

Reversal is not universally common word formation process. However, this is

usual among Filipino twitter users because of its popularity in Filipino terms. Dating back

during 1980’s, the uprise of Manila street slang begun. Tagalog street slang words are

often derived from ordinary Tagalog terms, using their first and last syllables and their

order reversed. Yorme which is mayor, nosi (sino, who), etneb (bente, twenty),

Takwarents (kwarenta, forty), posam (sampo, ten), kodli (likod, back), oblo (loob,

inside), todits (dito, here) are only few among hundreds of examples used by Filipinos,

usually those who reside in Manila during 1980’s. The recurrence of these words in the

recent years have been attributed to the preference of Francisco M. Domagoso to be

called as Yorme Kois or Mayor Isko, although, he is not to be credited alone for this.

Reversal is heavily culture-based. This means that from its emergence during

1980’s, Filipinos have been consistently using these street slangs for decades that have

passed to present, then popularized once again. This is why JHS students used these

terms in their tweets as a means to fit to what is new and appealing to their peers.

Table 10

Conversion (Redefinition)

Dictionary Meaning
F Intended Meaning F
(Merriam-Webster, 2020)
(pa)fall to descend freely by the V to make somebody feel Adj

force of gravity
one that is subjected to
(pa)victim oppression, hardship, or
mistreatment
a bodily state of readiness
to respond in a
attitude
characteristic way to a
stimulus
a vulgar term used to refer
balls
to the male genital parts
to strike (someone or
bash
something) violently
Cancel/ to decide not to conduct or
cancelled perform
sensation of cold
chill
accompanied by shivering
clout influence or pull
a fool, jester, or comedian
clown
in an entertainment
having a relatively low
cold temperature or one lower
than normal or expected
to behave in an excessively
cringe
humble or servile way
drain to draw off (liquid)
93
affectionate/attracted to them,
and then leave
someone who assumes to be
N the victim but is the Adj
abuser/oppressor
being unnecessarily rude or
having unpleasant manner of
N Adj
addressing other people on
certain occasions
the courage, dignity, and
N N
determination of a man
to verbally harass a person
with negative comments,
V V
either personal or thru social
media
to denounce support to a
V person, place, product, or V
event
a tension-free ambiance, or
N Adj
mood, calm and relaxed
one’s political or social
N N
influence to acquire benefits
ridicule to a person who is
N expected to be better, but Adj
disappoints expectations
manner of addressing
Adj someone in an unaffectionate Adv
way
to feel shame or
V V
embarrassment
V empty; unintellectual Adj

gradually or completely
the quantity of fluid that
drop
falls in one spherical mass
a long narrative poem in
elevated style recounting
epic
the deeds of a legendary or
historical hero
one that formerly held a
ex
specified position or place
to give food to (a person,
feed
or animal)
to handle or touch to
feels examine, test, or explore
some quality
a porous article or mass
through which a gas or
filters
liquid is passed to separate
out matter in suspension
of or resembling fish
fishy
especially in taste or od
to move muscles, to bend
flex
them repeatedly
to be or act in accordance
follow
with a law or rule
Fresh/ having its original qualities
freshness unimpaired; or raw
ghost the soul of a dead person
believed to be an
inhabitant of the unseen
94
to post in social media
N something of relevance to V
another person’s tweet
a description of a person’s
N memorable encounter or Adj
experience
a former partner in an
N N
intimate/romantic relationship
a virtual social media
V homepage where people can N
view different posts
ambiance or feeling that a
V N
particular place/ event gives
a mobile application, built in,
or downloaded, used to
N N
modify the appearance of a
subject.
a description of doubt or
Adj Adj
suspicion
to feature or be proud on
V V
someone or something
to support another person’s
V V
social media account
raw and beautiful lady with
Adj Adj
minimal make up
N person who led another to feel N
affectionate towards him/her
but then disappears

world
goods products that necessary
to reduce to powder or
grind
small fragments by friction
a person who hates
haters
someone or something
a state of being addicted to
hype
narcotics
idle lacking worth or basis
to affect especially forcibly
impressed
or deeply be admired
a descriptive or identifying
label
word or phrase
comparative slowness or
lag
retardation
accordant with law or with
legit established legal forms and
requirements
an idea, behavior, style, or
usage that spreads from
meme
person to person within a
culture
plural form of man which
men
means a specie of being
in a direction away from
out
the inside or center
poser a puzzling or baffling
95
N refer to game or go N
to work hard, or be
V
determined in working
person who extremely dislike
N a person, or thing and N
expresses it thru social media
description to a person who
N Adj
reacts exaggeratingly
(idol) a person who serves as
Adj N
an inspiration to others
V to court a lady V
level of the relationship
N N
between individuals
specifically mean having
N slowness in the speed of N
internet connectivity
description to a person, place,
Adj thing, or event that is Adj
guaranteed to be desirable
an amusing or interesting item
(graphic images, or videos)
N that is spread widely online N
especially through social
media
a term used for colleagues or
N N
friends
a condition of being true to
Prep N
oneself on gender preference
N a person who uses another N

question
to talk in a noisy, excited,
rant
or declamatory manner
an open way for vehicles,
road
persons, and animals
a fraudulent or deceptive
scam
act or operation
seen saw; or have been seen
ship a large seagoing vessel
vulgar: an act of
shit
defecation
a geometrical figure or
solid element having three
dimensions
a small, organized group of
squad
military personnel
to pursue obsessively and
stalk
to the point of harassment
an extremely or
stan excessively enthusiastic
and devoted fan
to walk in a leisurely or
stroll
idle manner
an aromatic beverage
tea prepared from tea leaves
by soaking in hot water
telegram a communicative means
thru coded messages to
96
person’s images to pretend as
him/her in social media sites
to verbally say problems and
V V
worries to a friend or in a post
N on the way or to N
a humorous, sarcastic notation
N N
on a particular statement
state of a message being seen
V N
thru social media
matchmaking or pairing of
N N
couples
things that must be done or
N N
accomplished
a description for persons,
N place, things, or events which Adj
have great qualities
N a group of close friends N
pursue a person specifically
V V
thru social media sites
support a person, place, thing
N V
or event
go to places as a means of
V N
recreation, or tourism
gossip or online arguments
N N
between persons or parties
N an app that is used to send N
messages to a person or group
 97

reach persons far of reach of people

a filament formed by
spinning and twisting short
thread
textile fibers into a
continuous strand
being poisonous material;
toxic capable of causing death or
serious debilitation
something worth little or
trash
nothing such as junk
a mechanical part used in
trigger initiating a process or
reaction
triggered to pull the trigger
a dwarf or giant in
troll scandinavian folklore
inhabiting caves or hills
an act of detaching oneself
unfriend to a person who is formerly V
considered as a friend
unprofitably used, made, or
wasted
expended
a series of relevant tweets to
N create substantial ideas to N
make a point or stand
often used as a description for
Adj a malfunctioning, disruptive Adj
relationship
a person having no worthy
N N
contribution to the community
a feeling that often causes
N negative reaction or changes N
in a person’s mood
to react harshly or negatively
V V
towards something
a person who is allegedly paid
N to harass political enemies N
using social media
to remove (someone) from a
list of designated friends on a V
person's social media sites
state of being intoxicated
V N
from drugs or alcohol

Conversion may include words that may or may not have any external changes,

such as its orthographical composition or spelling. Conversion has two subcategories;

these are word reduplication and category extension. Redefinition is a process of word

formation where the terms that are used have been existing for a time.
 98

Taken from Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the word attitude primarily means

readiness to respond to specific stimulus, but as discourse develops, the word has

changed its meaning into an unpleasant manner of addressing people or situations.

Another example is the word balls which is a vulgar term used to refer to part of male

genitals, but when considered in this sentence “ekis sa may abs pero walang balls”, its

meaning changes to courage, dignity, and determination of a man. All the words listed in

Table 9 have been undergone the process of redefining and this occurred as the need for

appropriation arise in the sentence.

Another good example is the affixation of the pa in the words pafall and pavictim

where the affix pa is a Filipino morpheme which means likely to be.

From the study conducted by Dimaculangan and Gustilo (2018), it was mentioned

that borrowing words from other languages and giving these words new meaning is a

know word formation process among language users. The new pattern in this language

use is the semantic shift of broadening and or narrowing of connotative word meanings.

In linguistic studies, conversion id often identified or described as to having zero-

derivation which means the word did not undergo unnecessary changes concerning

additional morphemes e.i. a phonologically null suffix to the base., however, new

function or meanings have been linked to the terms. Early studies mainly suggest that

words that undergo conversion are nouns and verbs but are not limited to these. From the

study of Sudartinah (2008), it was mentioned that Conversion is a very common word

formation process where the word converted has a grammatically independence from its

original meaning, can function alone without any affix. Therefore, it is otherwise known

as functional shift or functional change.

 99

Table 11

Conversion (Category Extension)

Category Original Extended

Basic Form Meaning
Extension Function Function
adulting adult N to become an adult V
cringing cringe N to cringe V
ending end N to end a story V
flexing flex V to flex, bend, or contract V
ghosting ghost N disappearing from someone V
trending trend N state of being on trend, or popular V

Category Extension is one of the two subclassifications of Conversion where a

word is affixed with a morpheme to change its function to achieve appropriation in a

sentence. From Table 10, it can be seen that six examples under this word process was

taken into consideration by the researcher.

From the corpus, it may be seen that three altered words have changed it function

from being noun, to a verb, these are cringing, ghosting, and trending. Consider the

sentence where these words come from; (1) me reading old convos and cringing to it

where the word cringing is now considered as the act of feeling cringe, regret, shame or

embarrassment; and now function as a verb, (2) kilig now, ghosting later whereas the

word ghosting was referred to as the act of disappearing from a person who was

intentionally made to fall affectionate to somebody, then (3) BS in Accountancy is

trending on twtr rn, Me as an incoming Accountancy student… whereas the word

trending is a state of being on the trend or popular.

 100

Linguistic researchers often do not include Category Extension as one of the word

formation processes because it is lesser in occurrences, especially since most of its

existence are attributed to product brands. According to Wałaszewska (2020) category

extension is described as a process that involves broadening the category of a word which

in some cases may be metaphoric or has another definition form its denotative meaning.

Category Extension has two types, limited extension, and creative extension.

These types have comparative qualities with the other sub-classification of conversion,

that is redefinition, which is shifting its function, usually nouns to verbs or vice versa. In

the examples given in Table 11, words are converted from being noun to verbs with the

inflection of +ing in the end of the words.

JHS students find this process as convenient in terms of their language use. Say,

in using mobile applications, instead of saying they are surfing or browsing in their SNS

accounts, they would simply say facebooking, intagramming, youtubing, tweeting, and

so. It is in the simplicity of using these words that IGen found most convenient in

tweeting.

Table 12

Affixation

Affixation Structural Pattern Meaning Function

Awit+ized  Filipino
(awit)ized blended word (Aw! Sakit) to express pain or hurt V
+V(Suf)
 101

Charot+i+ri+mi+ni+ism 
an idea of bluffing or
(charot)iriminism Filipino term for bluff N
joking
+added syllables +N(Suf)
a person who verbally
basher Bash+er  V+N(Suf) N
harass thru social media
Bash+er+ist  V+N(Suf) a person who verbally
basherist N
+N(Suf) harass thru social media
bessy Bes(t)+y  Adj+N(Suf) a best friend N
brainy Brain+y  N+Adj(Suf) an intellectual person Adj
having the quality of
brodie Bro(ther)+ie  N+N(Suf) Adj
being a brother
brokeness Broke+ness  V+N(Suf) quality of being broken Adj
cancelledt Cancel(ed)+t  V+Inf to not support V
cheesy Chees+y  N+Adj(Suf) full or rich in cheese Adj
crushie Crush+ie  N+N(Suf) endearment for a crush Adj
clownery Clown+e+ry  N+N(Suf) façade N
Comf(ortable)+y  N+Adj ability of being
comfy Adj
(Suf) comfortable
Cringe+ri+ni+mi+na+tion
idea or concept of
cringerinimination  N+added N
feeling cringe
syllables+N(Sur)
quality of being full of
cringey Cringe+y  N+Adj(Suf) Adj
cringe (feelings)
crushy Crush+y  N+N(Suf) endearment for a crush Adj
cutie Cute+ie  Adj+Adj(Suf) quality of being cute Adj
dummy Dum(b)+y  Adj+N(Suf) quality of being dumb Adj
exposedt Expose(d)+t  V+Inf act of being exposed V
frenny Fr(i)en(d)+y  N+N(Suf) endearment for a friend N
one who disappears
ghoster Ghost+er  N+N(Suf) N
without notice
homie Hom(e)+ie  N+Adj(Suf) one who is very N
 102

comfortable to be with
a sweater jacket with
hoodies Hood+ie(s)  N+Adj(Suf) N
hood
judger Judg(e)+er  N+N(Suf) one who judges easily N
one who is good in
keeper Keep+er  N+N(Suf) N
keeping relationships
lappy Lap(top)+y  N+N(Suf) term to refer to laptop N
one who makes graphic
memer Mem(e)+er  N+N(Suf) images of interesting N
and amusing things.
Origami+nated 
origaminated act of cowardice N
N+N(Suf)
an emphasis to a
periodt Period+t  N+Inf N
statement
reposting a tweet of
retweet Re+tweet  V(Pre)+N V
another person
having the similar
samedt Same+t  Adj+Inf Adj
qualities
shookt Shook+t  V+Inf shocked beyond belief N
endearment for a sister
sissy Sis(ter)+y  N+Adj(Suf) N
or friend
snappedt Snap(ped)+t  N+Inf become mad or angry V
songer Song+er  N+N(Suf) one who sings a song N
songerist Song+er+ist  N+N(Suf) one who sings a song N
idea of spoiling people
Spoil+er+in+ism 
spoilerinism on what is about to N
V+N(Suf)
happen
Stalk+er+ini+ism 
stakerinism idea of being a stalker N
V+N(Suf)
one who do live streams
streamer Stream+er  N+N(Suf) N
online
 103

uncertainty of
thingy Thing+y  N+Adj(Suf) N
describing something
one who speaks ill to
Trash+talk+er
trashtalker distract his/her N
N+V+N(Suf)
opponent
uncrush Un+crush  V(Pre)+N to stop liking someone V
one who does vlogs or
vlogger Vlog+er  N+N(Suf) video documentations N
of life events
Waw+er(s)  Filipino expression of support
wawers Int
ortography of wow+N(Suf) for others

It is seen from the Table 11 that there are 44 given examples of words which has

undergone the process of Affixation. It is the process of word formation where the stem

or root word is connected to a bound morpheme, in this case, to inflection. Inflections are

typically connected to a particular part of speech, mostly to verbs to denote tense of the

verb, or its quality. It is the most common word-formation process (Yule, 2006,p,70)

which is accomplished by means of a large number of tiny morpheme called affixes.

In these examples, the word cancelledt carries the same meaning, however the

addition of the double inflection of the past tense of the verb as cancelled, having both –

ed and –t in the end, gives the word a more profound meaning to having been cancelled

twice or in a deeper, stronger sense.

Affixation is one of the processes where overgeneralization of grammatical rules

may easily occur since morphemes, such that of inflections and affixes, are expendable.

More or less, IGen may use affixation either intentionally or not, but again, words used in

SNS linguistic neologism, meaning are words that are considered contemporary given
 104

that these are words have just emerge from a certain group of people which then spread

and are used by a large group of people in a particular community/ies.

In the book by Wałaszewska, entitled Relevance Theory, Figuration, and

Continuity in Pragmatics, Affixation is defined to be the process where affixes combine

with roots to create new words (e.g. in 'character-'ize', 'read-er', '-ize' and '-er' are

derivational suffixes). It is otherwise known as Derivation. The inflection/derivation used

in nouns to verbs have no definite rules and hence does not follow a pattern. Derivation is

less predictable, than inflectional morphology.

With this, JHS students find affixation as a word formation process that can easily

be manipulated because of it does not follow any rule in linguistic sense. Just like how

they turn Tiktok (a mobile application for short video clips) from noun (thing) into a

person with just the inflection of +er. This would have been enough, but in recent

language use, specially in Twitter, adding +ist to almost every word possible is a trend,

say tiktokerist, songerist, basherist and so. This freedom in language manipulation is an

advantage to JHS students for it gives them opportunity to be creative and innovative in

their language use.

Table 13

Borrowing

BORROWING Original Word Meaning in Social Media Function

at list at least lowest in importance or position Adj

aym i am state of being V
babi baby endearment for a romantic partner N
badtrep badtrip in a bad mood Adj
 105

barbi barbie someone who came out gay N

besprend bestfriend a close friend N
bidyu video an audio-visual record N
brad bro(ther) endearment for a friend N
dabest the best compliment for someone Adj
dade daddy endearment for a father N
dat that referring to a thing P
deds dead exaggerated expression for beating Adj
dis this referring to a thing P
ebriting everything all things P
ebriwan everyone all persons P
ebriwer everywhere all places Adv
gad god almighty being N
geym game means go or okay V
gib give to give V
gudnayt good night good wishes when one goes to sleep Int
hapi happy an emotion N
hart heart part of a body N
inosens innocence quality of a person N
jjowk joke a bluff or humorous remark Int
k payn okay fine sarcastic remark Int
kanseran cancer(an) insult Adj
klasmeyt classmate a person in the same class N
korni corny an unlikely humorous remark Adj
kras crush a likable, attractive person N
Kyot/ kyut cute pretty Adj
lab love strong emotion of affection N
laptrip laughtrip humorous mood N
Layf/ layp life being or existence N
layk like attraction towards a person or thing V
mami mommy endearment for a mother N
 106

insult to a person being

manyak maniac Adj
uncontrollable
mitik mythic stage or level in an online game N
mygad my god expression Int
nays nice expression Int
nowts notes written details of a lesson/ discussion N
nyu new recently came into existence Adj
onli only unique Adj
opkors off course confirmation or denunciation Int
pakner partner endearment to a friend N
pawer power compliment Int
payb five amount N
payn fine state of being V
payt fight to argue V
payting fighting expression of cheering someone Int
pers taym first time new experience Adj
peyborit favorite treated or regarded with a favor Adj
peyk news fake news incorrect information N
piksur picture photograph N
pipol people group of persons N
Prames/ pramis promise expression of legitimacy Int
prend friend a person who share affection with N
puds foods consumables N
pudtrip foodtrip mood for eating N
rawr roar expression of being feisty Int
rebyu review to relearn a lesson V
sadlayp sad life expression of being in a sad situation Int
sankis sun kissed slightly reddish skin/ complexion Adj
selpon cellphone a mobile device N
ser sir title of a person N
skerd scared to be afraid V
 107

Sori/ sowri sorry to apologize V

syet shit unwanted things N
teknik technique strategy N
Tengkyu/
thank you expression of gratitude Int
tenkyu
tertieyt thirty-eight amount Adj
titser teacher profession or position N
tots thoughts ideas N
wan dawn one down expression Int
watsawt what is out expression of greetings Int
waw wow expression of amusement Int
weyt wait to halt or pause V
wid with to go together Adv
wilkam welcome expression of being hospitable Int
yak yuck expression of disgust Int
yami yummy delicious Adj
yir year period of time N

It is shown in Table 12 that words processed under Borrowing have reached 86

altered words in total. Borrowing is a word formation where a user derives words from its

language origin and adapts it into his or her linguistic orthography (field of linguistics

that deals with how words are spelled). Borrowing is relatively known as loan words.

Borrowing occurs when one language adds a word or morpheme from another language

to its own lexicon (Fromkin, 2003).

These words are often pronounced in the original phonological rules of the

borrowed language, say for example the word klasmeyt where the word itself is

pronounced as class and mate but are spelled as klas and then meyt.
 108

In Borrowing, the pronunciation and meaning stay the same as the original word,

however, the spelling of the words has undergone alterations. In the corpus of Filipino

language, thousands of borrowed words coming from Spanish and English language

encompass almost half the words recorded as listed as part of the Filipino language, it has

been and it no surprise this time.

In the Philippines setting, borrowing words, or loaning them from other languages

is already widespread occurrence. Because of the colonial experiences of the people,

Filipino have adapted words from both Spanish and English language, not to mention that

there are provincial creole (dialect) created entirely out of the adaptations of Spanish

language to fit the use of the people, this is known as Chavacano.

Philippine linguists believe that Filipino borrowed words go beyond simply

borrowing the words semantically, but may or may not appear orthographically in the

same form. The borrowed words may have been a product of neologism that exist in

another country and have spread through the use of the SNS and reached Filipino

language users that is why the researcher also believed that borrowing is not just a

seasonal event, but is heavily culture-based and have transcended through media to

manifest in Filipino speech and discourse.

This is a particular manifestation among JHS students today, most specially

because of varied social media platforms, and Twitter which serves as a new verse for

language users for innovative and creative words as products of neologism.

Table 14

Natural Linguistic Progression

Natural Original Word Meaning Social Media Function

Linguistic
 109

Progression
Bebe/ bebi baby endearment for a romantic partner N
besh bestfriend endearment for a close friend N
Bortday/ bothdey birthday day of birth N
boyz boys endearment for friends N
buh bye goodbye bidding farewell Int
Cha/ chuu you referring to another person P
digitz digits phone number N
Gerl/ gurl girl a young lady N
gosh god almighty being N
gunayt good night good wishes when going to sleep Int
lezz let us allowing others V
ma my referring to one’s possession P
Mameh/ mamsh/
mommy endearment for a mother, or friend N
momsh
nah no denunciation N
pards father endearment for a father, or friend N
shet shit unwanted things N
Whut/ wut what question P
ya you referring to another person P
yall you all referring to another people P

For definition, Natural Linguistic Progression is one of the additional

morphological processes thoroughly discussed in the study of Magtanong (2018) in his

Morphological Analysis of the Language of the Netizens in Social Media. Magtanong

(2018) defines this process as: when a term changes when used over and over. Changes

may happen in terms of spellings and at times they may also involve the modification of

its meaning.
 110

From the previous table, 26 examples of words under Natural Linguistic

Progression has been classified. These words have been repeatedly used throughout

generations and have went on to have several changes in form and in the manner, these

are presented in the spoken language. Since tweets are considered to have more of the

spoken nature of language rather than written, rules of oral use of the language are

applied.

As an example, look into the word mameh, mamsh, or momsh which originally

came from the word mother. The word was primarily shortened into mom, and then added

with the affix of +y as mommy (mameh), associating the sound of momcy, then finally, it

becomes mamsh, or momsh. Today, mamsh, or momsh does not only refer to a mother,

but, it may also mean a friend or best friend, a person relevantly close to you in some

way, a customer in a business transaction, a person who is higher, a colleague, or any

other woman you relate yourself to.

Then, there is the word gerl or gurl, which both mean the same thing as a young

woman. This word alteration came from girl, then associated with ge as its initial sound

for gerl, and then finally the term gurl. Like momsh, gurl could also mean a young

woman who is relatively close to in a sense given.

Filipinos are known to be creatively gifted in language, having more than 150

living languages across the country. One of the factors in such abundance is their

language innovation, and this word formation process is a proof to this. Words like bes,

lezz, pards originally are two syllabic words, but Filipino street slang allows users to

contract these words (without using apostrophe) into one syllable using the inflection of

the sound of s.
 111

Table 15

Multiple Alterations

Multiple
Original Word Processes Involved
Alterations
afogat I forgot Omission and Blending
alabchu/ alabyu/
aylabyu/ halabyu/ Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
I love you
lamyu/ nyabyu/ Misspelling
wabyu
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
amsosowi I am so sorry
Misspelling
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
aylabet I love it
Misspelling
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
aymissu/ mityu I miss you
Misspelling
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
aymprawd I am proud
Misspelling
c'mon come on Omission and Blending
dafak/ dafuq the f*ck Borrowing and Blending
daheck/ dahek the heck Borrowing and Blending
d'best the best Omission and Blending
emeged oh my God! Blending, and Intentional Misspelling
faramis promise Borrowing and Intentional Misspelling
gon going to be Omission and Blending
hangkyot (ang) cute Borrowing and Blending
hapitot happy thought Borrowing and Blending
ion I do not Omission and Blending
Borrowing, Affixation, and Intentional
Kyoti/ kyutie cute(y)
Misspelling
 112

labyuall/ labyuol/ Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional

I love you all
labyuol Misspelling
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
labyutoo I love you too
Misspelling
lesgaw let us go Borrowing and Blending
lodicakes idol Reversal and Blending
Natural Linguistic Progression, Association,
Mamc/ mamsi momcy
and Borrowing
mhie mommy Omission and Affixation
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
misyuol I miss you all
Misspelling
muhduhfuhkuh motherf*cker Blending and Intentional Misspelling
naol/ naul (sana) all Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
numbawan number one Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
ocakes okay Intentional misspelling and Affixation
omaygad/ Omission, Borrowing, Blending, and Natural
oh my God
omygash Linguistic Progression
orayt all right Borrowing, and Blending
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
owaylabyuol oh I love you all
Misspelling
owemji Oh my God Acronym, Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
pbertdey happy birthday Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
pramiszxs promise Omission and Natural Linguistic Progression
prenny(q) friend Borrowing, and Affixation
siszt/ sizt sister Omission and Natural Linguistic Progression
Omission, Blending, and Natural Linguistic
sizmars sister (mare)
Progression
Borrowing, Blending, and Intentional
teynksue thank you
Misspelling
vro brother Omission and Intentional Misspelling
wampipti one (hundred) Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
 113

fifty
wanhandred one hundred Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
wanyir one year Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
watdahek what the heck Omission, Borrowing, and Blending
zo zwit so sweet Omission and Intentional Misspelling

Presented in the Table 14 are words which have undergone different processes of

word formation known to the researcher as Multiple Alterations. It is an addition to the

list already previously presented with regards to morphological processes. This occurs

when a word or group of words are shortened and then compounded to be treated as one

word, though the meaning of the words does not typically change but is taken as it is.

From the example, it is seen that the word trynna comes from the two-word

compound beginning with trying with the addition of –to serves as function word.

Together, these words are taken as one word with functions as a verb. The same goes for

idunnu, where I is compounded with –do, -not, and –know. These words are combined

and then shortened and associated with the sub-categories of modification such as

compounding and blending. Following this example is simplier word altered dabest,

meaning the best, with compounding the article or function word the, and the word best,

thus the word dabest. There’s lezzgo which undergoes three processes, subtraction,

modification under compounding, and also of intentional misspelling.

The most frequent word formation processes to have been used by language users

altogether are Omission, Borrowing, and Blending. To the researcher, this suggests that

JHS students have desirable goals in their language use, which are to; (1) achieve brevity

and concision, (2) to make the words more desirable and simple, (3) and to be more

appealing to their peers.

 114

Part III: Summary of Analysis

This Chapter has presented significant amount of data that the researcher believes

to be essential in the morphological analysis of the language use of JHS students in

Twitter. The study was conducted on the Twitter accounts of 50 JHS students with 679

total posts considered and transcribed for the study.

Primarily, Matthew’s Theory of Morphological Process (1991) is the basis of the

study, where five-word formation processes used, these are Subtraction, Modification,

Conversion, Affixation, and Reduplication (the last one was not found in any of the word

alterations in Twitter) the researcher also included three word formation processes

suggested by Magtanong (2018), these are Borrowing, Natural Linguistic Progression,

and Word Postering (however, there was no word postering found in the tweets of the

subjects).

From the analysis, the most frequent word alterations being used by JHR students

is Shortening. Having 34% of the total number of words altered, with four sub-

classifications, it is the leading word formation process amongst JHS students in Twitter.

Acronym is seen as an effective mode in expressing ideas and emotions with a very

limited number of characters. The familiarity of the students on the occurrence of these

words in Twitter (and other SNS) is a factor on how they manifest these words altered on

their own tweets, or retweet posts in their wall.

Omission of characters has the greatest number of altered words and affects the

language use of the iGen. Words under this word formation process is viewed as

informal. This is used to adjust to character restrictions of Twitter and overcome this
 115

limitation. Although the number components is already doubled in 2017, allowing 280

characters instead of 140, Twitter users have already adapted a system of linguistic

arbitrarily constructed corpus of new words that are easy to comprehend.

Brought about by neologism, Alphanumeric word formation process is

characterized by having both alphabetic and numeric symbols. This is used by JHS

students to make texts shorter or more appealing to readers. Link to Jejenese (language

used by a demographic cohort during late 2000s, Jejemon), the language is encoded in a

manner that demand excessive use od sticky capitalizations, punctuations, numbers and

other symbols to achieve a certain emphasis on their post.

Single letter words are considered under Association where letters represent the

words. Learners associate words with the initial phonetic sound of the word with the

letters. In recent study, single letter words are not flagged as spelling errors when

analyzed under checkers.

Modification of orthographic compositions is second in terms of frequency of

altered words used in Twitter. This is composed of four sub-classifications as well. First

is Compounding. Because its offers simplicity and inherent obviousness in decoding the

meanings of the compounded words, JHS students tend to use this word formation

process.

With minimal changes in its orthographic symbols or spelling, learners find

Blending an economic way for shortening and compounding words together. This

provides convenience in conveying complex concepts with concision. Also, this

manifests the desire of the language user to provide emotional coloring, originality,

humor, and diversity in enhancing stylistic features.

 116

Learners have proven to manipulate language to fit their needs or specific

purpose. This is explicitly shown in their attempt for Intentional Misspelling. These

alterations are intended to achieve purposes, such as; (1) to sound as if a child, (2) to

sound less offensive, (3) to sound sassier, (4) to sound more appealing to readers, (5), to

sound as though words are spoken by pets, (6) to sound as if a person with strong

provincial English language, (7) to sound trending, (8) to sound sarcastic. These

intentions all have one common goal, that is to be a desirable or appealing to their peers

or to the community they have in their SNS.

The last sub-classification of Modification is Reversal. It has been linguistically

existent in the native mother tongue of Tagalogs because of its emergence in Manila

during 1980s. This was then called as the Manila street slang where people use to spell

words inversely. It is also considered to be heavily culture-based, and this is why JHS

students tend to use these terms in their tweets as a means to fit to what seems to be

trending.

Following this is the word formation process of Conversion that has two sub-

classifications: Redefinition and Category Extension. The prior deals with the semantic

shift of broadening and narrowing of connotative meanings of altered words, though

these words do not undergo derivation or adding affixes to its base or stem. It usually

involves nouns and verbs but are not limited to these. Then, the latter involves

broadening the function of the word in the sentence and adds another definition in its

denotative meaning. JHS students find this process very economically convenient in their

language use.
 117

Affixation, or otherwise known as Derivation, is a word formation process that

could easily be overused by students because it does not follow any linguistic rule in any

sense, morphemes and affixes are expandable and easy to use. This is advantageous for

the learners because it provides opportunity for the learners to be creative and innovative

in their language use.

Philippine linguist believed that Borrowing words is not a recent addition to word

alterations because it has been evident throughout the decades in Filipino language.

These words go beyond simple borrowing the words semantically but may or may not

appear orthographically in the same form. This transcended through different media and

is manifested in everyday speech.

Natural Linguistic Progression is a new addition to the list of word alteration

suggested by Magtanong (2018). This is a process that involves the excessive use of the

term that overtime it is lexically or orthography changed from having two to three

syllables, it become one, or in a more convenient term for the user.

Words have been overused and this gives users the freedom to alter words using

not only one-word alteration but many word formation processes. From the data

collected, words which have undergone Multiple Alterations frequently went to have

Omission, Borrowing and then Blending simultaneously.

The analyzed data also shows that JHS students tend to alter words because of

three main goals; (1) to achieve brevity and concision, (2) to make words simpler and

easier to understand, (3) to be more desirable and appealing to their peers or their

community.
 118

One reason these word alterations occur is neologism or the continuous

development of language in the modern word, thru the use of varied media. This was

mentioned in almost all word formation inferences.

Notes in Chapter 4

Boot,A.B., Sang,E.T.K, Dijkstra, K. & Zwaan,R.A. How Character Limit Affects

Language Usage in Tweets. Palgrave Communications. Vol. 5, Article number: 76
(09 July 2019) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0280-3
Cook, P. Using Social Media to Find English Lexical Blends.
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~pcook/pp486-854Cook.pdf
Chirvony, A. Twitter: A New Center of Word-Formation.
https://www.academia.edu/12317290/TWITTER_A_NEW_CENTER_OF_WORD
_FORMATION
Clarka, E. & Arakia, K. Text Normalization in Social Media: Progress, Problems and
Applications For A Pre-Processing System Of Casual English. Pacific Association
for Computational Linguistics (PACLING 2011)
https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/
Davis, M.L, and Otto, W. Children's Word Association to Individual Letters1.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10862966909546865
Dimaculangan, N. and Gustilo, N. A Closer Look at Philippine English Word-Formation
Frameworks. November 2018 Advanced Science Letters 24 (11)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327904728_A_Closer_Look_at_Philippin
e_English_Word-Formation_Frameworks
Izura, C. and Playfoot, D. A Normative Study of Acronyms and Acronym Naming.
Behavior Research Methods. Vol. 44, Pages 862–889 (2012)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-011-0175-8#Sec2
Klymenko, O. Twitterverse: The birth of New Words. March 2019. Proceedings of the
Linguistic Society of America 4(1):11. (also available in pdfs.semanticscholar.org)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331799033_Twitterverse_The_birth_of_n
ew_words
Lacson, B. Retrospeak. July, 2019 https://punto.com.ph/retrospeak/
Marko, D. The Use of Alphanumeric Symbols in Slovene Tweets. Faculty of Arts,
University of Ljubljana. CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities,
Ljubljana, Slovenia, 27–28 September 2016.
 119

http://nl.ijs.si/janes/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-Use-of-Alphanumeric-
Symbols-in-Slovene-Tweets.html
Martsa, S. Conversion in English: A Cognitive Semantic Approach. Cambridge Scholars
Publishing. 2013. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/58350
Street Slang—Language Isn’t Dead Yet. LexCode. http://blog.lexcode.com.ph/street-
slang-language-isnt-dead-yet/
Sudartinah, T. On Conversion In English. October 2016. Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312555032_On_Conversion_In_English
Tagalog Slang. Diksyunaryo ng Wikang Filipino, Sentinyal Edisyon. Manila: Komisyon
ng Wikang Filipino, 1998. p. 926-929.
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/tagalog/salitang_kalye.htm
Wałaszewska, E. Relevance Theory, Figuration, and Continuity in Pragmatics. Chapter 1.
Category extension as a variety of loose use. (pp.25-43). May 2020.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341409606_Chapter_1_Category_extensi
on_as_a_variety_of_loose_use
Walker, J. Letter Association. Language Tutoring. 6 Oct 2012
http://www.languagetutoring.co.uk/LetterAssociation.html

CHAPTER V

SUMMARY, CONCLUSION, AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This chapter presents the summary of findings of the analyzed data in the

previous chapter, this also gives the conclusion to the findings of the study and suggests

recommendations for future research.

SUMMARY

Analyzing the morphological processes that altered words have undergone is the

main objective of the study, however, to fully understand the language use of Junior High
 120

School students in Twitter, the researcher has devised research question that would lead

to further analysis of the study. These are:

1. What are the words used by the Junior High School students in Twitter?

2. What are the morphological processes that occur on these words as they are used

in Twitter?

3. What could be a language periodical that may be devised to compare the standard

use of words against the language use of students in Twitter?

The researcher was able to find 3, 868 post that contains the reoccurrence of altered

words which 50 Junior High School students use in their Twitter account. These posts

were from June 2019 to June 2020. With the criteria in mind, the researcher was able to

narrow this number down to a total of 679 considered posts that constitutes to 17.55% of

the total number of gathered posts.

The analysis of the gathered data in the previous chapter led for the researcher to

have the following findings:

1. The analysis was based on Matthew’s Theory of Morphological Process (1991)

where five word formation processes are used, these are Subtraction,

Modification, Conversion, Affixation, and Reduplication (the last one was not

found in any of the word alterations in Twitter) the researcher also included three

word formation processes suggested by Magtanong (2018), these are Borrowing,

Natural Linguistic Progression, and Word Postering (however, there was no word

postering found in the tweets of the subjects).

 121

2. Shortening leads the most frequent word formation process to be used by the JHS

students with 34% (231) of the total number of considered post, followed by

Modification with 22% (146), then Borrowing with 13% (86), and Conversion

having 10% (68), Multiple Alterations with 9% (60), Affixation with 6% (44),

Natural Linguistic Progression and Association both have 1 % (10).

3. The familiarity of the students on the occurrence of Acronym in Twitter is a factor

on how they manifest these altered words on their tweets or retweets. Twitter

users have already adapted a system of linguistic arbitrarily constructed corpus of

shortened words that are easy to comprehend that involves Omission.

Alphanumeric is commonly linked to Jejenese which is encoded in a manner that

demand excessive use odd sticky capitalizations, punctuations, numbers, and

other symbols to achieve emphasis on their post. Single letter words considered

under Association are not flagged as spelling errors when analyzed under

checkers, therefore it is an effective means of conveying messages with limited

characters.

4. Compounding offers simplicity in decoding the meanings of the compounded

words, hence JHS students tend to use this more often because of its linguistic

ease. Blending manifests their desire to provide emotional coloring, originality,

humor, and diversity in enhancing stylistic features in their language use.

Intentional Misspelling is made by JHS to achieve one of these purposes; (1) to

sound as if a child, (2) to sound less offensive, (3) to sound sassier, (4) to sound

more appealing to readers, (5), to sound as though words are spoken by pets, (6)

to sound as if a person with strong provincial English language, (7) to sound

 122

trending, (8) to sound sarcastic. Reversal is viewed to be connected with Manila

street slang during 1980s when people used to spell words inversely, and this is

why JHS students tend to use these terms in their tweets as a means to fit to what

seems to be trending.

5. Conversion has two sub-classifications: Redefinition and Category Extension.

Both are used to broaden or narrow down connotative meanings of words. JHS

students find this process very economically convenient on their language use in

Twitter.

6. Affixation is advantageous for the learners because it provides opportunity for the

learners to be creative and innovative in their language use, linguistic freedom.

7. Borrowing go beyond simple loaning words semantically but may or may not

appear orthographically in the same form. This transcended through different

media and is manifested in everyday speech.

8. Natural Linguistic Progression is a new addition to the list of word alteration

suggested by Magtanong (2018). It is an excessive use of the word that overtime

it is lexically or orthography changed from having two to three syllables, it

become one, or in a more convenient term for the user.

9. Multiple Alterations frequently went to have Omission, Borrowing and then

Blending simultaneously.

CONCLUSION

With accordance to the findings of the study, the researcher arrived with the

following conclusions:
 123

1. Twitter is one of the leading Social Networking Sites today. It becomes a

breeding ground for new words being used by Junior High School students of the

iGen, and linguist now consider it as a rich corpus for language research.

2. This study has gathered a large amount of altered words that was found in

Twitter. These words have indeed undergone morphological processes that have

been pre-existing before this study was conducted, and inclusion of recent

proposed word formation processes.

3. Words that Junior High School students of the iGen use in their Twitter accounts

are mostly shortened, modified, affixed, converted, etc., to fit into the needs of the

learners for appropriation.

4. A portion from this corpus of altered words is based on Filipino linguistic culture

which is the use of Reversal (or tadbalik as Manila Street Slang would refer) and

Borrowing or loaning of words from other languages. These word processes is

greatly manifested in the learners’ language use in Twitter.

5. Students intentionally misspell because of these reasons; (1) to sound as if a child,

(2) to sound less offensive, (3) to sound sassier, (4) to sound more appealing to

readers, (5), to sound as though words are spoken by pets, (6) to sound as if a

person with strong provincial English language, (7) to sound trending, (8) to

sound sarcastic.

6. Some of the word formation processes may also occur simultaneously altogether

in a single word, that is why Multiple Alterations is added on the corpus.

 124

7. JHS students alter words because of three main goals; (1) to achieve brevity and

concision, (2) to make words simpler and easier to understand, (3) to be more

desirable and appealing to their peers or their community.

8. Apart from character restrictions on Twitter, neologism is one of the main reasons

why words are continuously being altered and subjected to word formation

processes.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The following recommendations are given to address the conclusions of the study:

1. iGen Twitter users have adapted an arbitrarily acceptable linguistic corpus of

altered words that continue to broaden word formation processes over time.

Deviation of Twitter language use from English standard language use is a

problem of learners today, this is why teachers should give interventions on the

language use of students during instruction.

2. Language teachers are also expected to familiarize themselves with altered words

on the internet, not only to be aware, but to properly monitor and regulate the use

of students on these words.

3. Teachers also are encouraged to device a language program, aside from daily

instruction, to specifically address the need to correct the altered words which

they could have manifested in their academic works (transcended from their

tweets).

4. The deviation of language used from academic to the internet slang poses a

problem to the substantial use of English which could later affect the students’
 125

performance in other significant life-related activities, such as work. Therefore,

curriculum developers must look into amending the current curriculum to address

the changing ways of language use of the students.

5. Parents’ intervention is also very important in handling students’ accounts,

specifically their language use on their tweets. Limitation on their on-screen time

is a must.

6. The booming industry of social media platforms thru the internet cannot be

overlooked. iGen Twitter users have anonymity that allows them to express

themselves more freely than in any other SNS forums. Hence, researchers are

encouraged to conduct studies on the linguistic characteristics of students’ tweets.

7. Researchers may also focus on comparative language use among JHS students

based on their demographic profile. Say, from this study, the researcher has

observed a great difference in the volume of tweets coming from male and female

subjects.

8. Future investigators on language use of students may also inquire on their content

creation for their tweets. The researcher have observe difference in the series of

tweets that students participate on, this may useful for studies that focus more on

content rather than structure.