Analysis

Under the umbrella term of abbreviations, three types of occurrences were observed and separated into three categories: 'textese', informalities, and contractions. Textese is the most commonly used abbreviation found and refers to "text speak". The use of vc in place of você was the most common example of textese. Textese served only to shorten words for convenience. A table is included below in order to show the textese abbreviations and their expanded forms.
Informalities were aspects of Portuguese which would be accepted, even expected, in day-to-day speech, but not in writing. Examples of informalities are the use tava in place of the estava or the shortening of para to pra when not preceding an article. The beginning es-' of the verb estar is often dropped in speech but isn't considered acceptable in formal writing; however, it was observed frequently throughout the conversations. There were a few instances of writers using brigado in place of obrigado. It is common in speech to hear individuals drop the initial 'o' in pronouncing this word.
Finally, contractions are ubiquitous and, often, obligatory in Portuguese, though only two were tracked during our project: não é into né and para + o/a into pro/pra. These were chosen as they are aspects of colloquial Portuguese, non-obligatory, and uncommon in writing.

In contrast with the use of abbreviations, we thought that it would be a good idea to look at the use of expanded forms of words as well. It wouldn't be out of line to expect a trend inversely related to what is shown in the abbreviations charts where Americans tended to use more abbreviations than the Brazilians. In fact, this is a very similar trend as the Brazilians tended to use more expanded forms than the Americans but not overwhemlingly so.

The most common expanded forms used were those of 'textese' forms, such as você rather than vc. These were marked as 'full'. Expanded forms of contractions were marked as 'uncontracted' and those of informal language were marked as 'formal'.

When we looked at the raw texting data that we received, it seemed like there was an overwhelming amount of emoji's used throughout the text and we thought thtat this would be interesting to look at further. By just looking through the data, we thought that there were many more instances where the Brazilian speakers were using emojis than where the American speakers did. However, when we ran the functions, it appears that the Brazilians did in fact, use more emojis than their American counterparts, but not by a large count.

One of the interesting aspects of communication through some static medium is the communication of emotions, something that emoji characters have recently been able to do more succinctly. Before the development of the emojis, one of the better communication methods for describing laughter was a transcription of what the speaker would perceive as laughter, much like the 'haha' that English speakers may commonly use. This form differes across the languages of the world, so it would be of interest to see the different styles that people of different cultures might employ. In this case, the different styles of laughter notation included 'ha/lol' 'k' and 'rs' (standing for risos meaning 'laughter').

Generally, the Americans seemed to use more instances of any sort of laughter notations and they considerably favored the 'ha' method which is commonly used throughout English texting conventions. The Brazilian speakers also favored the convention that is more commonly used in their environment, 'k'. Other Brazilian speakers have noted though, that they may also commonly use the 'ha' notation which would explain why there's still a significant amount of Brazilian uses of 'ha'. The occurance of Americans using 'k' may be an indication of the speakers attempt to speak (via text) as the Brazilians do and sound as native as possible. The third laughter notation, 'rs', presents an interesting instance because it was so scarcely used and used only by Americans.

Noting the amount and distribution of the addressed corrections didn't necessarily present any drastically new information, since we were looking at data where there was discourse between L1 and L2 speakers. Naturally, the L1 speakers will be the ones to address corrections more so than the L2 speakers and the data here confirms that. What might be of interest is how the corrections were addressed because constantly correcting grammar and spelling mistakes in conversation can greatly dampen the enthusiasm or flow of a conversation.. There were three different methods that speakers used to address a correction: Explicit, Implicit, and Self.

Explicit corrections were instances where the L1 Brazilian speaker acknowledges that the L2 American speaker has made some sort of grammatical or spelling mistake and directly addresses this. The WhatsApp app allows users to highlight portions of text to display to the other user which is how the majority of these corrections were done. Usually, the L2 speaker corrects their mistake, sometimes accompanied with more questions, and moves on with the conversation.

Implicit corrections are instances where the L1 Brazilian speaker notices a mistake on the part of the L2 American speaker, but doesn't directly confront them about this mistake. Instead, the L1 Brazilian speaker makes an effort to use the correct form of the word or grammatical element in thier own dialogue in the hopes that the L2 American speaker will see how to properly use that. It would be good ot not that this is one of the more efficient methods for correcting speech errors when learning a language because it does not hinder the flow of the conversation or diminsh the sprits of the mistaken speaker.

Self corrections are rather self explanatory and are instances where a speaker notices their own mistake and corrects it before the other speaker addresses it. This is the type that makes up the entirety of the American speakers' corrections (1).

Sweeping Genralizations and Blanket Statements

The Americans utilized more texting conventions, especially 'textese', than their language partners. We were initially surprised by this, as the Americans wrote less on average while still out-using Brazilians in texting conventions of their native language. We expected to find a more significant difference in the use of emojis and laughter, particularly anticipating the Brazilians to use more of each.