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Article published In:
Understanding Chinese Social Media
Edited by Sumin Zhao and Chaoqun Xie
[Internet Pragmatics 4:2] 2021
► pp. 247–271

More than playfulness

Emojis in the comments of a WeChat official account

| Guangdong University of Foreign Studies,
| Xi’an Jiaotong University,
| The University of Hong Kong,
This study aims to uncover the complexity of emoji usage on Chinese social media. We investigate emoji usage in comments on push notifications from the WeChat official account of Guokr, which was chosen as a representative for an open forum for public communication. The data includes 2,552 comments from 90 articles pushed by the account. The analysis adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective within the framework of intercultural pragmatics (Kecskes 2014), taking into account both the local discourse environment and the cultural context. It is found that Chinese WeChat users show a preference for using emojis that are unique to the WeChat platform. Qualitative analyses were carried out on selected WeChat emojis used in comments fulfilling the speech acts of self-disclosure, self-praise, humor and complaining. Emojis are found to be used to perform and reinforce a sense of playfulness in social media, but underlying this playfulness there is a discursive conformity to social norms in real life. The use of emojis resolves the tension between the openness and freedom in social media and the conservative, constraint-bounded nature of established social norms.
Keywords: emojis, intercultural pragmatics, Chinese social media, WeChat official account, speech act, self-disclosure, self-praise, humor, complaining
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The discourse of Chinese social media
    • 2.2Emoji studies
    • 2.3The social media platform WeChat
  • 3.Data collection and methods
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Analytical procedures and methods
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Overview of occurrences of emoji in the data
    • 4.2Qualitative analyses of emojis in use
      • 4.2.1Use of emojis in self-disclosure
      • 4.2.2Use of emojis in self-praise
      • 4.2.3Use of emojis in humor
      • 4.2.4Use of emoji sequence in complaining
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Source for examples
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00048.zha
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