Pragmatic Functions of Emoticons in WeChat Messaging

Abstract

With the development of social media and the updating of emoticons, people widely use emoticons to convey information and express emotions in instant messaging to achieve the purpose of communication. As a new research field, emoticons have attracted extensive attention of scholars in recent years. The previous studies mostly focus on motivation and influencing factors of emoticon usage from the perspective of communication. However, little research has been done on the study of linguistics. The author of this paper intends to explore the roles and pragmatic functions of emoticons in WeChat messaging through discourse analysis based on speech act theory. The study shows that emoticons compensate for the lack of information and eliminate ambiguity in online communication, and that different age groups have different understandings of emoticons. Hopefully the study on emoticons will help people systematically understand the roles and functions of emoticons, thus achieving interpersonal effective communication.