| Due to its increasing use in computer meditated communication,emoji has received attention from various fields.Pragmatic scholars have also cast light on it,and have found that emoji is mainly linked with politeness,which brings several deep analysis on the relationship between emoji and politeness.However,the relationship between emoji and impoliteness has been long ignored.Moreover,the majority of previous research focuses on the mere description of pragmatic functions of emoji without further exploration and without the support of pragmatic theories.Thus,the present study seeks to investigate the use of emojis in impolite contexts with quantitative and qualitative analysis..The study tries to answer three research questions:1)What is the pattern of emojis used in sarcastic comments on Sina Weibo(Weibo)?Specifically,Where are emojis placed?What and how many kinds of emojis are used by Weibo users?2)What are the functions of emojis in the performance of sarcasm on Weibo?3)Is there any interrelationship between patterns and functions?If yes,what is it?To answer the three questions,data in the current research are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively.Quantitatively,emojis are coded to figure out the pattern of emoji use.Qualitatively,Rapport Management Theory proposed by Spencer-Oatey Oatey(2008)is adopted as the theoretical framework to identify the functions of emojis.Data in this study consists of sarcastic comments posted during a period of a month(1 March 2020 to 31 March 2020)and all of these comments come from under Hot Weibo posts reporting the COVID-19 pandemic in western countries because these posts in this period have stirred up numerous sarcastic comments.Also,we set a restriction on the number of posts and comments we have to read because posts and comments are too many to be included.Finally the corpus is made up of 451 naturally occurring sarcastic comments written in Chinese.Through detailed reading and analysis of our corpus,we get three results:1),emojis are usually placed at the end of the utterance they accompany,and emojis are classified into five main categories:expression,gesture,nature,object,and symbol;2)seven functions are identified based on Rapport Management Theory:"emotion expression" in the nonverbal domain;"tone modification" in the style domain;"sarcasm strengthening" and "sarcasm uncovering" in the illocutionary domain;and"word replacement","word repetition" and "punctuation replacement" in the discourse domain.In the discourse domain,we further observe that emojis tend to replace nouns and emotional punctuation;3)except for "word repetition",the other six types of pragmatic functions are mainly realized at the end of sentences.Excluding "word replacement" and "word repetition",which are realized through gesture,nature,object and symbol emojis,the other five types of pragmatic functions are mainly realized by emojis under the category of expression(expression emojis)"Word replacement" and "word repetition".Finally,through the discussion of the above results,this research has obtained further findings:1)Weibo users tend to put emojis at the end of a text,and mainly use expression emoji to perform various functions;2)emojis are not always emotional markers reflecting real emotions,which comes down to the performance of other non-affective functions or design errors;3)emojis act as powerful sarcasm signals in sarcastic comments,proving a close bound with impoliteness;4)emoji is currently a pictorial paralanguage rather than an independent language,due to the pictographic nature of emojis.On the whole,emojis do not constantly reflect emotions,are tightly connected to impoliteness by performing various functions in sarcasm,and has a long way to go if to be an independent language. |
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