Repeated Capitalisation in a Practicum Supervisor’s WhatsApp Messages to Trainee Teachers

Abstract

Repeated capitalisation is a feature found in text messages sent via social messaging applications. While capitalisation is the convention of capitalising the first letter of each sentence and the first letter of each word in most proper nouns, repeated capitalisation is the capitalising of a whole word to intensify emotions. Linguists have variously seen this repetition as a form of exploitation to express emotional reactions and responses, as ‘shouting’, as a form of emphasis and as paralinguistic restitution in text messages. Despite its use by texters, little pragmatic research has addressed the repeated capitalisation used between texters in asymmetrical power relations. This paper bridges this gap by studying repeated capitalisation in a corpus of WhatsApp group chats written in English by a Malaysian practicum supervisor to her trainee teachers. The results indicate that determiners (e.g., ALL) and coordinating conjunctions (e.g., AND, BUT, OR) were capitalised by the practicum supervisor and that these were usually found in her initiating request and advice messages. The analysis further suggests these repeated capitalisations were used to indicate emphasis especially to reinstate prosodic and paralinguistic features of spoken language.