A Study On Functional Meaning Of Emoji "Face With Tears Of Joy" In Chinese And English

Emoji is a character that can be co-written with text."(?)" is frequently used in Chinese and foreign social network platforms and is rich in meaning expressed in different contexts."(?)" is often used to express beyond the meaning of "laughter and crying" especially among young people.It can be used in certain contexts,guide both parties to correctly understand the discourse content.In this essay,the research object "(?)" was collected from chatting materials of Chinese students on WeChat,British or American students on Facebook Messenger,iMessage and WhatsApp.A small self-built corpus was developed to do the research.First of all,according to the position of"(?)",we divide it into the following three parts:starting the turn,continuing the turn and summarizing the turn.Second,guided by the discourse marker theory,we subdivide it into patterns and make statistical analysis on the frequency of different patterns.Finally,combining the foreground and background theory of discourse grammar and the semantic field theory,we explain the functional meaning of"(?)" in each pattern and attempt to analyze the reasons for the differences between Chinese and English materials.This essay contains six chapters:The first chapter introduces the research background,object,significance,corpus sources and research methods.The second chapter introduces the theoretical framework and the research history and current status of "(?)".The third chapter studies the meaning of "(?)" from starting the turn.The fourth chapter investigates the meaning of "(?)" from continuing the turn and the fifth chapter investigates the functional meaning of "(?)" from summarizing the turn.The third,fourth and fifth chapters follow the same research ideas,and all use the discourse marker theory to divide "(?)" into several patterns.We analyze patterns and habits of "(?)" usage in both Chinese and English corpus based on statistical data and compare the functional meanings of"(?)" in Chinese and English corpus.The sixth chapter concludes with an overview of the main contents and summarizes the findings.We points out the shortcomings of this study and follow-up research directions.