Role of Emoticons as Structural Markers in Twitter Interactions

ABSTRACT

Emoticons play a key role in digital written interactions. Since the 1980s research has highlighted their growing relevance, as they allow to convey increasingly rich emotional, social, and pragmatic information. This article contributes to this area of research by providing an analysis of emoticons as structural markers in Twitter interactions. Based on a large corpus of Italian tweets, mixed-effect models were used to investigate to what extent and how emoticons are used in this role and what variables most influence their use and their relationship with punctuation marks. Results indicate that emoticons often have the function of clause and sentence boundary marking, either replacing or integrating punctuation marks. Variables affecting their use included user’s age, emoticon type, and position within the tweets. In this role their use reveals the pursuit of coherent strategies in discourse organization.

Notes

1. By “emoticon,” where not otherwise specified, I refer in this study both to ASCII emoticons and to iconic emoji.

2. Tweets that start with a mention are often replies to other tweets, where the mention to the author of the original tweet is automatically added by the system. In these cases an emoticon immediately after an initial mention is the first element that the author inserts in the text.

3. A random slope for the variable “mastery of Twitter environment” was also included at the beginning of the model building process, but it was dropped since it was found not significant. The random effect variance of the individual authors (1.6523) is significant, and the model fits better if compared with a fit that ignores individual random effects (Akaike information criterion (AIC) = 3314.9; against AIC = 3628.1).