Role of Emoticons as Structural Markers in Twitter Interactions

DISCOURSE PROCESSES https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2018.1510654 Role of Emoticons as Structural Markers in Twitter Interactions Stefania Spina Department of Human and Social Sciences, University for Foreigners of Perugia, Perugia, Italy ABSTRACT Emoticons play a key role in digital written interactions. Since the 1980s research has highlighted their growing relevance, as they allow to convey increasingly rich emotional, social, and pragmatic information. This article contributes to this area of research by providing an analysis of emoticons as structural markers in Twitter interactions. Based on a large corpus of Italian tweets, mixed-effect models were used to investigate to what extent and how emoticons are used in this role and what variables most influence their use and their relationship with punctuation marks. Results indicate that emoticons often have the function of clause and sentence boundary marking, either replacing or integrating punctuation marks. Variables affecting their use included user’s age, emoticon type, and position within the tweets. In this role their use reveals the pursuit of coherent strategies in discourse organization. Introduction Since the early 1980s emoticons have been a constitutive part of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Both in their ASCII and iconic versions or, more recently, as animated gifs, they have rapidly evolved to suit the new forms of interaction emerging in digital written communication over the last three decades. Today, with the spread of social networks and text-messaging systems, they are key resources, suitable to convey increasingly rich information in the “socioemotional conversations” (Yus, 2011, p. 198) that take place through written interactions. Despite some initial criticism on their usefulness (Andrews [1994], for example, states that smileys are “unnecessary in most cases. The primary reason smileys didn’t exist for so long is that good writers did not need them”), their use has rapidly spread across all platforms and environments dedicated to online interactions. Early studies already reported a widespread use of emoticons in online conversations: Witmer and Katzman (1997) examined emoticons in a large sample of Usenet newsgroups postings and found that 13.2% of them contained emoticons. More recently, Park, Barash, Fink, and Cha (2013) collected a corpus of more than 1 billion tweets sent from 2006 to 2009 and reported that 7% contained at least one emoticon. Spina (2016) analyzed a more recent sample of Italian tweets sent over a time span of 7 months, from November 2012 to May 2013. She found that over more than 550,000 tweets, 17% contained an emoticon and that more than one-fourth of the participants used emoticons in their interactions. There were more than 95,000 emoticons, distributed in 399 different types. This makes emoticons as frequent as, for example, personal pronouns (92,994) or the negation non (105,071). The evidence from corpus data, therefore, showed that emoticons are used as frequently as common lexical elements. One of the consequences of this growing use of emoticons in online conversations is the increasing differentiation of their functions (for a detailed overview, see Vandergriff, 2014). CONTACT Stefania Spina [email protected] University for Foreigners of Perugia, Piazza Fortebraccio, Perugia 4 06123, Italy. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/hdsp. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC