In traditional linguistics literatures there is a clear separation between words and non-words. Words are basically what you'd find in a dictionary. But in todays world you find all kinds of word-like "things" in tweets and other social media, such as you could imagine:
I'm so excited, yay!!ah!!woooohoo:):):Dboom
I've been w#ndreeeng what this means.
I don;t knw if this <asdfasdfasdf> sense.
Maybe the wordsarestucktogeth ...er.
Where:
yay!!ah!!woooohoo:):):Dboom
is basically enthusiasmw#ndreeeng
is "wondering" with a sort of sounded out part (reeeng) and the#
for playfulness.don;t
is misspelledknw
leaves out some letters<asdfasdfasdf>
can be interpreted as "makes" for "makes sense".- Words are stuck together
- But also split apart.
These are just the top of my head. But I am wondering how to structure them linguistically. Such as, calling them just "words", but that doesn't make sense. Calling them "things" is too general. Maybe "clauses", but that is usually a set of words. So wondering if there are any formalisms around this sort of stuff. Wondering how to treat them.
You can also have more normalized "non-word" structures such as:
This is a #hashtag.
This is a https://linguistics.stackexchange.com link.
This is a @username.
This is an example.domain.com.
Wondering what those types of things are called when they are found in text/writing/language.