Cover not available
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
References (79)
References
Al Rashdi, Fathiya. 2018. “Functions of emojis in WhatsApp interaction among Omanis.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 117–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard Unviersity Press.Google Scholar
Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bagozzi, Richard P., Utpal M. Dholakia, and Lisa R. Klein Pearo. 2007. “Antecedents and consequences of online social interactions.” Media Psychology 9(1): 77–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cappallo, Spencer, Stacey Svetlichnaya, Pierre Garrigues, Thomas Mensink, and Cees GM Snoek. 2019. “New modality: Emoji challenges in prediction, anticipation, and retrieval.” IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 21(2): 402–415. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cermak-Sassenrath, Daniel. 2018. Playful Disruption of Digital Media. Singapore: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chang, Melissa Xue-Ling, Jolanda Jetten, Tegan Cruwys, and Catherine Haslam. 2017. “Cultural identity and the expression of depression: A social identity perspective.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 27(1): 16–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Guoming. 2011. “An introduction to key concepts in understanding the Chinese: Harmony as the foundation of Chinese communication.” China Media Research 7(4): 1–12.Google Scholar
Chen, Yong. 2014. “From OMG to TMD – Internet and Pinyin acronyms in Mandarin Chinese.” Langauge@Internet 111, article 3. [URL] (accessed 8 August 2018).
Chen, Yuan-shan, Chun-yin Doris Chen, and Miao-Hsia Chang. 2011. “American and Chinese complaints: Strategy use from a cross-cultural perspective.” Intercultural Pragmatics 8(2): 253–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Xiaotang. 2000. “Asian students’ reticence revisited.” System 281: 435–446. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
CIW Team. 2019. “WeChat Year in Review 2018.” [URL] (accessed 29 March 2019).
Cramer, Henriette, Paloma de Juan, and Joel Tetreault. 2016. “Sender-intended functions of emojis in US messaging.” Paper presented at the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. Florence, 6–9 September. DOI logo
Dainas, Ashley R., and Susan C. Herring. 2021. “Interpreting emoji pragmatics.” In Internet Pragmatics: Theory and Practice, ed. by Chaoqun Xie, Francisco Yus, and Hartmut Haberland, 107–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Danesi, Marcel. 2016. The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Davison, Patrick. 2012. “The language of internet memes.” In The Social Media Reader, ed. by Michael Mandiberg, 120–136. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Dayter, Daria. 2016. Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech Acts, Stories and Self-praise. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Seta, Gabriele. 2018. “Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emoji, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms.” First Mondy 23(9). [URL] (accessed 20 March 2019). DOI logo
Doctoroff, Tom. 2012. What Chinese Want: Culture Communism, and China’s Modern Consumer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Eslami, Zohreh R., and Xinyuan Yang. 2018. “Chinese-English bilinguals’ online compliment response patterns in American (Facebook) and Chinese (Renren) social networking sites.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 13–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ge, Jing. 2017. “Humor in customer engagement on Chiense social media.” European Journal of Tourism Research 151: 171–174.Google Scholar
Ge, Jing, and Ulrike Gretzel. 2018a. “A new cultural revolution: Chinese consumers’ internet and social media use.” In Advances in Social Media for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality: New Perspectives, Practice and Case, ed. by Marianna Sigala, and Ulrike Gretzel, 102–118. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2018b. “Emoji rhetoric: a social media influencer perspective.” Journal of Marketing Management 34(15–16): 1272–1295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ge, Jing, and Susan C. Herring. 2018. “Communicative functions of emoji sequences on Sina Weibo.” First Monday 23(11). [URL] (accessed 3 March 2019). DOI logo
Gibson, Will, Pingping Huang, and Qianyun Yu. 2018. “Emoji and communicative action: The semiotics, sequence and gestural actions of ‘face covering hand’.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 91–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goatly, Andrew. 2012. Meaning and Humour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grewendorf, Günther, and Georg Meggle. 2012. Speech Acts, Mind, and Social Reality: Discussions with John R. Searle. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Grundlingh, Lezandra. 2018. “Memes as speech acts.” Social Semiotics 28(2): 147–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gu, Yueguo. 1990. “Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese.” Journal of Pragmatics 141: 237–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edn.). London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Herring, Susan C. 2004. “Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior.” In Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, ed. by Sasha Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. Gray, 338–376. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018. “The co-evolution of computer-mediated communication and computer-mmediated discourse analysis.” In Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions, ed. by Patricia Bou-France, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 25–67. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Herring, Susan C., and Jannis Androutsopoulos. 2015. “Computer-mediated discourse 2.0.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 127–151. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Herring, Susan C., and Ashley R. Dainas. 2017. “‘Nice picture comment!’: Graphicons in Facebook comment threads.” In Proceedings of the Fiftieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-50), 2185–2194. Los Alamitos: IEEE Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Highfield, Tim, and Tama Leaver. 2016. “Instagrammatics and digital methods: Studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emoji.” Communication Research and Practice 2(1): 47–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hwang, Kwang-kuo. 1987. “Face and favor: The Chinese power game.” The American Journal of Sociology 92(4): 944–974. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaeger, Sara R., and Gastón Ares. 2017. “Dominant meanings of facial emoji: Insights from Chinese consumers and comparison with meanings from internet resources.” Food Quality and Preference 621: 275–283. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jia, Hepeng, Dapeng Wang, Weishan Miao, and Hongjun Zhu. 2017. “Encountered but not engaged: Examining the use of social media for science communication by Chinese scientists.” Science Communication 39(5): 646–672. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kecskes, Istvan. 2014. Intercultural Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kim, Sora, Xiaochen Angela Zhang, and Borui Warren Zhang. 2016. “Self-mocking crisis strategy on social media: Focusing on Alibaba chairman Jack Ma in China.” Public Relations Review 42(5): 903–912. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
King, Robert Allen, Pradeep Racherla, and Victoria D. Bush. 2014. “What we know and don’t know about online word-of-mouth: A review and synthesis of the literature.” Journal of Interactive Marketing 28(3): 167–183. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kleinman, Arthur. 1986. Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Newursthenia, and Pain in Modern China. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Li, Wei, and Hua Zhu. 2019. “Tranßcripting: playful subversion with Chinese characters.” International Journal of Multilingualism 16(2): 145–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ljubešic, Nikola, and Darja Fišer. 2016. “A global analysis of emoji usage.” In Proceedings of the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-X) and the EmpiriST Shared Task, 82–89. Berlin: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Owen H. 2002. “Humorous communication: Finding a place for humor in communication research.” Communication Theory 12(4): 423–445. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mei, Qiaozhu. 2019. “Decoding the new world language: Analyzing the popularity, roles, and utility of emojis.” In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference, 417–418. San Francisco: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milner, Ryan M. 2016. The World Made Meme: Discourse and Identity in Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nastri, Jacqueline, Jorge Pena, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2006. “The construction of away messages: A speech act analysis.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(4):1025–1045. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Novak, Petra Kralj, Jasmina Smailović, Borut Sluban, and Igor Mozetič. 2015. “Sentiment of emojis.” PLOS ONE 10(12): e0144296.Google Scholar
Olshtain, Elite, and Liora Weinbach. 1993. “Interlanguage features of the speech act of complaining.” In Interlanguage Pragmatics, ed. by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, and Gabriele Kasper, 108–122. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parkwell, Corina. 2019. “Emoji as social semiotic resources for meaning-making in discourse: Mapping the functions of the toilet emoji in Cher’s tweets about Donald Trump.” Discourse, Context & Media 301: 100307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plantin, Jean-Christophe, and Gabriele de Seta. 2019. “WeChat as infrastructure: The techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms.” Chinese Journal of Communication 12(3): 257–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ren, Wei. 2018. “Mitigation in Chinese online consumer reviews.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 5–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richter, Felix. 2019. “China’s parallel online universe.” [URL] (accessed 20 November 2019).
Sampietro, Agnese. 2019. “Emoji and rapport management in Spanish WhatsApp chats.” Journal of Pragmatics 1431: 109–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sandel, Todd L., Chuyue Ou, Dorji Wangchuk, Bei Ju, and Miguel Duque. 2019. “Unpacking and describing interaction on Chinese WeChat: A methodological approach.” Journal of Pragmatics 1431: 228–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schreiner, Melanie, Thomas Fischer, and Rene Riedl. 2019. “Impact of content characteristics and emotion on behavioral engagement in social media: literature review and research agenda.” Electronic Commerce Research. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seargeant, Philip. 2019. The Emoji Revolution: How Technology is Shaping the Future of Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John R. 1976. “A classficiation of illocutionary acts.” Langauge in Society 51: 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1985. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
SwiftKey. 2015. “Most-used emoji revealed: Americans love skulls, Brazilians love cats, the French love hearts.” [URL] (accessed 28 March 2019.).
Tsai, Wan-Hsiu Sunny, and Rita Linjuan Men. 2018. “Social messengers as the new frontier of organization-public engagement: A WeChat study.” Public Relations Review 44 (3): 419–429. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Twitchell, Douglas P., and Jay F. Nunamaker. 2004. “Speech act profiling: A probabilistic method for analyzing persistent conversations and their participants.” Paper presented at the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Big Island, Hawaii, 5–8 January.
Valkenburg, Patti, and Jochen Peter. 2009. “Social consequences of the Internet for adolescents: a decade of research.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 181: 1–5. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Xinyuan. 2016. Social Media in Industrial China. London: University College London Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Yuping, Wei-Chieh Fang, Julia Han, and Nian-Shing Chen. 2016. “Exploring the affordances of WeChat for facilitating teaching, social and cognitive presence in semi-synchronous language exchange.” Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 32(4): 18–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weitz, Eric. 2017. “Online and internet humor.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. by Salvatore Attardo, 505–518. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wu, Ruey-Jiuan Regina. 2011. “A conversation analysis of self-praising in everyday Mandarin interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 43(13): 3152–3176. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wu, Xiaoping. 2018. “Discursive strategies of resistance on Weibo: A case study of the 2015 Tianjin explosions in China.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 64–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yang, Guobin. 2009. The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, Contemporary Asia in the World. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Yu, Louis, Sitaram Asur, and Bernardo A. Huberman. 2011. “What trends in Chinese social media.” [URL] (accessed 21 March 2019).
Yuan, Zhou-min. 2018. “Exploring Chinese college students’ construction of online identity on the Sina Microblog.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 43–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zappavigna, Michele. 2012. Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Zhang, Dan. 1995. “Depression and culture: A Chinese perspective.” Canadian Journal of Counselling 29(3): 227–233.Google Scholar
Zhang, Ke, and Fei Gao. 2014. “Social media for informal science learning in China: A case study.” Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal 6(3): 262–280.Google Scholar
Zhang, Xiaochen, Weiting Tao, and Sora Kim. 2014. “A comparative study on global brands’ micro blogs between China and USA: Focusing on communication styles and branding strategies.” International Journal of Strategic Communication 8(4): 231–249. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhao, Sumin. 2019. “Social media, video data and heritage language learning: Researching the transnational literacy practices of young children from immigrant families.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood, ed. by Natalia Kucirkova, Jennifer Rowsell, and Garry Falloon, 107–126. Abingdon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhao, Sumin, and Rosie Flewitt. 2020. “Young chinese immigrant children’s language and literacy practices on social media: a translanguaging perspective.” Language and Education 34(3): 267–285. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhou, Rui, Jasmine Hentschel, and Neha Kumar. 2017. “Goodbye text, hello emoji: Mobile communication on wechat in China.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 748–759. New York: ACM. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (13)

Cited by 13 other publications

Andersen, Elisabeth Muth
2024. The invitation game. Internet Pragmatics 7:1 ► pp. 7 ff. DOI logo
Cui, Jing, Herbert L. Colston & Guiying Jiang
2024. Is That a Genuine Smile? Emoji-Based Sarcasm Interpretation Across the Lifespan. Metaphor and Symbol 39:3 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo
Flores-Salgado, Elizabeth
2024. The most common graphicons in Mexican Spanish speaking WhatsApp communities composed of school parents. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 20:1 ► pp. 43 ff. DOI logo
Griggio, Carla F., Benjamin M. Gorman & Garreth W. Tigwell
2024. Party Face Congratulations! Exploring Design Ideas to Help Sighted Users with Emoji Accessibility when Messaging with Screen Reader Users. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8:CSCW1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Jun
2024. The same old same old? Three proposals for advancing the study of internet and contentious politics in China. Communication and the Public DOI logo
Wang, Han
2024. Justifying the use of excessive force: A critical discourse analysis of Chinese police individual WeChat Subscription Accounts. Modern Asian Studies 58:2 ► pp. 631 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Yaqin, Yiqiong Zhang, Guoliang Zhang, Shengyou He & Jingsong Qi
2024. Linguistic Properties of Emojis: A Quantitative Exploration of Emoji Frequency, Category, and Position on Twitter. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 31:3 ► pp. 183 ff. DOI logo
Yang, Kun & Shuang Qian
2024. Your Smiling Face is Impolite to Me: A Study of the Smiling Face Emoji in Chinese Computer-Mediated Communication. Social Science Computer Review 42:4 ► pp. 947 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Dewen, Yiliang Lv & Weidong Huang
2023. How do consumers react to chatbots' humorous emojis in service failures. Technology in Society 73 ► pp. 102244 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2023. Humour in Messaging Interactions. In Pragmatics of Internet Humour, ► pp. 107 ff. DOI logo
Zhang, Yiqiong, Susan C Herring, Rongle Tan, Qingwen Zhang & Dingxu Shi
2023. From compensation to competition: The impact of graphicons on language use in a Chinese context. Discourse & Communication 17:6 ► pp. 764 ff. DOI logo
Shen, Yeting
2022. Research on the Influence of Emoji in Advertising Slogans on Consumers' Purchase Intention. Frontiers in Business, Economics and Management 6:3 ► pp. 190 ff. DOI logo
Wong, Jamie, Crystal Lee, Vesper Keyi Long, Di Wu & Graham M. Jones
2021. “Let’s Go, Baby Forklift!”: Fandom Governance and the Political Power of Cuteness in China. Social Media + Society 7:2 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.