The interplay of emoji, emoticons, and verbal modalities

in CMC: a case study of YouTube comments

Célia Schneebeli

To cite this version:

Célia Schneebeli. The interplay of emoji, emoticons, and verbal modalities in CMC: a case study of
YouTube comments. VINM 2017: Visualizing (in) the new media, Nov 2017, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
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 THE INTERPLAY OF EMOJI, EMOTICONS, AND VERBAL MODALITIES IN CMC: A CASE STUDY
OF YOUTUBE COMMENTS

Célia SCHNEEBELI
University of Burgundy / Centre Interlangues (EA 4182)

1. Introduction

Emoticons, as their name (a blend of “emotion” and “icons’”) may suggest, are commonly
linked to expressing emotions. However, it has already been shown that their role in online
written communication is a bit more complex than their name indicates. In 2010, Eli Dresner
and Susan Herring have published a seminal paper on the subject, showing how they also
constitute “indicators of illocutionary force” (Dresner and Herring, 2010: 249). The Oxford
English Dictionary has also somehow acknowledged this second important use by defining
them as “used to convey the writer's feelings or intended tone”. Since the beginning of the
2010s, Internet users have started using more and more emoji alongside emoticons. Those
“small digital images or icons” (Oxford English Dictionary) have comparable roles and
functions (and in fact traditional punctuation-based emoticons may turn into equivalent
emoji on some platforms or websites) but add more complexity to what is expressed by
emoticons. Indeed, they are much more numerous, may represent faces, people, animals or
things, and are rendered differently depending on the platform they are used on.
Confronting this newfound complexity, Susan Herring and Ashley Dainas have gone back to
examining the discursive uses of both emoticons and emoji (alongside other “graphicons”)
and have identified two other functions: “nonverbal signaling” and “punctuation or
structural markers” (Herring and Dainas: 2017). While the functions of emoticons and emoji
have been examined rather extensively (see references in Herring and Dainas: 2017 for
studies of their functions in different modes and platforms), to our knowledge, their
relationship with verbal (in the sense of “relative to words”) modalities in those different
functions has not yet been explored (a notable exception is Amaghlobeli: 2012, but she only
studies emoticons in SMS discourse). After all, while emoticons and emoji are traditionally
considered as nonverbal cues making-up for the lack of non-linguistic cues in CMC
(computer-mediated communication), the “face with tears of joy” emoji has been named
word of the year 2015 by the Oxford Dictionaries. Internet users have reacted strongly to
this decision, mainly claiming that emoticons and emoji are not words at all. This makes it all
the more relevant to question and explore the relationship of emoticons and emoji with
verbal modalities, which is what this article intends to do. It will then seek to answer
questions such as how emoticons and emoji interact with verbal modalities, whether they
complete or replace verbal modalities, or, to view the issue from a different perspective,
whether emoticons and emoji always constitute nonverbal modalities.

2. Methodology and data

Those questions will be explored by looking at the different functions of emoticons and
emoji described above and by contrasting them with what verbal modalities have to offer in
those functions. This will be done using the tools of discourse analysis and pragmatics in
order to offer a micro-analysis of comments posted on the page of a YouTube video. Of
course, answers to those opening questions could be different according to the CMC mode
studied and what it enables to do. YouTube comments are not often considered in studies
about emoticons and emoji, maybe because there is not much interaction in them (see
Benson, 2014: 90, or Sindoni, 2014: 194). However, they seem like an interesting choice with
regards to the object of this article since commenters generally aim at reacting to the video
or other comments. That often implies taking an affective or evaluative stance, which is an
expected function of emoticons and emoji.
The dataset studied is composed of 915 comments that were posted on the page of the
video “DIY makeup tricks with school supplies”. This video was posted on September 18,
2017 on a very popular YouTube channel called Miranda Sings (it had more than 8,5 million
subscribers as of September 2017). To obtain this set of data, all comments were collected
from the day the video was put online to 28 September, 2017, 10 days later, in order to
obtain a wide and varied sample of comments. In this lapse of time, the video had been seen
a little more than 880 000 times, and 4041 comments had been written, amongst which 915
used emoticons and emojis. Those 915 comments are the ones studied in this article. They
were all copied and pasted as separate images and then saved in order to keep a stable
corpus to work on and to prevent them from disappearing, which is one of the main
problems one may encounter when working on digital corpora collected on social networks.
A last methodological and terminological issue remains to be dealt with. The word “emoji” is
sometimes used to refer to both “emoticon” and “emoji”. Conversely, the word “emoticon”
is sometimes used for both “emoji” and “emoticon”. It has been chosen here not to use
either one as an umbrella term and to retain the use of the two distinct labels since they
refer to two distinct forms. Emoticons are indeed “a representation of a facial expression
such as a smile or frown, formed by various combinations of keyboard characters and used
to convey the writer's feelings or intended tone,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it.
They are formed from ASCII characters and ‘”have been used in computer-mediated
communication (CMC) since 1979” (Herring and Dainas, 2017). As for emoji, from Japanese
“e” (picture) and “moji” (letter, character), they are often seen as the evolution of
emoticons. They no longer use characters and punctuation but are “small digital image[s] or
icon[s] used to express an idea, emotion” according to the Oxford English dictionary. They
may represent facial expressions, just like emoticons, but also objects, body parts, symbols,
or animals, among other things. Some platforms automatically turn emoticons into emoji
(this is not the case of YouTube) but most emoji do not have an emoticon equivalent. For
those reasons, it seems better to use the two distinct terms and not use one for the other.
However, they do “fulfil similar roles” even if “emoji are more visually complex and may be
expected to function somewhat differently in CMC as a consequence” (Herring and Dainas,
2017). This is why it has been chosen to study them together, but potential differences will
be taken into account when relevant.

3. Beyond indicating emotions: emoticons as indicator of stance

Since the early days of CMC studies, emoticons have been viewed as making up for
the lack of non-linguistic cues in CMC. Twenty years ago, Landra L. Rezabek and John J.
Cochenour already described them as “visual cues formed from ordinary typographical
symbols that when read sideways represent feelings or emotions” (Rezabek and Cochenour,
1998: 201). Since then, they have often been construed as “indicators of affective states, the
purpose of which is to convey nonlinguistic information that in face-to-face communication
is conveyed through facial expression and other bodily indicators” (Dresner and Herring,
2010: 250). For instance, inserting a smiling face in an utterance would be a way to make up
for the impossibility to physically smile. This is what Rezabek and Cochenour alreay wrote in
1998: “For example, the combination of symbols :-) represents a typical smiley face and
conveys the sentiment that the person sending the message and using that particular
emoticon is pleased, happy, agreeable, or in a similar state of mind” (Rezabek and
Cochenour: 201). After all, this is why the “smiley face” emoticon is also called “happy face”:
the facial expression is perceived as a synonym for the emotion it is supposed to express.
This function of emoticons and emoji, “expression of emotion” (Herring and Dainas: 2017) is
consensual among scholars and hardly questionable. However, it seems rather incomplete.
Emoticons and emoji do enable to express affective states, but expressing an affective state
itself can indeed have multiple purposes. Even in face-to-face conversation, people more
often than not do not smile for the mere sake of expressing an emotion. There is far more in
a smile than just an affective state. First of all, a smile, as any facial expression or bodily
gesture, may be an indicator of how a speaker stands in an interaction. Expressing an
emotion may therefore have a pragmatic and argumentative function.
The stance-taking theory of American linguist John W. DuBois may be of some help to
understand how, rather than expressing an emotion per se, the primary use of emoticons
and emoji may then be to indicate stance, and in the case of YouTube comments, a reaction
to the video. This theory was developed in a 2007 article in which DuBois writes that “one of
the most important things we do with words is take a stance. Stance has the power to assign
value to objects of interest, to position social actors with respect to those objects, to
calibrate alignment between stancetakers, and to invoke presupposed systems of
sociocultural value” (DuBois, 2007: 139). This is all the more true in YouTube comments,
whose first and foremost purpose is to react to the video, most of all to like it or dislike it.
Interestingly enough, even if DuBois only talks about words, all the stances he describes can
virtually be achieved thanks to emoticons and emoji too. Emoticons and emoji, in this
perspective, must be viewed as being far more than descriptive. They have a pragmatic or
argumentative function more than a merely descriptive function: a smiling face emoticon or
emoji more often than not doesn’t merely say “I am happy” (expressing an emotion) but
says “I appreciate the video”. It doesn’t mean expressing an emotion for the sake of it but
taking a stance with respect to the video, which really is argumentative, not descriptive.
In the perspective of the stance-taking theory then, expressing an affective state is not
something speakers do per se, but something they do in order to react and position
themselves with respect to the commented object, that is with a pragmatic purpose. Let’s
look at a few examples. Laughter emoticons and emoji of all kinds are the most common
type used in the dataset, which is not surprising since the video is intended to be funny. As
expected, laughter emoticons and emoji are not necessarily used with a descriptive purpose,
for example saying “I’m laughing”, but rather to state a reaction to the video, “I found that
funny”, which is precisely the speaker’s stance. In fact, over 915 comments, 150 precisely
consist in quoting a sentence or a dialogue or a passage of the video and adding a laughter
emoticon to show one’s reaction to the quoted piece. A laughter emoticon or emoji, be it XD
or tears of joy, packs the whole reaction or stance of the commenter in a single image. One
might argue they are more concise, hence straightforward, than a whole sentence: instead
of writing something as « I found that funny », the emoticon packs the whole stance in a
single graphic sign, which can then be used without any words, as in this comment:
Of course this is not specific to laughter; it is also the case with other emotions, such as
disgust, happiness, anger, or shock:

In this comment, the shocked face is not merely the expression of an emotion but a reaction
to what Miranda does in the video. Another interesting example is the angry face:

The angry face is used by the commenter to criticize the video. Again, the purpose of using
this angry face is clearly not to merely express an emotion. It even goes beyond evaluation.
It enables the commenter to show his clear lack of approval, which is a matter of alignment.
This is in fact one of the possible functions of stance-taking in DuBois’s theory: in discourse,
speakers may align or not align their stance with that of the co-speaker, or the object which
is commented in the case of the dataset studied here. Again, emoticons and emoji enable to
do that just as words.
Therefore, stance is not only a matter of affective state, and so are emoticons and emoji.
Plenty of them, particularly emoji, do not represent facial expressions and are not really
about expressing emotions. A good example is emoji representing gestures, which are often
used to take an evaluative stance, or to show one’s approval of the video and its content
(“alignement” in DuBois’s words). There are plenty of them, under many different forms, in
the dataset. The most frequently used (from 10 to 20 instances) are the following:

-The thumb, up or down, 👍and 👎. It is the most frequent in the dataset (20 comments use
it). It may express a negative or positive evaluation.
-The “ok hand” 👌also expresses a very positive evaluation and is used rather frequently (it is
found in 13 comments).
-The clapping hands emoji 👏 is used with a similar purpose of expressing a positive
evaluation (and is used in 10 comments).

Less frequently used (from one to five instances) gestural emoji include:

-The raised fist ✊ can be interpreted as a sign of support.

-The sign of the horns \m/ probably means something like “you rock”, and may thus be
interpreted as a positive evaluation again.
-Praying hands 🙏 may be used to show admiration or approval.
-Hands in the air 🙌 may also be interpreted as a positive evaluation where they express a
celebration of what the video says or shows:

Other non-gestural emoticons and emoji are used to express an evaluative stance, for
example:
-The heart ❤ and its many variant forms such as the sparkling heart or growing heart. It
means the commenter loves the video, or Miranda, or some element or person in the video.
It is often present too, with or without other modalities (180 comments contain a heart of
some kind meaning “I love X”).
-A last interesting example is the face with sunglasses emoticon, 😎, which is used only twice
in the corpus. This emoji doesn’t even describe a state of mind or an emotion of the
commenter but rather a perceived image of the objet, which implies and evaluation of it,
that in this case is positive (in this case, the sunglasses may be interpreted as an attribute of
“coolness”).

4. Stance emoticons and emoji versus/as verbal modalities

Sometimes, emoticons and emoji are sufficient to express a stance, and no verbal modality is
needed in this case. We have already considered comments where the speaker only uses an
emoticon that appears alone as a proposition. This is what has been called a “naked
emoticon” (Provine et al., 2007). For instance, the commenter will use a single heart
emoticon or emoji instead of writing “I love this video” or “I love Miranda”. It then packs the
whole propositional content –and the whole stance- in a single image. From the point of
view of discourse, a “naked emoticon” or emoji also constitutes a whole turn in the
interaction (Herring and Dainas, 2017). Conversely, emoticons and emoji sometimes appear
alongside verbal modalities that would have enabled to reach the same effect:

Here, the speaker doesn’t really need the heart emoticon to express their stance. The three
last parts of this paper will give potential explanations for those redundant uses but for the
moment, suffice it to say that the verbal predicate “love you” would have been enough to
convey the message and that the emoticon duplicates the content of the verbal statement.
This is in fact why other commenters write “I love you” or “I love this” with words only and
no hearts or emoticon of any sort.
Those two opposite cases suggest two things. The first one is that the function of emoticons
and emoji sometimes overlap the function of some verbal modalities. Sometimes, a
commenter will have a choice between using a verbal modality, such as a verb or a noun, or
an emoticon or emoji. Secondly, it shows that if emoticons and emoji sometimes make up
for the lack of non-linguistic cues in CMC, they are not to be simply opposed to linguistic
cues. Even when they are inspired by a non-linguistic modality, such as a gesture or a facial
expression, their use goes far beyond transferring this mere gesture or facial expression
inside CMC. This is particularly obvious when they swap place with a verbal cue in a
message:
In these examples, the “thumbs up”, “heart” and “face with tears of joy” emoji are used as
lexemes on the syntagmatic axis, as if they belonged to the same paradigm as traditional
verbal units, such as a verb or a noun. The first one is used as an equivalent to the verb “like”
and is followed by a conditional clause. The second one is used as an equivalent to the verb
“love” after a subject pronoun, and the third one is used in the same place as an infinitive
after TO. There are also instances of nominal use of emoji:

In this playful use that works in the same fashion as a rebus, the emoji simply stands for the
noun it replaces (a pig emoji for “pig”). It is an expected use of emoji since they may
represent objects, and hence have a referential use, just as a noun does. In those nominal
uses, an emoji can even be used as a nominal root to which a suffix is then added to form an
adjective:

The poop emoji is used as a nominal root to which the adjectival suffix is attached in order to
form a hybrid form composed of an image and a portion of a word, and which has the same
meaning as “poopy”.
Therefore, in some comments, emoticons and emoji contribute to the propositional content
of the message. Some convey propositional content on their own (stand-alone emoticons
and emoji), some convey referential content (emoji used as lexemes), so that it seems hardly
possible to consider them as non-linguistic cues.

One might argue that in terms of reference, they are less efficient than words since the
semantic content of an emoticon or emoji is not always clear or even consensual. For
instance, users may use a same emoticon to replace different verbs: in the dataset, some
users use the thumbs up emoji as an equivalent of “like”, while some other use it to mean
“agree” or “approve”. However, polysemy is also a feature of words, and there is no reason
why emoticons should be limited to one single meaning. What is more, there is referential
stability in emoticon and emoji use. For example, in the dataset under study, the heart sign
always seems to mean “love”. Indeed, when it is used in combination with a verb that
duplicates its content, the verb in question is found to be “love” in all cases (and never
“like”). As for “like”, it seems to be conventionally duplicated by the thumb up emoji. Hence,
to some extent, the choice of one or the other emoji can be interpreted as a stabilized
expression of the degree of the predicate, just as choosing between “like” or “love” is.
What is more problematic from the point of view of reference, though, is the case of stand-
alone emoticons and emoji. In this case, the emoticon/emoji often stands for the verbal part
of the proposition (for instance ❤ for “love”). While this is enough to make the stance
clear, it leaves the subject and the object implicit. The absence of the subject is in itself not
that much of a problem. Indeed, the subject is by default understood to be the speaker. By
definition, the utterance is delivered by the first person of the speaker. Therefore, in the
case where the comment is reduced to a single emoticon or emoji, like the heart, it is
thought to be a first person predicate (“I love”). After all, subject deletion is a common
feature in CMC discourse (Werry, 1996: 54), and that frequently happens too with verbal
predicates in YouTube comments, where the first person singular often does not appear
(“like this”, “love you”…). If the subject didn’t coincide with the speaker, then we may guess
it would have to be mentioned in front of the emoticon or emoji, even though there is no
case of that feature in the dataset. The question of the object is much more of a problem.
Indeed, in comments consisting of a stand-alone emoticon or emoji the object is left implicit
and ambiguous and can rarely be recovered in the context. In the case of the single heart
used as comment, there is no way to know if what is liked or loved by the speaker is the
video, a part of the video, or Miranda herself.
It seems hardly arguable that even though words may sometimes convey an ambiguous
reference (for example “it” as an object in “love it” may be ambiguous when its referent
doesn’t clearly appear in the context), they generally enable to be make the reference of the
statement clearer. Moreover, without the use of determiners and other nuances brought
about by linguistic operators, it seems difficult for emoji and emoticon to reach the precision
of verbal language.

5. Emoticons and emoji as illocutionary force markers

The central idea of Dresner & Herring’s seminal 2010 article is that emoticons may be used
as illocutionary force markers, markers that indicate how the message is to be taken or
understood. The idea that emoticons may contribute to message interpretation is in itself
not new. The New Hacker’s Dictionary already pointed this out in 1994 in its somewhat
humorous definition of the word “emoticon”: “An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional
state in email or news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some
other explicit humor indication) are virtually required under certain circumstances in high-
volume text-only communication forums such as Usenet; the lack of verbal and visual cues
can otherwise cause what were intended to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise
non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by newbies),
resulting in arguments and flame wars.” (Raymond, 1994: 162). In 2001, Joseph B. Walther
and Kyle P. D’Addario had also already concluded from an experiment that emoticons
contributed to message interpretation (Walther and D’Addario, 2001). However, Dresner
and Herring have offered the first detailed account of how emoticons function as
illocutionary force markers drawing on the speech act theory and in the frame of a thorough
exploration of emotional and non-emotional meaning of emoticons. The central idea in this
perspective is that emoticons may “help convey the speech act performed through the
production of the utterance”, that is “help convey an important aspect of the linguistic
utterance they are attached to: What the user intends by what he or she types.” (Dresner
and Herring, 2010: 255-256).
For example, a tears of joy emoji or a smiling emoticon might indicate that a remark is not to
be taken at face value. It is a rather frequent use in the dataset, that is found with very
similar statements:
The emoticons and emoji used here indicate that the statement is not to be taken literally. In
the two first comments, the person is not literally dying or pissing themselves. One may
argue that a statement such as “I’m dying” would not be taken literally anyway and that the
emoticon or emoji is not really required for the reader to understand that. However, even
though it is not required, the function of the emoji or emoticon is to mark explicitly the fact
that the statement is not literal and is meant as a joke. This strategy may be seen as choice
of the speaker to make the implicit, paradoxically, more obvious. However, in the third
example, the emoji really is needed: it indicates that it is not a serious compliment and is
more of a joke. A more subtle example would be the use or the smirking face emoji, which
often indicates that something is implied in the statement, for example that there is a sexual
connotation to what is said. But, a bit surprisingly, this emoji is never used in the dataset.
Conversely, an emoticon or emoji may also confirm that a remark is not to be taken as a
joke:

The disappointment face confirms what the verbal part of the message suggests and signals
that it is not meant to be taken as a joke or an ironic statement.
More originally, an emoticon or emoji may be used to change the value of a preceding
emoticon or emoji:

In this comment, it seems the commenter only pretends to be appalled with a first emoji but
shows with a second emoji that they are really joking.
Since they enable to calibrate the force of the utterance, emoticons and emoji are also used
to manage facework online, that is not hurting the hearer’s feelings and avoiding to be rude.
Here is an instance of this function:
Because of the connotation of the adjective “creepy”, the comment could have been
perceived as negative. But the emoji enables the writer to mitigate the connotation brought
about by the adjective. It indicates it should not be perceived or taken as a piece of criticism.
Using an emoticon may also make a directive (an order or a command) less imposing, as is
the case here:

The smiley face is used to mitigate the imperative, alongside the more conventional verbal
cue « please ». In the dataset, the same tactic is also found in the context of issuing an order
with an imperative, but mitigated thanks to a wink:

In all cases, whether they are used for mitigation or not, emoticons and emoji are used to
make (or try to make) one’s intentions when typing clear. This is the conclusion Shao-Kang
Lo reached in an article telling about a study of his that shows “that when Internet users are
faced with pure text without emoticons, most people cannot perceive the correct emotion,
attitude, and attention intents. However, when emoticons are added in the same context,
the receiver’s perception of the messages starts to significantly change. Also, when opposite-
meaning emoticons are used, the receiver shows extreme difference in perceptions.
Emoticons allow receivers to correctly understand the level and direction of emotion,
attitude, and attention expression.” (Lo, 2008: 597).
For Dresner and Herring, emoticons, when they indicate the illocutionary force of the
utterance, are comparable in function to punctuation. “[U]ses of emoticons as indicators of
illocutionary force can be viewed as an expansion of text in the same way that, for example,
question marks and exclamation marks are.” As an expansion of text, they may then be less
verbal-like than emoticons and emoji used in stance-taking, but they remain within the
scope of linguistic expression in written communication. Again, they constitute far more
than mere non-verbal cues as had been postulated in the early days of CMC.

6. Emoticons and emoji as markers of emphasis

There is another use in which emoticons and emoji influence how meaning is conveyed in a
message. Indeed, apart from indicating the way a message must be perceived, emoticons
and emoji can also be used alongside other means to express emphasis in CMC. In this case,
emoticons and emoji enable the commenter to reinforce an assertion or a predicate, just as
an intensifying adjective or adverb might do, or a contrastive speech pattern in spoken
language.
A first tactic to put emphasis on a statement is to use multiple emoticons and emoji,
particularly multiple use of the same one:
Arguably, one shock face or one grin would have the same meaning, but three probably
makes it stronger.
A second technique of emphasis consists in using an emoticon or an emoji that mirrors the
content of verbal cues, thus reinforcing them:

The anguished faces reinforce what the message already says with words, and so do the
thumbs down. In this case, expression of emphasis and expression of illocutionary force
logically converge. It should be noticed, however, that expression of emphasis is not the only
function of emoticons/emoji that are redundant with verbal content. Commenters
sometimes have other motivations, which will be exposed further on.
Emoticons and emoji used as markers of emphasis often appear alongside other features.
There are traditional ones, the ones that belong to the grammar of English, such as high
degree adjectives and adverbs. There are also less traditional but more or less
conventionalized. For example, commenters often use the repetition of a vowel to
“represent […] expressive intonation” (Werry, 1996: 57), as for instance with “sooooo”. They
also use caps or all-caps to show their excitement (in CMC, capitalization is “employed as a
convention for expressing emphasis”, Werry, 1996: 57, and is interpreted as shouting). This
is the case in this comment:

Here, the commenter writes in all-caps, which, if done purposefully, could express
excitement. They use the intensifying adverb “so” with a double o to translate expressive
intonation. They also use the shortened form OMG, which is the acronym for “Oh my god”, a
form that quintessentially expresses a high degree of surprise or excitement. Last but not
least, they use the laughter emoticon XD twice, at the beginning and the end of the
message. Framing the message with this affective emoticon is a form of emphasis and
possibly shows that this affective stance concerns the whole of the message (not just an
element of it).
In cases like the ones studied above, emoticons and emoji play a role that is comparable to
that of intensifiers of all kinds. They are intensifiers of their own and, just as intensifiers, only
make sense when used alongside another unit, which is often verbal and bears the
propositional content of the message. So, again, emoticons and emoji can’t be opposed to
linguistic cues but seem to rightly belong to them, far from being mere non-verbal cues.
However, this is not true of all emoticons and emoji uses. In fact, in the set of data studied,
two uses of emoticons and emoji seem to attach them to non-verbal cues.

7. Phatic use of emoticons and emoji

There is a curious phenomenon that can’t be left unnoticed in the dataset: many
commenters put a laughter emoticon at the end of their message, even though the message
in question is not particularly funny or even intended to be funny. In some of them, the
discrepancy between the content of the message and the emoticon/emoji used at the end of
it may be accounted for by using the functions that have been previously exposed. Indeed,
as the previous examples have shown, the laughter emoticon may be used to express a
stance or to create irony. But in some messages, those interpretations don’t seem to hold
that well. A good example is the following comment:

The emoji does not correspond to the content of the comment: it is not particularly funny,
nor does it state an emotional reaction to the message. It doesn’t seem to suggest a reaction
that would be complementary to the message. More than express a reaction or irony, this
laughter emoji may well mirror a phatic use of laughter that already exists in face-to-face
communication. According to some neuroscientists, laughing at the end of an utterance is a
way to create empathy with the hearer. In a 1996 study of why and where people laugh in
conversations, neuroscientist Robert R. Provine found out that “most of the laughter
seemed to follow rather banal remarks” (1996: 41). He and his team analyzed this
phenomenon and found out that laughter in this case is purely social and merely a way to
create empathy, to bond with the hearer. This is what Provine called the “punctuation
effect”. In a more recent study, Provine and other scholars have examined “whether the
punctuation effect extends to emoticon placement in typed English text posted on website
message boards” (Provine et al., 2007: 301). The study concluded that “the mechanism
governing the punctuation of text by emoticons is less clear than that involved in the
placement of laughing in speech and signing” but that “[a]s in the case of laughter,
emoticons do not necessarily follow comments that have obvious emotional impact”
(Provine et al., 2007: 304). So, even though the study was not very conclusive, commenters
could well use laughter emoticons and emoji at the end of their message to reach the same
effect as speakers do when they laugh at the end of their utterances. After all, comments are
meant to be read, and the authors of the comments quoted above may well aim at creating
empathy with the potential reader.
While this is a phenomenon which is common to CMC and face-to-face communication, in
both cases, it is triggered by a non-verbal cue. In this case, the laughter emoticon or emoji
does really reflect what the speaker would do in face-to-face communication: laugh. It is
difficult to think of emoticons and emoji used with the punctuation effect as anything else
than a non-verbal cue.

8. Emoticons and emoji used without linguistic or paralinguistic use

Last but not least, in the dataset, some emoticons and even more emoji seem to be used
without any linguistic or even paralinguistic function at all. More precisely, commenters
appear to be sometimes using emoticons and emoji with a mere esthetic function. Emoji,
more than emoticons in this case, may for instance make the message more colourful (at
least with operating systems that doesn’t show them in black and white) and attractive. This
is particularly obvious in emoji uses such as the following:

The emoji used in those messages do not add content or paralinguistic information to the
message. They could be suggested by the platforms used to type the message (some phones
suggest an emoticon when a certain word is typed), but they would remain illustrative
nonetheless. What is more, there are comments where it cannot be the case, such as the
following, where the queen emoji adds nothing in terms of meaning or content but can’t
have been generated in this fashion since the queen emoji appears before and after the
word “queen”:

Those emoji therefore appear to be merely illustrative. In fact, using emoji, which are small,
sometimes colourful or cute, pictures, might be perceived by the commenter as a way to
make a message more pleasant to read. This could be the case in the following comment,
which is pretty long by the standards of CMC, and punctuated with illustrative emoji:

Again the emoji used in this message merely duplicate what words already say and add
nothing in terms of stance, meaning, or even force or emphasis. In this case, emoticons and
emoji constitute neither linguistic nor paralinguistic cues. Their purpose is merely esthetic.

9. Conclusion
The two last functions examined in this article put aside, it seems that emoticons and emoji
are becoming increasingly conventionalized as textual markers. Their uses are not as chaotic
as it seems, and they can no longer merely be simply opposed to linguistics cues and verbal
modalities, as used to be the case in early studies. They have integrated all domains of the
traditional material of linguistics: communication of descriptive content in the same way as
lexical words, communication of attitudinal information and illocutionary force in the same
way as punctuation (and some grammatical words), or expression of emphasis. As Dresner
and Herring write, this may now call for future investigations in the degree to which they
have become conventionalized (Dresner and Herring, 2010: 264). Another interesting
direction for future research would be to try and determine whether emoticons and emoji
tend to replace verbal cues in the domains of expression where both can be used.

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