Pragmatic Functions of Emoji on Chinese Social Media

Emojis, expressive symbols on social media, gained popularity due to its convenience and versatility. This paper explores the pragmatic functions of four specific emojis (doge, smile, funny face, love) from comments on Bilibili and Weibo. A corpus of 229 comments is created through manual collection and crawler, and annotated according to the intext functions of the emojis. The results show that the four emojis are mainly used as “external tonal complements” and used for friendliness or joking, which can be explained by the renderings of the emojis. Furthermore, the friendly-looking love emoji and smile emoji also have occasional uses for sarcasm. Emojis used mainly for joking have softening uses, while emojis used mainly for friendliness are found to have sarcastic uses instead of softening uses. A possible cause of these negative uses is the censorship in Chinese social media. The research serves as a basis for Chinese emoji uses research of greater scale and provides insight for sentiment analysis with emojis.