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Do you kiss when you text? Cross-cultural differences in the use of the kissing emojis in three WhatsApp corpora
Abstract
Emojis are pictographs added to messages on social media and websites. Researchers have observed that emojis representing kissing faces are often used to close instant messaging conversations. This has been interpreted as an imitation of cheek kissing, a common behavior in some cultural contexts. We analyze the use of seven types of kissing emojis in three corpora of WhatsApp chats, one from Spain (where cheek kisses in face-to-face interaction are commonplace in many situations), the other from Germany (where kisses are occasionally given), and the third from the German-speaking part of Switzerland (where cheek kisses are a common greeting between relatives and friends). To do so, we systematically categorize and compare the use of a sample of these emojis on WhatsApp. The analysis suggests that there are differences between the three corpora in the use of the kissing emojis. The emoji “face throwing a kiss” is often included in closing messages in the Spanish and Swiss-German data, while in the Federal German corpus kisses do not appear at the end of a conversation; using these emojis in openings is uncommon in all three corpora. This suggests that these emojis can exhibit cultural variation, but they do not clearly mirror face-to-face behavior.
... They were divided into three groups: (A, B, and C). Each group has been provided with a selection of a specific number of screenshots (Group A (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20), Group B (21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40), and Group C (41-58)). (Example 1) below is an example of the screenshot provided in their questionnaire. ...
This descriptive linguistic study aims to check the effect of age (old/young) and social role (mother/daughter) on the kind of emojis and their intended meanings that Saudi mothers use while chatting with their daughters. The data has been collected from twenty Saudi mother-daughter WhatsApp groups’ chat interactions. The study is qualitative in its approach and has used computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) of ‘coding and counting’ (Herring 2004) on (58 screenshots) and has revealed (42 emoji types) of Saudi mothers used in different frequencies. A combination of multi-choice and open-ended questionnaires has been tailor-made to arrive at the subjective perspectives of ninety Saudi young females. The findings show that there are variations in the kind of emojis used and their intended meanings, signaling the two generations and social roles apart. The results signaled (7 Saudi mom emoji types) that are never used by Saudi young females at all. These emojis were found to be age-specific and social role specific. The rest of the emojis (35 emoji types) were found to be used by both groups but with differences in usage and intended meanings, marking again the differences in age and social role. Despite variations of emojis and their meanings, there were many factors that helped youngsters to understand the intended meanings of their mother’s emojis: the accompanying text, frequent chatting with their mothers, and the literal representation of the emojis their mothers used. Even though accommodation is the process Saudi young females developed in order to understand their mother’s emojis and their intended meanings, there were minor misunderstandings found. The reason has been attributed to what has been termed in this study as the ‘emoji gap’ that marks the effect of age and social role (Evans 2015, 2017; White 2017; Marko 2022). Saudi mother-daughter WhatsApp conversations revealed that they are approximate to the structure of face-to-face conversation in relation to their back-and-forth quasi-synchronous messages, topics discussed, the informal style, the intimate relation, and the Saudi dialects used accompanied with related emojis that agree with the content of the digital texts. In this study, emojis are proved to be a visual language that mirrors its users in relation to their age and social role in digital text.
... In messages #05 to #07, María offers an 'absolution' (Robinson, 2004), declaring that she likes VMs, thus ratifying the mode switch. The standalone emoji in #07 can either strengthen her appreciation or mark an (unsuccessful) closing of the interaction, often marked with a kissing emoji in Spanish WhatsApp messages (Sampietro et al., 2022). In #21, she accepts that Ricardo is sending VMs because he is busy preparing lunch, and implicitly acknowledges the apology by referring to its content. ...
Voice messages (VMs), which allow users to send recorded messages to other contacts, are a popular feature of instant messaging applications. Despite their popularity, linguistic research on VMs is still in its infancy. This study analyses metacommunication around VMs in mobile messaging conversations among WhatsApp users in Germany and Spain. It focuses on participants’ metacommunicative accounts (such as references, explanations, or motivations) of their preference for audio posting over other forms of communication (e.g. texting). Drawing on recent advances in digital conversation analysis, we examine how accounts placed in different sequential positions in messenger chats (preceding a VM, at the beginning or end of a VM, or after it has been sent) address diverse aspects of voice messaging (from either the sender’s or recipient’s perspective). We demonstrate that accounting accomplishes different social actions, such as framing a VM as something outstanding or worth apologising for. We argue that a sequential analysis of accounting and metacommunication offers rich insights into users’ media ideologies concerning the appropriateness and timing of text and voice messaging. Overall, these findings contribute to a better understanding of the growing importance of voice in mobile communication.
... When refusing a request from peers, both the Chinese and Japanese participants thought that it was very important to use emojis, with the Japanese participants considering it significantly more important than the Chinese participants. The differences between the two groups' perception of emojis provided more evidence of the cultural variation in the use of emojis, which has been documented in earlier studies (e.g., Gao and Vanderlaan, 2020;Sampietro et al., 2022). However, cross-cultural comparisons of the perception of emojis are often conducted between Westerners and East Asians (e.g., Togans et al., 2021). ...
This study explores how Chinese and Japanese participants perceived different variables in making, accepting and refusing requests and how they evaluated certain requests between peers on social media. The study comprised two parts: 50 students for each language completed a questionnaire survey, and another four students took part in focus groups. The quantitative results from the questionnaires show both similarities and differences between the perceptions of the Chinese and Japanese participants. The qualitative analyses of the focus groups indicate that both the (in)directness of the request head act and the types and numbers of mitigation influenced the participants' evaluations of requests on social media. Implications for (in)directness and (im)politeness, as well as the triangula-tion of different methods, are also discussed.
This study examines how non-target-like formulaic expressions used by advanced second language (L2) speakers of German are perceived by first language (L1) German business professionals in an intercultural workplace setting. By using an experimental design, we explore how L1 business professionals (N = 84) perceive the appropriateness and acceptability of the non-target-like expressions as well as how they perceive the communicative competence of the writer in two conditions: one in which the writer is explicitly described as an L2 user of German (intercultural condition), and one in which the writer is not (German condition). Moreover, by first establishing recurrent unconventionalities when L2 users create their own formulaic expressions (i.e., misspellings, grammatical errors, pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic infelicities), we examine the effect of the type of unconventionality. Our experimental stimuli are based on authentic student responses to situations in an intercultural workplace setting which were elicited through a written discourse completion task. Our results indicate that in both conditions expressions containing a grammatical error are judged as least acceptable, followed by those with a pragmatic infelicity. Ratings were significantly higher in the intercultural condition, suggesting tolerance of the L1 professionals towards non-target-like expressions of L2 users.
Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics are inherently multifaceted and varied, given discipline’s breaching of numerous cross-disciplinary boundaries. In fact, research in Intercultural Pragmatics represents merely new ways of thinking about language and, thus, of researching interactants’ (non-)verbal behaviors: With core common ground and shared knowledge about conventionalized frames of the target language being limited, intercultural communication features a number of unique characteristics in comparison to L1 communication. This being said, the range of methods employed in data collection and analysis in Intercultural Pragmatics is not only wide, but highly heterogeneous at the same time. The present paper takes a scientometric approach to data collection methods and data types in Intercultural Pragmatics research. In order to provide an extensive diachronic survey of methods and approaches featuring in empirical studies published specifically by the journal Intercultural Pragmatics (edited by Istvan Kecskés), this study includes a self-compiled corpus of 358 papers in 17 volumes published since its launch in 2004 thru 2020. The aim is to carve out diachronic method preferences and emerging as well as declining trends in data collection methods and data types adhered to within this discipline. These are further discussed within the context of relevant state-of-the-art accounts that have specifically offered surveys of methods and methodologies pertaining to issues in data collection and data analysis in (Intercultural) Pragmatics in recent years.
En este trabajo se estudia un uso muy peculiar de los emojis en la aplicación WhatsApp: la sustitución o reproducción de un término por medio de su representación visual. A través de un procedimiento cualitativo, se analiza un corpus de mensajes de WhatsApp, identificando regularidades tanto en el uso de los emojis para sustituir o enfatizar palabras, como los posibles mecanismos de trasposición visual. Los emojis pueden reemplazar o repetir visualmente sustantivos, verbos, adjetivos, interjecciones y expresiones más complejas. A falta de un emoji específico, los usuarios recurren a aproximaciones en general metonímicas al término buscado o a referencias al imaginario colectivo. También se observa que los emojis reproducen estereotipos y sesgos presentes en nuestra sociedad.
This book offers a unique model for understanding the cognitive underpinnings, interactions and discursive effects of our evolving use of smartphones in everyday app-mediated communication, from text messages and gifs to images, video and social media apps.
Adopting a cyberpragmatics framework, grounded in cognitive pragmatics and relevance theory, it gives attention to how both the particular interfaces of different apps and users’ personal attributes influence the contexts and uses of smartphone communication. The communication of emotions – in addition to primarily linguistic content – is foregrounded as an essential element of the kinds of ever-present paralinguistic and phatic communication that characterizes our exchange of memes, gifs, "likes", and image- and video-based content. Insights from related disciplines such as media studies and sociology are incorporated as the author unpacks the timeliest questions of our digitally mediated age.
Aimed primarily at scholars and graduate students of communication, linguistics, pragmatics, media studies, and sociology of mass media, Smartphone Communication traffics in topics that will likewise engage upper-level undergraduate students.
This paper explores the nature of public tweets posted on the
ShitMyReviewersSay (@YourPaperSucks) Twitter account. The focus is on the
content of recontextualized extracts from peer reviews, as well as the formal
properties and the socio-pragmatic functions of the sharing practice on Twitter.
The examination of a corpus of tweets (n = 397) yields several types of unprofessional
review comments which correspond to the academic users’ rationale for
sharing them publicly. The most frequent type of review comment is the aggressive
one (n = 277), which harshly communicates negative evaluation, quite often in a
creative manner (n = 91). This trenchant criticism, also when creatively formulated,
represents purposeful acts of impoliteness. Whether or not originally intended to
be wittily humorous, review comments publicized on Twitter, prototypically via
Tumblr, display humorous potential, which may be boosted through the use of
additional verbal commentaries and GIFs. Thus, situated in a different participation
framework, the reported review comments are decontextualized and recontextualized
in order to be publicly ridiculed and/or disparaged. Thereby,
academics engage in solidarity-building, affiliative humor experience, which also
gives them a sense of psychological relief.
El artículo describe, desde una perspectiva sociolingüística e interaccional, uno de los actos de habla expresivos centrales en la interacción por textos breves en el discurso digital y de gran relevancia dentro de las estrategias pragmáticas: el saludo. Por un lado, el saludo de inicio, así como el empleo de fórmulas de tratamiento en función vocativa, son claves de contextualización para que los interactuantes identifiquen el punto en el que quedó la interacción previamente. Por otro, el saludo de despedida presenta una menor incidencia en la interacción digital escrita dada la posibilidad de mantener siempre abierto el canal de comunicación. El objetivo es caracterizar los recursos y estrategias que emplean los hablantes en las instancias de preparación, apertura y terminación conversacional en el intercambio de SMS. El estudio, que se realizó a partir de un corpus de 6700 SMS recolectados entre 2008-2016 en la ciudad de Bahía Blanca, analiza la variación existente según diferentes dominios de uso y variables sociolingüísticas. Se observa la preferencia por formas vocativas en detrimento de los saludos de inicio y la competencia entre el saludo de despedida y otros acto de habla expresivos, como la manifestación de agradecimiento.
This chapter focuses on an application that has gained more and more importance in recent years and shapes our everyday life: WhatsApp. Linguistics is now working intensively on this new form of communication (cf. the numerous references on www.whatsup-switzerland.ch). But how should language didactics deal with this development? Should WhatsApp be addressed in the classroom? With a focus on secondary education, this question will be explored in the present chapter. In a first step, the arguments are compiled that speak against and in favour of treating WhatsApp in German lessons. Then it will be shown that WhatsApp is not only suitable for a critical reflection on the use of language, but also offers the opportunity to examine different ways of text-image-relationships and to reflect on the role of images and symbols (emojis) in everyday writing.
Mobile messaging is considered as a prominent site for phatic communication, where interpersonal connection is often foregrounded over information transaction. Though frequently overlooked, a large amount of this interpersonal work is done nonverbally through regular and meaningful emoji use. This exploratory study deals with emoji use within Laver's (1975) phatic token framework, showing that different relationship structures (e.g., status-differential vs. solidary) correspond to distinct phatic token norms. The article analyzes phatic emoji use in a small-scale corpus of WhatsApp interactions between (a) a teacher and her L2-English students and (b) a teacher and her friends/family. Qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal patterns which widely corroborate Laver's account of socially marked and unmarked token options: the teacher, the students, and the friends/family members tend towards addressee-specifc use of neutral, other-oriented, and self-oriented phatic emojis.
Dentro de los recursos semióticos disponibles en los sistemas de mensajería instantánea, los emojis son especialmente apreciados por los usuarios gracias al variado repertorio que ofrecen y a su capacidad para dinamizar la interacción. Ante el crecimiento de su uso, nos planteamos la necesidad de disponer de una técnica metodológica que permita no solo identificar los emojis más frecuentes (es decir, los que tengan un uso más extendido en una comunidad de habla), sino también sus principales funciones e interpretaciones más usuales. Por ello, en este trabajo presentamos, por un lado, una metodología que hace posible recuperar los emojis utilizados con mayor frecuencia por parte de un grupo de usuarios de WhatsApp y, por otro, un modelo de exploración e interpretación de estos primeros datos obtenidos. Nuestro diseño metodológico se aplica a la recogida de una muestra comparativa de dos variedades del español: español de España y español de Argentina.
The article examines whether the use of emojis varies with the age of the chatters. The phenomenological insight into two corpora, a corpus of Swiss German and German data, contains the representation, commentary and illustration function of emojis, similar to the description for the ‘classic’ ASCII smileys. However, the expanded inventory of the iconic signs widens their use on all three levels. Due to this expansion, emojis are increasingly used with a referential function. Emojis mainly take the grammatical function of nouns or simple noun phrases, but they also appear as verbs or in emoji combinations as relatively complex propositions or as a substitute for communicative actions. In addition, substitutions of letters by emojis with a similar shape are also possible. Since emojis represent a more recent phenomenon of medially written language, the expectation - and the general prejudice - is that emojis are used more frequently by younger people with regard to them also chatting more, and - given their playful character - emojis are especially favoured by young people. This trend has been confirmed for the Swiss-German data. However, the analysis of a comparable German corpus shows a different, non-age-related distribution, which questions the generalizability of this age effect on the basis of the two examined corpora. Despite the relatively large data size of 419 and 374 thousand messages from 359 and 209 people respectively, a possible distortion of the data cannot be completely dismissed. Therefore, the results should be read and interpreted with caution so as not to draw premature conclusions. A further investigation should also take into account the chat partners or their age. Beyond the quantitative analysis, however, it is also necessary to examine whether the functions and specific patterns of usage presented in the text show an age-dependent frequency distribution. Both demands have not been respected in this article.
Based on a large data set of emoji using behavior collected from smartphone users over the world, this paper investigates gender-specific usage of emojis. We present various interesting findings that evidence a considerable difference in emoji usage by female and male users. Such a difference is significant not just in a statistical sense; it is sufficient for a machine learning algorithm to accurately infer the gender of a user purely based on the emojis used in their messages. In real world scenarios where gender inference is a necessity, models based on emojis have unique advantages over existing models that are based on textual or contextual information. Emojis not only provide language-independent indicators, but also alleviate the risk of leaking private user information through the analysis of text and metadata.
This paper offers some initial insights into the first large-scale and multilingual corpus of WhatsApp messages for linguistic research and the related research project “What’s up, Swit-zerland?”. Data was gathered in Switzerland in the summer of 2014 and will be made availa-ble to the academic public online at the end of the project (end of 2018). This article presents facts and figures about the corpus and the participants’ demographic data as well as an over-view of (the lack of) existing linguistic research in the field and the research intended in the SNSF-funded research project.
The paper provides an overview of the functions of emojis in everyday written communication – either used to complement or to replace text. The first chapter presents the current research literature on this topic and addresses the differences between unicode emojis and the former ASCII-signs. Then we discuss a question hotly debated by the public: May emojis be considered the basis of a new universal language? After having shown on both the lexical and the grammatical level that this cannot be the case we move on to the question whether, within our alphabetic system of writing, emojis may be used as additional graphic signs. The last chapter offers some examples of WhatsApp messages containing emojis in the various functions discussed before (as allographs and ideograms, for instance). Furthermore, a frequency analysis based on the Swiss WhatsApp corpus shows the distribution of emojis in these data.
Emojis, as a new way of conveying nonverbal cues, are widely adopted in computer-mediated communications. In this paper, first from a message sender perspective, we focus on people's motives in using four types of emojis -- positive, neutral, negative, and non-facial. We compare the willingness levels of using these emoji types for seven typical intentions that people usually apply nonverbal cues for in communication. The results of extensive statistical hypothesis tests not only report the popularities of the intentions, but also uncover the subtle differences between emoji types in terms of intended uses. Second, from a perspective of message recipients, we further study the sentiment effects of emojis, as well as their duplications, on verbal messages. Different from previous studies in emoji sentiment, we study the sentiments of emojis and their contexts as a whole. The experiment results indicate that the powers of conveying sentiment are different between four emoji types, and the sentiment effects of emojis vary in the contexts of different valences.
Facial expressions constitute a rich source of non-verbal cues in face-to-facecommunication. They provide interlocutors with resources to express and interpretverbal messages, which may affect their cognitive and emotional processing. Contrarily,computer-mediated communication (CMC), particularly text-based communication, islimited to the use of symbols to convey a message, where facial expressions cannot betransmitted naturally. In this scenario, people use emoticons as paralinguistic cues toconvey emotional meaning. Research has shown that emoticons contribute to a greatersocial presence as a result of the enrichment of text-based communication channels.Additionally, emoticons constitute a valuable resource for language comprehension byproviding expressivity to text messages. The latter findings have been supported bystudies in neuroscience showing that particular brain regions involved in emotionalprocessing are also activated when people are exposed to emoticons. To reach anintegrated understanding of the influence of emoticons in human communication onboth socio-cognitive and neural levels, we review the literature on emoticons in threedifferent areas. First, we present relevant literature on emoticons in CMC. Second, westudy the influence of emoticons in language comprehension. Finally, we show theincipient research in neuroscience on this topic. This mini review reveals that, whilethere are plenty of studies on the influence of emoticons in communication from a socialpsychology perspective, little is known about the neurocognitive basis of the effects ofemoticons on communication dynamics.
An Integrated Review of Emoticons in Computer-Mediated Communication. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312102025_An_Integrated_Review_of_Emoticons_in_Computer-Mediated_Communication?fulltextShareDialog=1&origin=mail&reqAcc=Mahmood_Sangari [accessed Jan 7, 2017].
The paper contrasts a monological approach to the analysis of mobile phone text
messaging with a dialogical analysis which takes the interactive nature of text messaging
as its starting point. Based on a corpus of dyadic text message dialogues, the "classic"
text message format is compared to internet-based WhatsApp messages in a
conversation-analytic approach. It is argued that WhatsApp messages differ from
"classic" text messages not only in their multimodal variability. Writers also use different
practices of marking off dialogues as separate entities. Moreover, different sequential
patterns emerge in WhatsApp communication: Writers tend to send adjacency pair parts
in separate messages which in some cases even leads to a pair-by-pair interaction.
In the last decades, the studies on politeness have discussed central concepts stemming from Brown and Levinson’s work ([1978] 1987), such as
face
,
threats
,
mitigations
and
strategies of politeness
. One of the problems that the study of politeness presents for the analysis of a situated corpus of speech is that the use of the mentioned notions calls for a socio-cultural perspective. In other words, it is necessary to include extralinguistic factors in the analysis of politeness, as the phenomena is beyond the sphere of linguistics in strict terms. In this paper, I approach the challenge based on other studies that I have already done for different corpora of Spanish. I discuss the problem of using certain concepts (face, threats, mitigations and strategies of politeness) as methodological categories for the interpretation of communicative behaviours in situated interactions. In my analysis, I use categories that incorporate, both theoretically and methodologically,
socio-cultural variation
in the realisations of politeness. To achieve this, I evaluate the
social effect
that certain behaviours have in the interpersonal relations under study, so as to, from then on, classify those behaviours in terms of politeness, impoliteness or neutrality. Also, I use the categories of “autonomy” and “affiliation”, void of socio-cultural contents. Finally, I put forward extralinguistic elements in the analysis of corpora of Spanish by making explicit those “socio-cultural premises” that an analyst use to make his or her interpretations.
This paper introduces the work of the MOOD (Microanalysis Of Online Data) network, an interdisciplinary association of academic researchers exploring ways of conducting close qualitative analyses of online interaction. Despite the fact that much online interaction meets the criteria for ‘conversation’, conversation analysis (CA) has only recently begun to grow and flourish as a methodology for analysing the overwhelming quantity of material that in many cases sits in archive form, visible to millions, on the Internet. We discuss the development of methods that are inherently suited for subjecting online interaction to the kind of rigorous analysis that conversation analysts have applied to talk of all kinds for several decades. We go on to explore the fundamental challenges that online data pose for CA, the value of many CA techniques for online analysis, and the possibilities of developing bespoke modes of analysis that are crafted for use with specific forms of online data (e.g. ‘tweets’ on Twitter).
The aim of the present study is to explore whether traditional discourse units are valid
for the analysis of instant messaging (IM) conversations in Spanish. Corpus-based
techniques were applied to a 176000 words corpus of Whatsapp interactions in order to
compare their features with those of written/spoken texts and of other new forms of
communications in Internet. The findings show that we do find relevant differences that
affect both the structure of the interaction and how we define the interaction itself.
Results indicate that conversations with IM have fuzzy limits, usually occur
simultaneously to other interactions, and are multimodal. The findings suggest that units
of analysis should be revised not as a variation of traditional written/spoken texts, but as
a different class of interactions.
In contrast to recent sociological emphases on the social shaping of technology, this article proposes and illustrates a way of analysing the technological shaping of sociality. Drawing on the concept of affordances (Gibson 1979), the article argues for a recognition of the constraining, as well as enabling, materiality of artefacts. The argument is set in the theoretical context of one of the most recent and comprehensive statements of anti-essentialism (Grint and Woolgar 1997). The position is illustrated through a reinterpretation of some case studies used by proponents of the radical constructivist position.
This paper presents the results of a study seeking insights into how speakers express oppositional stance in an online genre (businesses’ responses to negative customer reviews on TripAdvisor). The research is contrastive, exploring the differences between the practices of speakers in two types of setting – L1 English-speaking countries and countries where English is L2 – when performing oppositional speech acts (e.g. disagreement, criticism of the review/reviewer, etc.). Although there exists a large body of work concerned with contrastive differences in speech act realizations, oppositional speech acts remain under-researched – especially in contexts of non-politeness or impoliteness. This paper presents the results of a mixed-method qualitative/quantitative analysis revealing substantial differences along two principal dimensions of variation: the (in)directness with which opposition is expressed, and the downgrading (mitigation) or upgrading (aggravation) of oppositional speech acts. Some of these differences can be traced to well-known tendencies related to L1 versus L2 language use, while others represent new empirical findings that open up potential avenues for future research.
Bringing together thirteen original papers by leading American and British researchers, this volume reflects fresh developments in the increasingly influential field of conversation analysis. It begins by outlining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field and goes on to develop some of the main themes that have emerged from topical empirical research. These include the organisation of preference, topic, non-vocal activities, and apparently spontaneous responses such as laughter and applause. The collection represents the most comprehensive statement yet to be published on this type of research.
Emojis are little pictographs commonly added to electronic messages on several social media platforms. Besides being considered as a way to express emotions in electronically-mediated communication (EMC), similarly to ASCII emoticons, emojis are strictly involved in the performance of humour in everyday digital conversation. Drawing on a corpus of casual WhatsApp dyadic chats, this paper analyses the contribution of emojis to humour in conversation. Results show that these pictographs not only help to signal the opening and closing of the play frame, but also to respond to humour, graphically reproducing laughter. For these purposes, the most common emojis employed by WhatsApp users are the popular yellow smiling and laughing faces. Nevertheless, other pictographs are also involved in electronic humour, as less common emojis can be used in playful ways by themselves.
Messenger-Dienste wie WhatsApp, Telegram, Threema, iMessage u. Ä. werden (heute noch) weitgehend für die private Kommunikation genutzt. Zusammen mit dem hohen Interaktionsrhythmus gilt dieser private Charakter als Ursache dafür, dass die sprachliche Realisierung in dieser mobilen Kommunikation durch konzeptionelle Mündlichkeit (Koch/Oesterreicher 1994) geprägt ist. Dementsprechend wird sie als informell bezeichnet. Im Folgenden wird untersucht, welche sprachlichen Muster zur Markierung dieser Informalität genutzt werden. Als wesentliches Kriterium für Informalität wird immer wieder die Verwendung des Dialekts genannt (z. B. schon Schuppenhauer/Werlen 1983: 1417-1423). Durch den unterschiedlichen Status der Dialekte in Deutschland und in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz kann diese Zuschreibung aber nicht generell vorgenommen werden, denn in der Schweiz sind die Dialekte die Alltagssprache, und deren Verwendung in der interaktiven Schriftlichkeit ist schon seit mindestens dem Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts üblich (für IRC-Chats z. B. Aschwanden 2001; Siebenhaar 2003, 2005; für SMS Spycher 2004; für WhatsApp-Chats Dürscheid/Frick 2014: 170) und in keiner Weise auffällig, während der Dialektgebrauch in bundesdeutschen Chats als Informalitätsmarker interpretiert wird (für IRC-Chats Androutsopoulos/Ziegler 2003; für SMS Schnitzer 2012: 282-286). Durch diese unterschiedliche Bewertung und Nutzung der dialektalen Schriftlichkeit ergibt sich die Frage, ob in bundesdeutschen und Deutschschweizer Chats andere Muster der Informalitätsmarkierung genutzt oder präferiert werden. Der folgende Beitrag zeigt, dass in beiden Ländern tatsächlich unterschiedliche Muster der Informalitätsmarkierung bevorzugt werden. Der Unterschied ist wie erwartet nicht kategoriell, sondern quantitativ
Emoji are a set of pictographs available on several electronic platforms and applications, which are gradually replacing emoticons (sequences of punctuation marks representing facial expressions). Over the last decade, researchers have proposed that emoticons not only convey emotional content in computer-mediated communication, but they may also perform pragmatic functions, such as signaling the illocutionary force of the utterance (Dresner and Herring, 2010), mitigating threatening formulations (Wilson, 1993), or strengthening expressive speech acts (Skovholt et al., 2014). Despite their growing popularity, little pragmatic research to date specifically addresses emoji. The present paper bridges this gap by exploring the functions of emoji in a corpus of WhatsApp chats written in Spanish. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey's (2000, 2005) rapport management framework, the analysis shows that emoji are used across different domains in the corpus: they not only upgrade or downgrade different speech acts (illocutionary domain), as pointed out by previous research, but they also contribute to achieving a successful interaction by signaling closing sections or by helping to negotiate openings (discourse domain), as well as serving as a way to frame playful interactions (stylistic domain). This study also shows that some practices related to the use of emoji may be influenced by Spanish culture.
This study shows that emojis are a significant element in brand communications, which still requires attention from researchers. Specifically, it describes the use of emojis by the four companies with the largest audiences on Twitter in the Spanish beer industry. Through a correspondence analysis, we found that those emojis were not a mere occasional resource within a message but rather a differentiating element for brand positioning. Likewise, we analyzed the existing relationship between the way in which they were used and the engagement generated. In this regard, we concluded that communications using emojis aimed at customer service and care, as well as those used in positive contexts and for emphasis, were the ones related to higher user engagement. We discuss herein the practical implications of these findings for businesses.
The present study investigates functions of ‘laugh’ particles like haha, hehe or hihi in a corpus of German WhatsApp text messages. It contributes to research on humor, ‘laugh’ particles and emojis in mobile messaging chats by examining the different stances the interlocutors take when they use ‘laugh’ particles in WhatsApp postings and the role emojis play in these postings. Based on an interactional approach to the analysis of WhatsApp chats, the study shows that ‘laugh’ particles are prototypically deployed in a posting-initial position and that they relate to previous postings or utterances ‘Laugh’ particles can be used to establish or support a humorous joking modality (laughing with). Particularly in group chats users can cooperatively turn one participant into the target of their ‘laughter’ (laughing at). ‘Laugh’ particles and emojis are closely connected, as emojis help to contextualize these different ‘laughter’ stances.
As digital interactions become more global, individuals who bring divergent practices ‘to the keyboard’ must interact with other participants who come to the digital space with different cultural norms and expectations. This study explores the interface between local expectations and global practice through emoji use in online gaming – a venue which brings people from around the globe together on a common ‘playing field’. Since emojis were originally designed to tap into universals in human experience and expression, they are a ready-made resource through which individuals can integrate their culture-based expectations with communicative norms that are rooted in the common denominators of the (global) digital environment. Using live chat data from the game streaming platform Twitch, this study examines emojis posted to the open chat room during game streams of one female and one male gamer. The analysis examines the ways that participants use these semiotic images to orient toward gaming communities of practice and claim identities within gaming groups. It also explores whether emoji use is affected by the gender of the streamer. Analysis indicates that participants in the man’s stream differ from participants woman’s stream in the ways they use emojis to claim community membership and employ emojis as phatic devices.
This chapter aims to study the linguistic conventions of use of emoticons in several WhatsApp communities, focusing specifically on gender differences in adults’ interactions. Several methodological approaches serve to this end. A discourse analysis of online interactions is contextualized by offline data taken from interviews, while a questionnaire works as an anonymous source of information, and an initial point of departure. The study concludes that subjects’ gender plays an important role in determining how emoticons are included in these written conversations for relational purposes. Emoticons in women’s chats seldom add a propositional meaning but simply emphasize the participants’ belonging to the group, regardless of content. The analysis also reveals that the affordances of WhatsApp do not generally determine the actions of users in emoticon use.
This paper examines the functions of emojis as used by Omani men and women friends and relatives in messages exchanged on WhatsApp. The data consists of naturally occurring WhatsApp conversations taken from one male-only and one-female only WhatsApp groups. In order to determine the types of emojis used and the frequencies, I used what Herring (2004) describes as “coding and counting” in her description of computer-mediated discourses analysis. Then, I performed a qualitative analysis of selected extracts using theories and methods of interactional sociolinguistics. In line with studies such as Dresner and Herring (2010), the analysis of select, representative excerpts including various emojis demonstrates that emojis do not only serve as indicators of users’ emotions, but also serve many other communicative functions. They can serve as what Gumperz (1982) calls “contextualization cues”; indication of celebration; indication of approval of others’ messages; responses to expressions of thanks and compliments; conversational openings and closings; linking devices; and indication of the fulfillment of a requested task. In other words, emojis serve to create alignments between participants, structure interactive exchanges, and indicate message tone.
La communication par texto (SMS et WhatsApp) a conquis les rituels de socialisation de la vie de tous les jours. Par l’intensification des connectivités socio-technologiques qu’elle accompagne, elle a contribué à la diversification des possibilités de contact linguistique.
Dans ce contexte, les pratiques plurilingues sont en effet courantes. Cet ouvrage en rend compte en décrivant précisément ce que les utilisateurs font lorsqu’ils utilisent différentes langues dans leurs textos, en détaillant comment ils le font et en identifiant les régularités dans ces pratiques.
Sur la base d’un dispositif méthodologique pluridimensionnel (linguistique, sociolinguistique et interactionnel), il expose les spécificités d’un nouveau type de compétence plurilingue liée à une communauté dont les membres ne communiquent pas forcément à l’aide de différentes langues dans leurs pratiques quotidiennes mais qui, lorsqu’ils passent à de l’écrit électronique informel, combinent de façon ludique et souvent virtuose les moyens hétérosémiotiques à leur disposition.
The assessment of emoji questionnaires as a method in food-related consumer research is furthered by this methodological study aimed at exploring the extent to which they can be used with a range of population segments. In the first part of the paper, a web-based survey was implemented to assess differences in the interpretation of 33 facial emoji using a check-all-that-apply (CATA) question. Results showed that while emoji interpretation was not influenced by age and frequency of emoji/emoticon use in computer-mediated communications, age-related differences existed for a few emoji. In the second part of the paper, differences in the completion of emoji questionnaires used to measure product-elicited emotional associations were assessed across four studies involving the evaluation of written stimuli and tasted food samples. Gender and age did not influence consumer ability to describe and discriminate between stimuli, eliciting emoji profiles that were highly similar. Among more frequent users of emoji/emoticon, the average number of emoji used to characterise the stimuli was significant higher than among less frequent users, and there was a tendency toward greater discrimination, but the differences were small and of little concern regarding ability of the less frequent emoji/emoticon users' ability to perform the research task. The findings of this research provide preliminary evidence about the suitability of emoji surveys to measure product-related emotional associations with different consumer populations.
Emojis are pictures commonly used in texting. The use and type of emojis has increased in recent years; particularly emojis that are not faces, but rather objects. While prior work on emojis of faces suggest their primary purpose is to convey affect, few have researched the communicative purpose of emojis of objects. In the current work, two experiments assess whether emojis of objects also convey affect. Different populations of participants are shown text messages with or without different emojis of objects, asked to rate the message’s affective content, and indicate their confidence in their ratings. Overall results suggest that emojis of objects communicate positive affect, specifically joy. These findings are framed in the sociological theory of emotion work, suggesting that the time and effort involved in using emojis may help maintain and enhance social relationships.
Many non-standard elements of 'netspeak' writing can be viewed as efforts to replicate the linguistic role played by nonverbal modalities in speech, conveying contextual information such as affect and interpersonal stance. Recently, a new non-standard communicative tool has emerged in online writing: emojis. These unicode characters contain a standardized set of pictographs, some of which are visually similar to well-known emoticons. Do emojis play the same linguistic role as emoticons and other ASCII-based writing innovations? If so, might the introduction of emojis eventually displace the earlier, user-created forms of contextual expression? Using a matching approach to causal statistical inference, we show that as social media users adopt emojis, they dramatically reduce their use of emoticons, suggesting that these linguistic resources compete for the same communicative function. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the adoption of emojis leads to a corresponding increase in the use of standard spellings, suggesting that all forms of non-standard writing are losing out in a competition with emojis. Finally, we identify specific textual features that make some emoticons especially likely to be replaced by emojis.
This chapter considers how Greek text-messagers' perceptions of politeness and appropriateness appear to inform the use of closing formulae in their messages. In line with current advances in politeness research, closings are explored not as inherently polite strategies but as interactional accomplishments which may be carried out in line with established norms of interaction and constitute "appropriate (unmarked) behavior" or realized as marked behavior, either positively evaluated (and, thus, polite) or negatively judged (and, thus, impolite or over-polite). The data analysis reveals how relational aspects, such as the participants' in-group relations, their daily interactional routines and perceptions of politeness, impact upon generic expectations in the use of closings in texting. The chapter employs current discursive approaches to politeness to account for an enhanced flexibility in the generic patterns of use, evidenced in participants' shift between asynchronous and synchronous uses of texting.
In this paper, I first look at how the notions of “politeness” and “impoliteness” have been discussed in the literature including my own ideas of relating universal levels of impoliteness to culture and language-specific levels. Given this framework and my earlier postulation of a set of dimensions along which German speakers were found to prefer expressions that are more direct than indirect, more explicit than implicit, and generally more content-oriented than addressee-oriented, I provide several examples of German speakers interacting with members of other cultures in everyday talk and academic advising sessions. In interpreting the results of the analyses of these interactions, I attempt to relate them to the concept of impoliteness, to German speakers' communicative preferences and to the distinction between an emic and an etic perspective.
Despite the increasing interest scholarly research has shown in the study of computer-mediated communication, there is still a need to investigate the empirical validity of assumed homogeneity of language usage over the net and focus on the social diversity and variation that characterizes any communication. With this in mind, the present paper is an investigation into the stylistic choices that a particular group of email users made when engaged in a specific activity type. More specifically, it explores the variation in the discourse practices employed to open and close emails in conversation alongside the institutional power of participants and the interactional position of each email contributing to the conversation.To carry out this study a corpus of short email conversations in Peninsular Spanish was collected (n=240). The analysis focused on the opening and closing sequences of the emails that made up the conversations and considered opening and closing linguistic conventions as discursive practices that members of a community may use strategically. The findings revealed that the discursive practices under scrutiny were subject not only to technological but also to social and interactional constraints and thus highlighted contextual variability. Further, the high degree of sociability in the electronic episodes studied was interpreted as reflecting a “people first, business second” communicative style.