Sharing emotions or/and making allies: the emoji’s interpersonal function in Chinese social media news comments

ABSTRACT

This article explores the semiotic capabilities of emoji in realizing attitude and building alignment via Chinese social media. The news comments section on Weibo is filled with readers’ evaluative responses, making it a suitable site for examining the interpersonal function of emoji. Drawing on appraisal, the analysis of emoji and emoji-text interactions in the news comments is associated with a car quality story. The findings show that a commenter’s position is contingently forged through the concordant or discordant coupling of ideation with attitude across language and emoji. Instead of construing particular attitude, some emoji serve as a bondicon featuring friendlies to convene readers around negative appraisal, irony or humor in the text. Besides, a few emoji perform a dual part of carrying evaluation and signaling membership in the comments. For Weibo news readers, the multifunctional emoji become a strategical tool of public participation in sociopolitical issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Emoji
• interpersonal function
• public participation
• Weibo news comments

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Correction

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her gratitude to the reviewers and Associate Editor of Social Semiotics for their illuminating and inspiring comments on the earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2023.2287867).

Notes

1 The ethics for digital data collection is largely ignored but needs attention. The easy and quick access to publicly available data from social media does not mean we have consent to use it for research. At my university, we are required to do an ethical review of consent to participate in research, including for projects that involve human subjects (who are reachable for reading the consent form and answering questions about it), and then to submit it for approval from the head of the Department of Linguistics and Translation. So it is critical to consider the necessity and contribution of using social media data to research and further discuss the feasible approach to dealing with the ethics for data collection and use.

2 按闹分配 (distribution according to troublemaking) is originated from 按需分配 (distribution according to one’s needs), which is part of the principle of distribution 各尽所能，按需分配 (from each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s needs) in the communist society.

3 二 (two) in Chinese spoken language means being stupid or naive when it is used to describe people (https://baike.baidu.com/item/二/13716551#viewPageContent). 哈 is short for 哈士奇 (Husky), so 二哈 is the nickname of Husky dog, which is depicted as a kind of stupid but cute pets.

4 各位，请问买车吗？让你花六十多万开不出4s店就漏油的那种。放心，我们有贴心的“售后服务”，买新车给你换发动机的那种 (Everyone, would you like to buy a car? The one that costs you over 600,000 and leaks oil before being driven out of the 4s dealership. Be relaxed, we offer a caring “after-sales service”, which replaces an engine for your newly-bought car)

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Juan He

Juan He is a Lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages at Jimei University, China and currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong, China. She has publications in Discourse & Communication, Discourse Context & Media and Media Culture & Society. Her research areas are Systemic Functional Linguistics, discourse analysis and news media development in China in online environments.