Dear Rich, I don’t know if it this phenomenon has a specific name. I’m not working exactly on this topic, but I have worked on WhatsApp in my doctoral dissertation and (from a linguistic point of view) I have considered this phenomenon as the “disrupted turn adjacency” observed in chats: in order to maintain coherence, in my corpus users normally use addressivity (repeat the name of the user they’re writing to), topicalizations and repetitions (for example, they repeat the noun instead of using a pronoun), as in chats. I hope it helps. -- Agnese Sampietro Universitat de València Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación Avda. Blasco Ibáñez, 32 Tel. (+34) 963 86 41 00 Ext.51106 CLAUSULA DE CONFIDENCIALIDAD (ACGUV 227/2014: Art. 7.1)