A Metonymical Approach To Emoji

In recent years,with the rapid development of network communication,emoji is fashionable all over the world.Emoji are image ideograms used in online communication,which includes many living items such as facial expressions,characters,food,transportation,animals,symbols,flags,places,etc.,while the majority of people mainly use the yellow face emoji to represent various kinds of emotions.Emoji is not merely a kind of ideographic image,from the perspective of language,but also a sort of visual language.It is a pictorial language in multi-modal languages,just like words,signs,gestures,moods and so on.At present,the development of the global visual language emoji has been extended to many fields such as design,entertainment application,education research,etc..Its widespread dissemination and mass application are not accidental,but it is an inevitable result of the demand of online communication.It is based on the humans’ embodiment of “happiness,anger,grief,and joy”derived from the objective world to representation and construal.The advantage of emoji is that although both the sender and the receiver in online communication can’t communicate with each other face to face,they still directly transmit and understand each other’s emotions and attitudes through emoji.To attain the emotional meanings of emoji,the two parties conceptualize these emoji through the salient emotional physiological features or object features.This cognitive approach is images referring to the abstract emotions,that is,pictorial metonymy,which is included into the conceptual metonymy.Therefore,compared with pure text,simple and intuitive emoji bring more convenience and flexibility to online communication,which make the language expression more vivid in online communication.The widespread application of emoji gradually draws the attention of researchers.They have discussed the social functions of emoji,the semantic interpretation of emoji,and the artistic value of emoji,but up to now,there is few explanation about emoji from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.In view of this situation,in order to make a rational and essentialinterpretation about the cognitive mechanism of emoji and broaden the research field of cognitive linguistics,this research mainly adopts emoji from QQ and WeChat input methods as research object and is based on the metonymy theory to solve the following three questions:(1)What are the metonymical features and the conceptualization process of emoji?(2)What are the factors that influence the metonymical conceptualization of emoji?(3)What are the influences of the extensive application of emoji on text?Combining with the above three questions,based on the theory of cognitive linguistics,cognitive psychology,sociolinguistics,semiology and other related disciplines’ theories,taking conceptual metonymy as the theoretical basis,and with the help of the research reports,the corpus of online media,and the researches about emoji from scholars at home and abroad,this article aims to study the features of emoji’s conceptual metonymy,its conceptualization processes as well as some other important influential factors on emoji.The result firstly shows that the features of metonymical conceptualization process of the emoji: embodiment,cognition,proximity,prominence.In addition,it also especially refers to the deviation feature of emoji’s conceptualization and discusses the differences of understanding the “hands merged” emoji in detail between Chinese and foreign netizens.All these features further prove that emoji can be explained by metonymic cognitive mechanism.The conceptualization process of emoji can be illustrated by metonymy,because it follows the psychological cognitive schema of metonymy of the mapping from source domain-image to target domain-emotion: inputting the prominent image information into brain,then the inputting image information mapping with the emotion concept in Ideal Cognition Model,and processing and blending these information,finally outputting the concept of emoji.Secondly,in the conceptualization process and selection of emoji,it will be influenced by such cultural differences,cognitive context,online dialogue context,age,gender,personality and interpersonal relationship,etc..These factors lead to different understandings of emoji.Finally,we discuss the detrimental influence of widely used pictorial language emoji on words in online communication and the possibility whether emoji can become a world language.With the increase in use of emoji and the decrease in application of text or words,the text must bedegraded.If this trend becomes more obvious,emoji will become the dominant language in network communication and gradually evolve into a new world visual language.If it may become a new global visual language,what are the grammatical rules and what is the arrangement of words order? All these questions are worthy to explore.This article which takes emoji as the research object and analyzes it from the metonymical perspective of cognitive linguistics gives a systematic and essential interpretation on emoji.It not merely collects a large amount of information about emoji,but also adds new research perspectives and contents into the researches of cognitive metonymy and brings new and deeper thinking to emoji’s future development.