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Grinter and Eldridge's teenagers said that they did use capital letters to emphasise words and 'if you're really good you go to special letters and you can kind of put accents and dots and little squiggles, and it's kind of fun' (Grinter & Eldridge, 2001: 17). Döring distinguishes three main functions for short forms of language in SMS communication: time economy function, identity function and interpretation function.

She also notes that abbreviations tend to appear on an ad hoc basis and that users can formulate interpretable and meaningful messages in spite of the character limitation and without having to rely largely on language short forms. With the decision made to use SMS as a communication medium, the cases in which the process of composition reaches, or threatens to reach the borders of the application, whereby full language forms need to be converted into syntactic or lexical short forms, are rather rare. About 60 per cent of Döring's participants utilised the character limitation of their messages and the remaining 40 per cent did not utilise the full space, or deem it to be much of a restriction. This was identified as the divide between competent versus non-competent users.

This thesis also draws on the work of semiotics specifically in order to understand the language that is entirely unique to SMS e.g. 'BHME@2' ('I will be home at two o clock'). This vocabulary can consist of single letters, numbers and symbols placed together to form a new word or phrase. Semiotics is the theory of the creation and explanation of definition. Meaning is created through objects and events acting as 'signs' in relation to other signs. Systems of signs are made-up of the complicated relationships of meaning that can occur between signs. Human communication can be defined as the conveyance of any influence, exacting change, from one person to another. The term 'semiotics' in its simplest form stands for the 'study of sign' or the social manufacture of meaning by systems of signs and how things are given meaning. The contents of various messages or signs that exist all around us form the basis of semiotics. Semiotics investigates the way in which signs are arranged and fashioned and the medium in which these signs are transmitted and later interpreted. This is the natural place to begin when discussing text-messaging language as we are dealing directly with signs and messages and how each textee interprets the language code received on their tiny screens. A representation is something, which stands in place of something else, in semiotics a 'sign', is something that represents. If we take a text message as a representation, the code of letters and numbers becomes the 'sign'. One understands 'table' because a picture of a table can be constructed in the mind's eye and thus the sign 'table' interpreted. In SMS language 'GR8' means 'great'. Though a user may or may not have learnt this sign, its meaning can be deduced when one recognises the obvious shortcomings of the medium and the space permitted for composing messages. This ability to interpret is the basis of human intelligence.