A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Emoticon From The Perspective Of Grammar Of Visual Design

With the development of multimedia technology, the emoticon has played a more and more important role in online chatting, which, as a result, contributes to expressing more vivid meaning. And it is through over20years’ development that emoticon has changed a lot in construction, content and subject. The construction of emoticon has shifted from basic ASCII codes to graphical icon, from static image to dynamic flash. And in terms of content, the topic of emoticon is no longer limited to facial express but extends to various kinds of body languages and hand gestures. Besides, there is even more than one subject in emoticon, which can meet the demand to express more complicated meaning. Though there are a lot of researches in dealing with the topic of emoticon, the majority of them only take simple emoticons like graphical icon into consideration, which is short of theoretical foundation as well.Based on the theory of systemic functional grammar, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) has established a set of analyzing tool, namely the grammar of visual design, to deal with the multimodal discourse analysis. Afterwards, many scholars, with the help of grammar of visual design, have explored the analysis of multimodal discourse like advertisement, poster, PPT, etc, which, at the same time, has proved the compatibility of grammar of visual design when facing different kinds of multimodal discourse. This thesis, with the help of grammar of visual design, has tried to explore the representational, interactive and compositional meaning of frequently used emoticons on the internet to reveal the their inner mechanism to express meaning. And during the detailed analysis, four factors including contact, social distance, perspective and modality have been taken into consideration when dealing with interactive meaning, while information value, salience and framing are discussed when talking about the compositional meaning. As is shown by the research, the demand, a kind of contact, is more frequently seen compared with offers in existed emoticons, which is to create a direct communication between the viewer and the participants in the emoticons and as a consequence to add the vividness of the emoticon. And in terms of the social distance, the closer distance like intimate or personal distance can definitely contribute to decreasing the barriers of communication and makes the emoticon more subjective. And when talking about the perspective. If the eye-level is taken, it means the relations of the participants and viewers are equal while the imbalanced relations will be presented if either high or low viewing angle is taken. Moreover, information value has reflected what is the most important part of emoticon that deserves the most of readers’attention. which are usually the elements on the right, bottom or center. And in terms of salience, what is put in the foreground of emoticons tends to reflect more of its main compared with what is put in the background. Besides, bigger participants or with sharper color contrast are supposed to mean more to reveal the main intention of the emoticon. When the framing of emoticon is taken into consideration, all the elements in most cases are connected to each other to create an integrated meaning of emotion. However, there still exist some others cases in emoticon in which two or more parts are divided separately to form a sharp contrast and thus cause a humorous effect.This research, by taking grammar of visual design as theoretical foundation, offers the analysis of emoticon from a new perspective, which has broadened the compatibility of the theory. Besides, it is possible for the viewer to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of emoticon with the theory of grammar of visual design, which, as a result, makes the interpretation of the emoticon’s hidden meaning easier for the viewer. And in terms of the emoticon user, they can choose and create proper emoticons based on the mechanism how different factors all together construct the overall meaning of emoticon, which, as a result, will make on-line chatting more effective.