The emoticon

This is an exercise about an aspect of the language of on-line discourse, namely the emoticon.  If you don't know what an emoticon is, you might like to read this page, which discusses the nature and history of emoticons, in addition to what follows here.

Emoticons are used to indicate how the writer feels about what he is writing.  They are useful in certain types of informal discourse because they allow the writer to make a comment about his attitude towards the information he is conveying.  So for example, if I write this in an email:

You never turn up on time ;-)

the emoticon at the end is my attempt to reassure you that I'm only joking about the fact that you are always late, or that even if you are always late, it doesn't really bother me.  If I was speaking to you face-to-face, there are other ways I could convey the same message about my attitude towards your being late – my body language, or tone of voice, for example.  But these things only work if you can see or talk directly to your addressee; in online chat, or in e-mail, you have to come up with another way of showing how you feel about what you are writing.

Emoticons are therefore part of the way in which we can engage in what is known as facework.  When we interact with others, we are (often subconsciously) engaged in facework, because we want to be respectful of others, and we want other people to respect us.  For instance, imagine you want to get your brother to stop talking so you can hear the TV.  You could say one of the following:

Be quiet!

Could you be quiet?

I'd appreciate it if you'd be quiet.

All of these expressions have the same function or purpose; but they have very different forms, and the first is far less polite than the last.  This degree of politeness is partly to do with the form of the utterance.  Imperatives like the first expression (other imperatives are things like Come here! Go away! and Don't do that!) tend to involve minimal face work.  Sometimes they are used either when there is no time for pleasantries: in an emergency, there's not usually enough time to say 'It would be most helpful if you could possibly see your way clear to leaving the building before it collapses', so people just shout 'Get out!'   Sometimes they are used when the speaker doesn't care whether or not the addressee feels offended that they've been given an order.  If the speaker does care about protecting their addressee's face, they might choose to use a different form; and this depends very much on the relationship between the speaker and the addressee.  For instance, it might not bother you too much whether your brother takes offence at being told to 'Be quiet!' but would you use the same expression to your grandmother?

Now emoticons are another way of doing facework.  Notice the difference between:

You never turn up on time

And

You never turn up on time ;-)

By using a combination of punctuation marks – a semi-colon followed by a dash followed by an end bracket – the writer has created a meaning which is interpersonal.  It's to do with how he wants the addressee to interpret the message ‘you never turn up on time', so it's additional to the actual message itself.

Not all emoticons have this function.  Click here for a list of what you should type when using MSN Messenger to create a particular emoticon.  Some of the emoticons don't seem to have anything to do with the writer's attitude to what he is writing (e.g. the emoticon for a cat face or for a ball), but a lot of them do (e.g. thumbs down, embarrassed, confused.)  Again, this is just like our previous examples using imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives.  Not all interrogatives have the function of directing someone to do something, but some do.  For example, if someone says:

Do you find it cold in here?

This could be interpreted by a listener as an instruction to close the window, in order to keep room hot.  But it could also be a genuine question which the speaker wants an answer to.  Sometimes it's hard to pin down the meaning of an utterance without knowledge of the wider context in which that utterance appears.

Some possible exercises

1. With the permission of your friends and other correspondents, make a collection of text messages and other electronic communications you receive that contain emoticons.  Are some emoticons more frequently used than others?  Which ones do you think are examples of facework?
2. Can you think of other things that appear in text messages which indicate facework?
3. Why would you not use an emoticon in more formal on-line discourse (for instance, if you were applying for a job on-line)?