Pragmatic Study of Emojis in Chinese Instant Messaging Discourse
Donghong Liu
Central China Normal University
Abstract
Instant messaging discourse has become a popular way for language communication and transmission, in which the mixed use of emojis and words produces prominent textual features. The relevant studies both in China and abroad mainly focus on interpreting the functions of the solely-used emojis or other computer-mediated communication cues in IM discourses. But little attention has been paid to the combining effects of emojis and words; and quantitative method is seldom used in the limited number of related studies, especially in China. This study analyzes the pragmatic functions and the systematic correlations between emojis and their surrounding words from the perspective of relevance theory. A corpus of 139 conversations of Chinese college students over Wechat and QQchat was built. A mixed research method was employed in encoding and data analysis. The emojis can be classified into five kinds according to their turn-taking characteristics: starting-turn emojis, ending-turn emojis, spacing-turn emojis, scattering emojis and independent feedback emojis. By investigating the consistent and inconsistent meanings between emojis and words, we have found the pragmatic functions of emojis: filling, enhancing, weakening, challenging and replacing the effects of words. The emojis play an important role in enhancing contextual effects and reducing reader’s processing effort. The five kinds of emojis produce the following five corresponding contextual effects: eliciting a context, clarifying a context, separating two contexts, intensifying a context and setting up an independent context. The first four kinds of emojis together with words will increase the text-sender’s processing effort but reduce the text-receiver’s processing effort, while the last kind used alone will reduce the text-sender’s processing effort but maybe increase the text-receiver’s processing effort. The present study attempts to provide a new interpretation of the emojis used by the young people so as to understand their literate practices. We argue that the findings must be interpreted and viewed alongside the large body of research to better elucidate the possible mechanisms underlying the heavy use of emojis with the combination of words in the IM discourse context.
Key words: Instant Messaging; Emojis; Pragmatic function; Relevance Theory