A Study Of Emoticon In Internet Instant Messaging Text: The Intersemiotic Complementarity Perspective

This thesis is situated in the research field of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), which is a new approach to discourse analysis mainly based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). A multimodal discourse, which defined as any texts utilizing more than one semiotic system to project meanings, goes beyond language and extends to other modals such as images, sound, and gestures etc. The overall aim of the thesis is to provide a metafunctional account of multimodal and multisemiotic meaning-making in instant messaging (IM) chat logs.In China, instant messaging as a new way of communication, which developed from 1980s in last century, has become very popular and important in people's daily lives. Emoticon, as one of the remarkable phenomena in IM, is widely used in the written texts. However, because of its novelty, few researches have been made to study the emoticons in IM discourse, especially study on the relations between emoticons and verbal aspects. As a consequence of this, the present research attempts to study the intersemiotic complementarity of emoticons and verbal aspects underpinned to the Royce's intersemiotic complementarity analysis.The data are both private and group history chat logs collected from the users of Tencent QQ which is the most popular IM software in China. The findings are derived from the statistical analysis of those data. After an examination on emoticons per se, the results show that smiley and static graphic icon are rare and almost out of use in IM written discourses in China; the facial emoticons are still most frequently used and the main function is mainly on expressing emotions; white and black emoticon is rarely used; and the emoticons are more likely to be located in a single move, and there's no preference for the users whether to place them before or after the verbal texts within a move, but they will seldom insert them in-between the characters. Generally speaking, the results of private and group chat logs are similar and prove each other except some small differences: the group chatters tend to use more emoticons; they prefer user-defined emoticons and emoticons of sound and language, or emoticons embedded with picture and character; The writers in group chat tend to use narrative emoticons more frequently than the behavioral ones, and in private chat the situation is on the contrary.After a thorough examination of emoticons under the framework of intersemiotic complementarity analysis, the author finds: 1) emoticons are interpersonally-oriented visuals, and of the three metafunctions, the interpersonal metafunction is foregrounded; 2) the comparatively high occurrence of intersemiotic repetition and synonymy shows that both the emoticon and written text of the two corpuses complement each other in maintaining and supporting the same topics. The users tend to use emoticons to repeat, reinforce or supplement the verbal aspects rather than go against them. 3) emoticons fulfill at least three speech functions namely offer, demand and question, and emoticons also perform the two image acts what Kress and van. Leeuwen (1996) have named as offers and demands. The results are quite different from the study of Kress and van Leeuwen, who have proposed when images offer, they primarily offer information, when images demand, they demand the goods-and-services. It should be noted that when the emoticons offer or demand, they mostly offer or demand responses rather than information or goods and services. 4) the attitudinal congruence takes the overwhelming majority in IM written discourses as compared to the attitudinal dissonance. The interlocutors in IM tend to use emoticons to repeat, reinforce or supplement the verbal aspects to show similar or same attitudes with the readers, thus harmonious and smooth relations between the netspeakers are constructed and maintained.The studies of emoticon are very limited, and the overseas scholars define it at the stage of smiley or graphic icon, actually, the emoticon has been extended to any non-verbal signs used in written messages to facilitate the communications. The author proposes a new definition of emoticon to cater the present research. A detailed categorization of emoticon has been accounted according to different criteria. The previous studies generally focus on the emoticon per se, or the users of emoticons, but the relation between the emoticon and the verbal text, and the ways relating the reader and the text are left untouched. This thesis may provide a new perspective on the study of emoticon.