Emoji has gone so viral that Oxford Dictionaries even named (face with tears of joy) instead of other popular text words its 2015 Word of the Year.
Almost 40% Instagram posts in 2015 contained at least one emoji, which was a dramatic increase of 40% compared with those in 2012, because of Apple and Android releasing emoji keyboard and Instagram launching on Android platform (Lupyan & Dale, 2016). Extremely fast development of technology also accelerates the process. In fact, not only slangs but other forms of written texts are now rapidly giving way to emojis. Lupyan & Dale ( 2016) reported that four groups of Instagram posts increased in emoji use by 30%–40% in 2015 compared with that in the last 2–3 years, and there was a gradual decrease in the use of text-based slang, suggesting that emojis are replacing the functions served by text-based slang in recent years. However, such virtual communication circumstances as forum, blog, instant messaging, which are mainly based on written texts, make verbal communication incomplete due to absence of suprasegmental features, and make it even impossible for the participants to use conventional nonverbal tools for smooth and successful communication. In face-to-face communication, a wide variety of functional verbal (e.g., stress, intonation, tone, etc.) and nonverbal (e.g., body language, dress, facial expression, etc.) tools can facilitate the achievement of the communicative goal for both parties. They are used almost in the same way as are emoticons and exist in various genres, including facial expressions, gestures, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals, for example, and. Interestingly, online preference to emoji use does not perfectly mirror non-verbal signs in face-to-face communication and in socio-emotional setting, people tend to frequently use positive emojis to create positive atmosphere to boost group rapport.Įmoji is a Japanese word, literally means “picture letter”, which is a small digital picture or pictorial symbol that represents a thing, a feeling, or a concept, etc., used in text messages and other electronic communications. These findings suggested that emojis are of high frequency, functionality and efficiency in internet-based communication. Additionally, positive emojis were used more often than negative ones. The top 3 most frequent emojis were (thump-up)(477 times) (rose) (222 times) and (traditional Chinese way of greeting and thanks) (108 times), which were used in an exaggerative and generalized way, slightly different from people’s preference of other countries. We found emoji use was of high frequency, 1908 times in the corpus of 34,047 words, mainly as emotion signifier (attitude/emotion signal and attitude/emotion intensity enhancer, 50.8%) and interaction device (turn taking/giving, backchannel device and illocutionary force modifier, 47.8%). Forty-six types of emoji in a corpus of 34,047 words were classified into 7 functions: attitude/emotion signal, attitude/emotion intensity enhancer, illocutionary force modifier, humor, irony, turn taking/giving, and backchannel device. A total of 10 volunteers (20–40 years) were invited to collect a 3000-word latest corpus from their most active Wechat group respectively. The present research is to study the pragmatic functions of emoji in internet-based communication within the revised framework of Linguagem em (Dis) curso (special issue on relevance theory) 14:511-529, 2014 8-function taxonomy. Emojis have been indispensable and efficient tools in online interaction with the booming Internet and dramatically fast emergence of electronic communication channels.