Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 31:1 (2021) ► pp.144–172

The pragmatics of text-emoji co-occurrences on Chinese social media

ORCID logo | Shanghai Jiao Tong University
 | City University of Hong Kong
This paper explores the pragmatics of emojis co-occurring with or embedded in text on Chinese social media with this central research question: what are the patterns and the communicative functions manifested by emojis in co-occurrence with Chinese text? Building on the metafunctional approach of multimodal analysis, popular online posts from Sina Weibo which contain both emoji(s) and text have been collected and analyzed to discover the representational, interactive, and compositional features manifested by emojis co-occurring with text. We have found that these emojis on Weibo appear most frequently at the end of the posts and reflect some unique Chinese cultural and linguistic features. Based on recurring pragmatic and functional patterns of text-emoji co-occurrences, it is proposed that emojis are used to perform speech acts, highlight subjective interpretations, and enhance informality, while substituting, reinforcing, and complementing the meanings conveyed by verbal language.
Keywords: text-emoji co-occurrence, metafunctions, multimodal analysis, componential patterns, pragmatic functions, speech acts
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Research question and object of study
  • 2.Theoretical framework and background
    • 2.1Multimodal studies and the metafunctional approach
    • 2.2Special features of Weibo emojis
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Framework of analysis
  • 4.Emojis in representation
    • 4.1Visual-semantic features of Weibo emojis
    • 4.2Visual patterns of text-emoji co-occurrences
  • 5.Emojis in social interaction
    • 5.1Speech acts of emojis
    • 5.2Highlighted subjective interpretation
    • 5.3Enhanced informality
  • 6.Compositional and componential patterning of text-emoji co-occurrences
    • 6.1Compositional relations
    • 6.2Componential patterning
  • 7.Conclusions, limitations, and prospective studies
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 25 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18018.yan
References (70)
References
Ai, Wei, Xuan Lu, Xuanzhe Liu, Ning Wang, Gang Huang, and Qiaozhu Mei. 2017. “Untangling Emoji Popularity Through Semantic Embeddings.” Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017), 2–11. Palo Alto: The AAAI Press. (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL])
Aull, Bethany. 2019. “A Study of Phatic Emoji Use in WhatsApp Communication.” Internet Pragmatics 2 (2): 206–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baldry, Anthony, and Paul J. Thibault. 2006. Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis: A Multimedia Toolkit and Coursebook. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish. 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bai, Qiyu, Qi Dan, Zhe Mu, and Maokun Yang. 2019. “A Systematic Review of Emoji: Current Research and Future Perspectives.” Frontiers in Psychology 101 (2019): Article 2221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chiu, Cindy, Chris Ip, and Ari Silverman. 2012. “Understanding Social Media in China.” McKinsey Quarterly 21 (2012): 78–81.Google Scholar
Churches, Owen, Mike Nicholls, Myra Thiessen, Mark Kohler, and Hannah Keage. 2014. “Emoticons in Mind: An Event-related Potential Study.” Social Neuroscience 9 (2): 196–202. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Churches, Owen, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Howard Ring. 2009. “Seeing Face-like Objects: An Event-related Potential Study.” Neuroreport 20 (14): 1290–1294. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coulson, Seana. 2006. “Constructing Meaning.” Metaphor and Symbol 21(4): 245–266. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cramer, Henriette, Paloma de Juan, and Joel Tetreault. 2016. “Sender-intended Functions of Emojis in US Messaging.” Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services: 504–509. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crystal, David. 2006. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Danesi, Marcel. 2017. The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davis, Mark, and Peter Edberg. 2019. Unicode Emoji-unicode Technical Report #51. Technical Report 51 (Version 12.0). (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL])
de Seta, Gabriele. 2018. “Biaoqing: The Circulation of Emoticons, Emoji, Stickers, and Custom Images on Chinese Digital Media Platforms.” First Monday 23 (9). (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL]) DOI logo
dos Reis, Julio C., Rodrigo Bonacin, Heiko H. Hornung, and M. Cecília C. Baranauskas. 2018. “Intenticons: Participatory Selection of Emoticons for Communication of Intentions.” Computers in Human Behavior 851: 146–162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dresner, Eli, and Susan C. Herring. 2010. “Functions of the Nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and Illocutionary Force.” Communication Theory 20 (3): 249–268. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. “Emoticons and Illocutionary Force.” In Perspectives on Theory of Controversies and the Ethics of Communication, ed. by Dana Riesenfeld, and Giovanni Scarafile, 59–70. Springer Netherlands. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Ge, Jing, and Susan C. Herring. 2018. “Communicative Functions of Emoji Sequences on Sina Weibo.” First Monday 23 (11). (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL]) DOI logo
Ge, Jing, and Ulrike Gretzel. 2018. “Emoji Rhetoric: A Social Media Influencer Perspective.” Journal of Marketing Management 34 (15–16): 1272–1295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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
Hakami, Shatha Ali A. 2017. “The Importance of Understanding Emoji: an Investigative Study.” Research Topics in HCI (Spring, 2017).Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edition). London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., and Ruquiya Hasan. 1985/1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
. 1989. Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson. 1993. “Emotional Contagion.” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 21: 96–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herring, Susan C., Anupam Das, and Shashikant Penumarthy. 2005. CMC Act Taxonomy. (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL])
Herring, Susan C., and Ashley Dainas. 2017. “Nice Picture Comment!. In Graphicons in Facebook Comment Threads.” Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2185–2194. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE. 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
Jewitt, Carey (ed). 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. (2nd edition). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jewitt, Carey, Jeff Bezemer, and Kay O’Halloran. 2016. Introducing Multimodality. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kress, Gunther. 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther, and Theo V. van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd Edition). London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krohn, Franklin B. 2004. “A Generational Approach to Using Emoticons as Non-verbal Communication.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 431: 321–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ljubešic, Nikola, and Darja Fišer. 2016. “A Global Analysis of Emoji Usage.” Proceedings of the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop, 82–89. Association for Computational Linguistics. (Retrieved 18-02-2020 via [URL]) DOI logo
Lotherington, Heather, and Yejun Xu. 2004. “How to Chat in English and Chinese: Emerging Digital Language Conventions.” ReCALL 16 (2): 308–329. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lu, Xuan, Wei Ai, Xuanzhe Liu, Qian Li, Ning Wang, Gang Huang, and Qiaozhu Mei. 2016. “Learning from the Ubiquitous Language: An Empirical Analysis of Emoji Usage of Smartphone Users.” Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 770–780. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miller, Hannah, Daniel Kluver, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Loren Terveen, and Brent Hecht. 2017. “Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication.” Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017), 152–161. Palo Alto: The AAAI Press. (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL])
MODE. 2012. Glossary of Multimodal Terms. (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL])
Moschini, Ilaria. 2016. “The ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ Emoji. A Socio-Semiotic and Multimodal Insight into a Japan-America Mash-Up.” HERMES-Journal of Language and Communication in Business 551: 11–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mrowiec, Anna. 2016. How to Speak Emoji Love. London: Ebury Press.Google Scholar
Novak, Petra Kralj, Jasmina Smailović, Borut Sluban, and Igor Mozetič. 2015. “Sentiment of Emojis.” PloS one 10 (12): e0144296.Google Scholar
O’Halloran, Kay (ed). 2004. Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic Functional Perspectives. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Painter, Clare, James Martin, and Leonard Unsworth. 2013. Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Rauchfleisch, Adrian, and Mike S. Schäfer. 2015. “Multiple Public Spheres of Weibo: A Typology of Forms and Potentials of Online Public Spheres in China.” Information, Communication & Society 18 (2): 139–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rodrigues, David, Marilia Prada, Rui Gaspar, Margarida V. Garrido, and Diniz Lopes. 2018. “Lisbon Emoji and Emoticon Database (LEED): Norms for Emoji and Emoticons in Seven Evaluative Dimensions.” Behavior Research Methods 501: 392–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sampietro, Agnese. 2016. “Exploring the Punctuating Effect of Emoji in Spanish WhatsApp Chats.” Lenguas Modernas 471: 91–113.Google Scholar
. 2019. “Emoji and Rapport Management in Spanish WhatsApp Chats.” Journal of Pragmatics 1431: 109–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schnoebelen, Tyler. 2012. “Do You Smile with Your Nose? Stylistic Variation in Twitter Smoticons.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18 (2): Article 14.Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1969/2011. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1976. “A Classification of Illocutionary Acts.” Language in Society 5 (1): 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Skovholt, Karianne, Anette Grønning, and Anne Kankaanranta. 2014. “The Communicative Functions of Emoticons in Workplace E-Mails::-).” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19 (4): 780–797. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Leah Warfield, and Randall L. Rose. 2019. “Service with a Smiley Face: Emojional Contagion in Digitally Mediated Relationships.” International Journal of Research in Marketing (In press; available online).Google Scholar
Stöckl, Hartmut. 2004. “In between Modes: Language and Image in Printed Media.” In Perspectives on multimodality, ed. by Eija Ventola, Classily Charles, and Martin Kaltenbacher, 9–30. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
SwiftKey. 2015. SwiftKey Emoji Report, April 2015. (Retrieved 21-02-2020 via [URL])
Tang, Ying, and Khe Foon Hew. 2018. “Emoticon, Emoji, and Sticker Use in Computer-Mediated Communications: Understanding Its Communicative Function, Impact, User Behavior, and Motive.” In New Media for Educational Change, ed. by Liping Deng, Will W. K. Ma, and Cheuk Wai Rose Fong, 191–201. Singapore: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tauch, Channary, and Eiman Kanjo. 2016. “The Roles of Emojis in Mobile Phone Notifications.” Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunt, 1560–1565. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vandergriff, Ilona. 2013. “Emotive Communication Online: a Contextual Analysis of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) cues.” Journal of Pragmatics 511: 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vidal, Leticia, Gastón Ares, and Sara R. Jaeger. 2016. “Use of Emoticon and Emoji in Tweets for Food Related Emotional Expression.” Food Quality and Preference 491: 119–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wijeratne, Sanjaya, Lakshika Balasuriya, Amit Sheth, and Derek Doran. 2016. “Emojinet: Building a Machine Readable Sense Inventory for Emoji.” In SocInfo 2016 Social Informatics, ed. by Emma Spiro, and Yong-Yeol Ahn, 527–541. N.p.: Springer, Cham.Google Scholar
Wolf, Alecia. 2000. “Emotional Expression Online: Gender Differences in Emoticon Use.” CyberPsychology & Behavior 3 (5): 827–833. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Xu, Bing. 2012. Di Shu [The book of earth]. Guangxi: Guangxi Normal University Press.Google Scholar
Yuasa, Masahide, Keiichi Saito, and Naoki Mukawa. 2011. “Brain Activity When Reading Sentences and Emoticons: an fMRI Study of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication.” Electronics and Communications in Japan 94 (5): 17–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zhang, Yi. 2017. “The Semiotic Multifunctionality of Arabic Numerals in Chinese Online Discourse.” Language@Internet 141: Article 2.Google Scholar
Zhao, Jichang, Li Dong, Junjie Wu, and Ke Xu. 2012. “Moodlens: An Emoticon-based Sentiment Analysis System for Chinese Tweets.” Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, 1528–1531. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhou, Huiquan, and Quanxiao Pan. 2016. “Information, Community, and Action on Sina-Weibo: How Chinese Philnatropic NGOs Use Social Media.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 27 (5): 2433–2457. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhou, Lijun, and Tao Wang. 2014. “Social Media: A New Vehicle for City Marketing in China.” Cities 371: 27–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (9)

Cited by nine other publications

Cui, Jing, Yu R. Dandan, Bo Yang & Youping Jing
2024. Which emoji are markers of sarcasm among Chinese teenagers using the WeChat app?. Heliyon 10:23 ► pp. e39796 ff. DOI logo
Herring, Susan C. & Jing Ge-Stadnyk
2024. Emoji and illocutionarity. In Structures in Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 345], ► pp. 124 ff. DOI logo
Mu, Junfang, Lixin Zhang & Yuyang Chen
2024. An investigation of the formation and pragmatic strategies of “xx-zi”. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 34:4 ► pp. 565 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
Weissman, Benjamin, Neil Cohn & Darren Tanner
2024. The electrophysiology of lexical prediction of emoji and text. Neuropsychologia 198 ► pp. 108881 ff. DOI logo
Cui, Jing, Yu R. Dandan & Guiying Jiang
2023. Judging emoji by occupation: A case of emoji-based sarcasm interpretation. Acta Psychologica 234 ► pp. 103870 ff. DOI logo
He, Juan
2023. Sharing emotions or/and making allies: the emoji’s interpersonal function in Chinese social media news comments. Social Semiotics 33:5 ► pp. 1131 ff. DOI logo
Xu, Huan & Dengshan Xia
2023. Digital tildes (“∼”) may convey more: analyzing innovative uses of tildes in Chinese WeChat messages. Language and Semiotic Studies 9:3 ► pp. 443 ff. DOI logo
Zeng, Weining
2023. Pragmatic Functions of Emoji on Chinese Social Media. BCP Education & Psychology 9 ► pp. 26 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 december 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.