THE PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF THE LANGUAGE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The emergence of digital communication technologies, encompassing platforms from short-message service (SMS) to complex social media environments, has profoundly reshaped linguistic practice. This paper explores the pragmatic features of this new linguistic landscape, focusing on how context, intent, and social meaning are negotiated and conveyed in primarily text-based interactions where traditional paralinguistic cues are absent. Drawing upon theories of Gricean implicature, politeness strategies, and speech act theory, this analysis argues that digital communicators have developed a sophisticated, often platform-specific, set of pragmatic tools—including emojis, strategic punctuation, acronyms, and codeswitching—to compensate for physical distance, manage social relationships, and ensure the successful interpretation of illocutionary force. The study highlights the tension between the push for efficiency (brevity) and the need for expressivity (emotional clarity) as the defining pragmatic constraint of the digital language environment.