In this chapter, the writers consider these matters by stepping back from the hyperbolic commentary on text messaging by journalists and the entertaining observations of popular writers. To this end, they start with a comprehensive but potted review of the scholarly, research-driven literature
on text messaging; this work highlights the range of applications to which texting has been put as well as the ways in which sociolinguists, discourse analysts and other communication scholars have been attending to language in texting messaging. Shifting next to a more specifically pragmatic and metapragmatic focus, we present some of our own empirical research as a way to illustrate general phenomena covered in the wider scholarly literature and to ground text messaging as a pragmatic phenomenon. We close our chapter with some brief thoughts about gaps in the academic literature and possible directions for future research on the language of text messaging. Before we go any further, however, we offer the following brief account of text messaging as a digital technology.
