An insight into Twitter: a corpus based contrastive study in English and Spanish.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the use of Spanish and English in the micro-blogging social network Twitter from a contrastive point of view. A quantitative research methodology is applied in order firstly, to identify specific common characteristics of language, organization and content in the medium and secondly, to find eventual differences in the use of a particular language. To carry out the experiment, two corpora were constructed using language data from Twitter, one in Spanish with a total number of 4,027,746 words and another with similar characteristics in English with a total number of 4,655,992 words. From the results obtained, the conclusion is that there are a number of very general discourse and organizational features common to the two corpora under study. It is also concluded that there are some particular characteristics which differentiate the use of English and Spanish in the medium.

Keywords

• Twitter, contrastive analysis, corpus linguistics