WRITING IN DIGITAL GENRES: MOTIVATIONS FOR SPELLING ERRORS AND INTERNETESE IN COMMENTS ON THE SOCIAL NETWORK INSTAGRAM

Abstract

In this work, based on a reflection made in Meireles et al. (2018), we aim to analyze cases of spelling errors and internetese in comments posted on a social network. We seek to answer two questions here: (i) Which forms found in digital genres are characterized, on the one hand, as spelling errors and, on the other, as instances of internetese language? (ii) What motivates the occurrence of these spelling errors and internetese in digital genres? As a theoretical foundation, we are based on Bortoni-Ricardo (2005, 2006), Cagliari (2005), Freitag and Fonseca e Silva (2006), Komesu and Tenani (2009), Barbosa (2016) and Simão (2022), among others studies. From a methodological point of view, our research is descriptive and qualitative in nature. As a corpus, we used 14 texts (comments) belonging to the digital sphere, taken from the social network Instagram and produced in 2023. With the analysis, we showed a distinction between spelling errors resulting from the influence of speech on writing and the arbitrariness of writing (Bortoni-Ricardo, 2005, 2006) and the linguistic forms that refer to what has been called internetese (Freitag; Fonseca e Silva, 2006; Komesu; Tenani, 2009). Our results indicate that: (i) in the digital texts examined, there is a greater variety of spelling errors motivated by the transposition from orality to writing; (ii) regarding internetese, there are more cases of abbreviation due to some functional properties of digital genres.