Language economy in short text messages

The purpose of this paper is to investigate some of the formal characteristics of the genre of the short text message, with a special focus on the concept of language economy, which typically underlies the use of this mode of communication. The subject of analysis are text messages in two languages, English and Polish, which are compared in terms of the methods of text shortening used by the two language systems. The elements studied include word clippings, vowel deletion, word-letter substitution, word-number substitution, spelling simplification, and pronoun deletion. The aim is to establish the preferred options in the two languages and identify reasons for such choices.