The Influence of Social Media on Syntactic Simplification in Youth Discourse

Abstract

This paper examines the role of social media in syntactic simplification in youth discourse, including such a platform as TikTok, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The research works to understand the role that digital communication plays in developing shorter sentences, less complex clauses and a greater use of coordination rather than subordination through a mixed-methods orientation that involves both quantitative and corpus linguistics and qualitative linguistic approaches. The analysis of data on young adults aged between 16 and 25 shows that linguistic economy is determined by platform-specific restrictions, including character count and visual focus among content, with TikTok being the most notable in simplification (5.8 words average sentence). The qualitative results point to adjustive linguistic performance, where functional effectiveness and peer conventions take precedence of complexity in grammar, with brevity and emotional expression being more valuable in the linguistic performance. This paper is a critique of prescriptivism when it comes to language impoverishment as it re-contextualizes syntactic simplification as an adaptation to online uses. The implications of education, linguistic theory and language evolution are raised with a focus on the need to incorporate digital literacy in the education curricula and the appropriate reconceptualization of competence in a multimodal situation.

Keywords: Social Media, Syntactic Simplification, Youth Discourse, Digital Communication, Linguistic Adaptation, Corpus Linguistics, Platform Constraints, Language Evolution.