Stance taking with ‘laugh’ particles and emojis – Sequential and functional patterns of ‘laughter’ in a corpus of German WhatsApp chats

Emojis and the performance of humour in everyday electronically-mediated conversation

“…With the growing success of emojis, researchers have also started to identify their possible use. Emojis perform different pragmatic functions (see Yus 2019), such as strengthening or mitigating speech acts (Herring and Dainas 2017), they have been linked to politeness and rapport (Sampietro 2019b;Aull 2019;Pérez-Sabater 2019;Al Rashdi 2018), have been considered structural markers of conversation (Gibson, Huang, and Yu 2018;König 2019;Sampietro 2016a), as well as sort of a pictorial language, especially when emojis are used to replace words (Azuma and Ebner 2008;Alshenqeeti 2016;Danesi 2016), even if their supposed universality has been put into doubt (Ge and Herring 2018;Sampietro 2016a).…”

“…Some emojis can be a multimodal way to perform laughter in EMC (König 2019), and, similarly to emoticons, they can also function as humour markers (Sampietro 2016a;Yus 2019;Al Rashdi 2018).…”

“…Another possibility is resorting to smiling and laughter, as in face-to-face communication (Attardo, Pickering, and Baker 2011;Glenn 2003). For instance, König (2019), studying a corpus of WhatsApp group chats written in German, found that the emojis "face with tears of joy" and "squinting face with tongue" were strictly related to some of the functions of laughter in face-to-face conversation. Using conversation analysis, this author observed that emojis contextualise different laughing stances, such as helping to distinguish between "laughing with" (shared laughter) and "laughing at" (teasing) contexts (Glenn 2003).…”

“…As ASCII emoticons are being gradually replaced by emojis (Pavalanathan and Eisenstein 2016), research on these pictographs is also shaped by the opinion that they add emotional content to electronicmediated messages. Linguistic research, on the contrary, drawing on real corpora, has found that emojis perform a wide range of pragmatics functions (see Yus 2019): they signal the illocutionary force of the utterance they are associated to (Herring and Dainas 2017); they can strengthen or mitigate different kinds of speech acts (Sampietro 2019b); contribute to the structuring of the conversation (Sampietro 2016a;König 2019); create rapport (Al Rashdi 2018;Pérez-Sabater 2019;Aull 2019); replace words (Siebenhaar 2018;Sampietro 2019a); and signal humour (König 2019;Sampietro 2016a).…”

Cómo hacer palabras con emojis: sustitución y enfatización visual de vocablos en WhatsApp

“…Juan señala que el "nerviosismo" por el encuentro se tiene que interpretar en broma (mensaje 5); su interlocutor responde reproduciendo gráficamente la risa (mensaje 6), para indicar que ha entendido y acepta el tono jocoso. Según un estudio reciente realizado sobre un corpus de chats de WhatsApp en alemán (König, 2019), el emoji face with tears of joy también se emplea conjuntamente con la interjección de la risa para indicar si se trata de una risa en respuesta a una afirmación humorística, mientras que si se utiliza al final de un mensaje (como en este ejemplo) señala preferentemente bromas o humor.…”