Conventional Faces: Emoticons in Instant Messaging Discourse

This study investigated the emoticon in situ and attempted to examine emoticons in their own right as conventions of IM discourse, rather than comparing emoticons to Standard English (SE), written or spoken. We analyzed a corpus of naturally occurring IM conversations in order to uncover the conventions of emoticon use, including frequency, type, and placement. Our analysis illustrates that IM users access a shared body of knowledge about the types of emoticons they employ and also appear to rely on that body of knowledge to determine where they place emoticons within an utterance. We also suggest that examining the emoticon as a meaningful linguistic unit reveals that seemingly idiosyncratic uses of the emoticon may have rhetorical significance. We suggest that treating computer-mediated communication (CMC) as a language independent of SE is more generative toward theorizing CMC conventions. Knowledge of CMC conventions may help scholars and teachers to more fully understand adolescent literate practices.