The Use of Emojis in Students’ Email Messages: Functions and Purposes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55707/ds-po.v41i2.182Keywords:
emoji, communicative function, digital communication, e-mailAbstract
Emojis have become an indispensable and effective non-verbal tool for adding and marking the communicative tone of messages in young people’s online interactions. They are also appearing more and more frequently in emails from students to university professors. The aim of our study was to analyse the communicative functions, purposes and typology of emojis, based on a corpus of 564 emails from the students at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Organizational Sciences. The results indicate that the most commonly used emoji is the traditional smiley face, that students favour positive and cheerful emojis, and that these appear most often in requests and thank-you messages. The discourse analysis shows that emojis generally fulfil several functions. Primarily, they act as emotional and pragmatic markers that either emphasise or soften the intention of a message. Students use emojis to express their emotional state, soften the seriousness of a statement, add humour, create a friendlier and more informal communication, and strengthen interpersonal relationships. However, the analysis shows that emojis have little impact on the interpretation of the message, as they are often redundant and mainly serve to confirm an already expressed meaning.
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