Pragmatic Study Of "Cry" Emoticons In College Students’ Group Based On Image Schema

As a product of new media development,internet emoticons have been widely used in people’s online communication.Internet emoticons developed by simple punctuation marks are forms of non-verbal communication,but they have rich pragmatic meanings.This paper intends to study the internet emoticons from the perspective of linguistics,which regards image schema theory as theoretical foundation.Image schema is one of the important theories of cognitive linguistics.Its main principle is to use schemas to express people’s perceptions of external things and the images in brain.This paper aims to apply image schema theory to analyze of the series of “Cry” internet emoticons’ pragmatic meanings.This paper discusses four questions:(1)Whether internet emoticons are widely used in the group of college students;(2)Reasons for college students to use internet emoticons;(3)Pragmatic meanings of “Cry” internet emoticons and relative image schema models;(4)The comparative analysis of pragmatic attitudes of “Cry” internet emoticons and relative image schema models.Through the pilot of questionnaire,students’ major,grade and age don’t affect the results.Therefore,this study randomly selects 300 college students as research objects and controls the male to female ratio of 1:1.Finally,through data processing of the questionnaire and image schema analyzing with examples,the results have shown that:(1)All the college students have experience of using internet emoticons;(2)The reasons of using internet emoticons are mainly the speed,closing the psychological distance between the two sides of the dialogue and expressing one’s emotion and personality;(3)The dividing line between the pragmatic meanings of emoticons is not clear.The author interprets each emoticon’s most obvious pragmatic meaning based on image schema theory,and finds that internet emoticons don’t belong to language but have some similarities with language;(4)“Cry” emoticons are classified into crying faces,but they can express both negative and positive attitudes.This thesis analyzes internet emoticons’ pragmatic attitude comparatively and make image schema models with examples.The finding shows that the “Face with Tears of Joy”emoticon is the most positive one,while the most negative emoticon is “Sob”.