Keywords
language play
social media
TikTok
English language development
multimodality
How to Cite
Abstract
Language is changing at an unprecedentedly rapid speed thanks to the internet and social media). New English varieties have developed in merely a few decades and a flood of new words and novel ways of using English have evolved. Since its international launch in 2017, the social media platform TikTok has been playing a major role in accelerating the development of new English varieties. TikTok’s unique algorithmic content recommendation enables virality. Such virality has had consequences for language use, specifically the use of English. This paper focuses on the English verb give and examines its new phrase structural and semantic developments observed on TikTok by the researcher. The verb give on TikTok seems to have developed new structural possibilities, new valencies, and a new sense. This new give has also been observed in use in other places outside of TikTok. This indicates that the new online variety of English observed on TikTok has seeped into mainstream dialects of English.
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