Laughing Online: A Morpho-Semantic Study on Typed Laughter-Derived Expressions Used in Hijazi Twitter and WhatsApp Instant Messages

Al-Jahdali, Najah Ali

doi:10.5296/ijl.v14i4.20160

Cited by 2 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…going to movies, talking about celebrity news, etc. Consequently, this study supports Hypothesis (3) in that all the online conversations in this study have met the systematic structure of face-to-face communication and the use of emojis helped packing up the absence of nonverbal cues and gestures. It also agrees with (Gaspar et al, 2015(Gaspar et al, , 2016 in that the use of emojis is related to interpersonal relationships in that more specific and vivid emojis are used in groups where participants are more compassionate and intimate about a particular topic.…”

Section: You Will Like It Inshallah (If God Wills It)supporting

confidence: 81%

“…As a result, the study will refer to all the emojis used by Saudi mothers that are never used by their young daughters as Saudi mom emojis peculiar to this study. 3 The third aspect aims at finding the kind of topics discussed among those mothers and their daughters, their relation with each other, the variety used, the style used, and whether their online communication approximates the systematic conversation of everyday face-to-face situations that are accompanied by the emojis used and their meanings in the digital text.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/opinions/2015/02/12/why-moms-love-emoji/ 2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/opinions/2015/02/12/why-moms-love-emoji/3 It is to be noted that there might be other emojis that were not collected in this study due to the limited number of WhatsApp groups and the collected data.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are You Emojically a Mom? Age, Social Role, and Emojis in Saudi Mother-daughter WhatsApp Groups

Al-Jahdali

2023

IJLLT

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This descriptive linguistic study aims to check the effect of age (old/young) and social role (mother/daughter) on the kind of emojis and their intended meanings that Saudi mothers use while chatting with their daughters. The data has been collected from twenty Saudi mother-daughter WhatsApp groups’ chat interactions. The study is qualitative in its approach and has used computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) of ‘coding and counting’ (Herring 2004) on (58 screenshots) and has revealed (42 emoji types) of Saudi mothers used in different frequencies. A combination of multi-choice and open-ended questionnaires has been tailor-made to arrive at the subjective perspectives of ninety Saudi young females. The findings show that there are variations in the kind of emojis used and their intended meanings, signaling the two generations and social roles apart. The results signaled (7 Saudi mom emoji types) that are never used by Saudi young females at all. These emojis were found to be age-specific and social role specific. The rest of the emojis (35 emoji types) were found to be used by both groups but with differences in usage and intended meanings, marking again the differences in age and social role. Despite variations of emojis and their meanings, there were many factors that helped youngsters to understand the intended meanings of their mother’s emojis: the accompanying text, frequent chatting with their mothers, and the literal representation of the emojis their mothers used. Even though accommodation is the process Saudi young females developed in order to understand their mother’s emojis and their intended meanings, there were minor misunderstandings found. The reason has been attributed to what has been termed in this study as the ‘emoji gap’ that marks the effect of age and social role (Evans 2015, 2017; White 2017; Marko 2022). Saudi mother-daughter WhatsApp conversations revealed that they are approximate to the structure of face-to-face conversation in relation to their back-and-forth quasi-synchronous messages, topics discussed, the informal style, the intimate relation, and the Saudi dialects used accompanied with related emojis that agree with the content of the digital texts. In this study, emojis are proved to be a visual language that mirrors its users in relation to their age and social role in digital text.

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Section: You Will Like It Inshallah (If God Wills It)supporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are You Emojically a Mom? Age, Social Role, and Emojis in Saudi Mother-daughter WhatsApp Groups

Al-Jahdali

2023

IJLLT

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“…Emojis, the successors of emoticons, have become so widespread in online interaction, and that is the reason why Evans (2017) refers to them as the 'new universal language'. In a study made on the first large-scale emoji used by the University of Michigan (2017) 3 , it was found that Face with Tears of Joy (…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emojis on Board: The Communicative Functions of Emojis in Saudi Females’ WhatsApp Groups’ Interactions

Al-Jahdali

2023

IJLLT

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This study examines the communicative functions of emojis as used by Saudi females aged between (35-55) in twenty-five female-only WhatsApp groups’ instant messages. These groups are chosen according to five different social purposes for which the group is created: sisterhood-related, close friendship-related, relatives-related, religion-related, and workplace-related. The data has been collected through screenshots of WhatsApp conversations naturally occurring between the females in these groups. The method used for checking the types of emojis and their frequencies is based on computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) of ‘coding and counting’ (Herring 2004). All the different emojis were coded and counted and then were put to qualitative analysis on theories and methods of interactional sociolinguistics (IS) such as (Gumperz 1982; Dressner and Herring 2010). Results show that emojis have been used to express various kinds of emotions such as happiness, sadness, longing for old days, etc. Furthermore, they have been used to express different communicative functions of what Gumperz (1982) refers to as ‘contextualization cues’ such as congratulation on happy occasions, agreeing on others’ comments, compliments, sharing information with others, gratitude, sending prayers, reminding the members of religious tasks, laughing, arguing, etc. The results also prove that emojis are context-dependent and are used to help users to approximate real daily face-to-face situations to others and to facilitate the different expressed emotions and communicative functions to receivers (Dressner and Herring 2010; Evans 2017).

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Laughing Online: A Morpho-Semantic Study on Typed Laughter-Derived Expressions Used in Hijazi Twitter and WhatsApp Instant Messages

Cited by 2 publications

References 18 publications

Are You Emojically a Mom? Age, Social Role, and Emojis in Saudi Mother-daughter WhatsApp Groups

Are You Emojically a Mom? Age, Social Role, and Emojis in Saudi Mother-daughter WhatsApp Groups

Emojis on Board: The Communicative Functions of Emojis in Saudi Females’ WhatsApp Groups’ Interactions

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