What is Verbal Codes

The chapter investigates the assumptions that academics in two universities in Southwestern Nigeria (namely, University of Ibadan- a federal government-owned institution- and Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso- a state government-owned institution) work with when sending GSM (Global System of Communication) text-messages. The research on this aspect of GSM interaction, which has received little attention from scholars in Computer-mediated Communication (CMC), is approached, in the present paper, by a random sampling of 400 text-messages from the ‘sent’ (out-box) compartment of cell phones of academics in the sampled universities. The analysis of the texts is based on insights from contextual beliefs, collaborative theory and implicature. The findings reveal that senders of text messages exploit two beliefs, namely, language-based beliefs and subject matter-based beliefs, which are constrained by participants’ conception of co-interactants’ relative status in inclusive or exclusive terms, itself a determinant of the degree of the assumptions made. The findings further show that the messages which are based on research and academic activities, themselves covering research and supervision, academic promotion and advancement, general academic matters and academic obligations and assignments, are characterized by a variety of short hands, context-driven indices of assumptions and flouts of quantity and manner maxims. It is concluded that with the high level of assumptions made, aided by various linguistic tools, messages communicated by academics could be exclusive to the in-group members. Finally, future research is invited to compare the beliefs of academics with those of other groups of professionals.