Linguistic Features of Typographic Emoticons in SMS Discourse

With the flourishing of information technology in the last 50 years, electronic communication has become a significant part of our daily lives. As electronic language is written text, it is divorced from gestures, facial expressions, and prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and volume. That is why emoticons have entered cyberspace; they infuse electronic communication with an emotional, human touch. This paper deals with typographic emoticons as linguistic units, and observes their structures and uses in sentences. The research corpus covers 258 French text messages collected with anonym questionnaire around the years 2008 - 2009. After a graphic analysis of typographic emoticons, we define ―emoticon structure‖ as ―a pictogram-like unit formed with alphagrams and topograms of distinctive significative function, and visually conditioned to the referent‖. Morphological analysis has shown that, in emoticon structure, graphemes of entirely different significances and functions become morpheme-like units, which, like word morphemes, can be derivational, inflectional, or abbreviated, but never unbound. Relying on a corpus, we isolated the two main uses of the emoticon: non-verbal and verbal. The former is the more frequent use, so it is considered in more detail in this paper. Analysis has shown that emoticons are not only paraverbal devices, but also structural markers, and they play a significant role in the formation of the sentence.