FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF EMOJIS IN WHATSAPP INTERACTION AMONG OMANIS A

244 Pages·2015·5.09 MB·English

FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF EMOJIS IN WHATSAPP INTERACTION AMONG
OMANIS

A Dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
of Georgetown University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in
 Linguistics

By

Fathiya Al Rashdi,
 M.S.

Washington, DC

June
 16,
 2015
Copyright
 2015
 by
 Fathiya Al Rashdi

All
 Rights
 Reserved

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FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF EMOJIS IN WHATSAPP INTERACTION
AMONG OMANIS
Fathiya Al Rashdi, M.S.
Thesis Advisor: Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the forms and functions of emojis as used by Omani men and
women friends and relatives in messages exchanged on the Instant Messaging application
called WhatsApp. Emojis, or “picture characters,” are a recent development, extending
what before were just emoticons that use ASCII characters to represent facial
expressions. The data consisted of naturally occurring WhatsApp conversations taken
from one male-only and one-female only WhatsApp groups. The analysis shows that 121
emoji forms were used in both groups. Some of these emojis appeared only or
predominantly in one group but not in the other, reflecting gender differences. In
addition, similar to previous studies on emoticons, women were found to use more emojis
than men.
Through the analysis of many excerpts including various emojis, the study
demonstrates that emojis do not mainly serve as indicators of users’ emotions; rather they
serve many other communicative functions. They can serve as indication of approval or

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disapproval of others’ messages, responses to expressions of thanks and compliments,
conversational openings and closings, indications of celebration and excitement, and
indications of the fulfillment of a requested task, contextualization cues, substitutes for
lexical items, and indexical signs. The study also examines the forms and functions of
repetition of emojis, which was a ubiquitous phenomenon in the data. These forms were
found to serve various functions such as indicating intensity of emotions, displaying
enthusiasm and excitement, indicating insistence, showing solidarity, and adding
emphasis or highlighting a certain part of an utterance. The analysis also shows how
through repetition over a long period of time, a particular emoji takes on meanings that it
might not have in any other contexts outside the WhatsApp group in which it was used.
This study contributes to the scholarly literature on computer-mediated discourse
in general, on Arabic computer-mediated discourse in particular, and on the forms and
functions of emojis, a recently introduced, increasingly common, and little-studied
feature of computer-mediated discourse.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First and foremost, I owe my deepest gratitude to my mentor, Deborah Tannen,
who devoted countless hours to discuss, advise, and offer comments on multiple drafts of
each chapter and even proofread for my non-native speaker interference. She gave
invaluable feedback and kept tabs on the progress I was making at every stage, and was
always available to meet, answer questions, and provide immediate detailed feedback on
drafts. I will always be grateful for her patience, her confidence in me (as shown when
she invited me to guest lecture in her classes), and her caring (as when she concluded her
emails by reminding me to step out under the sun and not to skip meals). Professor
Tannen, I have been honored to be your student; you will always be a source of
inspiration for me.
I am also very grateful to my readers, Professors Heidi Hamilton and Jennifer
Sclafani, for their insightful comments on the pre-final draft of this study, and to Dr.
Cynthia Gordon, who read and offered comments on a draft, even though she had no
official role on my committee. I wish to thank Dr. Hamilton as well for having served as
my advisor in prior years. Her teaching and advice have played an important role in
shaping my thinking about language. She has always been available to respond to my
questions and concerns about many things throughout my PhD journey. I am also
indebted to every faculty member and to fellow graduate students in the Department of
Linguistics at Georgetown, who have contributed in one way or another to making my
past five years of graduate school an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

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I would also like to offer special thanks to the participants in this study who so
generously agreed to provide me with their WhatsApp conversations. I am particularly
grateful to many members in the female group, who have kept encouraging and
supporting me, even from afar.
A good support system is vital to surviving and staying sane in graduate school. I
was fortunate to have great and caring friends without whom I would not have been able
to survive the long and daunting journey toward a PhD. I am very grateful to Mashael Al
Aloula, Hana Jan, and Hanan Al Kindi who have gone above and beyond the call of just
being a friend by always being there when I needed them. I will forever cherish those
shared moments of joy, laughter, and tears. I am also indebted to my friends: Rana
Tabishat, Enas Al Zaghal, and Maryam Al Hinai.
Finally, I am indebted to my family for their persistent love and support. I am
particularly grateful to my parents for their constant love, pride, and faith in me. I am also
grateful to my sister Bahia without whom I would not have been able to be away from the
family to pursue a PhD degree for five years. Thank you for everything you have done
for me, for our parents and for our sisters. I could not ask for a better sister and friend.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1

1.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1

1.2 Background Information ........................................................................................ 3

1.2.1 Emojis ............................................................................................................. 3

1.2.2 Oman ............................................................................................................... 5

1.2.3 WhatsApp Messenger ..................................................................................... 7

1.3 The Study ............................................................................................................. 10

1.3.1 Participants .................................................................................................... 11

1.3.2 Data Collection ............................................................................................. 12

1.3.3 Data Analysis ................................................................................................ 15

1. 4 Preview of the Chapters ...................................................................................... 17

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................... 21

2.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 21

2.2 Research on Nonlinguistic Features of Computer-Mediated Discourse .............. 24

2.3 Research on Arabic Computer-Mediated Discourse ............................................ 30

2.4 Emoticons in Computer-Mediated Discourse ...................................................... 39

2.4.1 Emoticons: Origin, Forms and Definitions ................................................... 39

2.4.2 Research on Emoticons ................................................................................. 42

2.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 52

CHAPTER THREE: FORMS, FREQUENCY AND PLACEMENT OF EMOJIS ......... 54

3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 54

3.2 The Forms and Frequency of Emojis ................................................................... 55

3.2.1 People ............................................................................................................ 56

3.2.2 Nature ............................................................................................................ 76

3.2.3 Objects ........................................................................................................... 84

3.2.4 Food and Drink ............................................................................................. 92

3.2.5 Symbols ........................................................................................................ 95

3.3 Gender Differences and Emoji Use .................................................................... 96

3.4 Emoji Placement ................................................................................................ 100

3.5 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 103

CHAPTER FOUR: COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS OF EMOJIS ......................... 106

4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 106

4.2 The Functions .................................................................................................... 108

4.2.1 Indicating Emotions .................................................................................... 108

4.2.2 Indicating Approval or Disapproval ........................................................... 113

4.2.3 Emojis as a Response to Thanking and Compliments ................................ 120

4.2.4 Signaling Openings and Closings of Conversations ................................... 123

4.2.5 Indicating Celebration ................................................................................. 133

4.2.6 Emojis as Indicators of Fulfilling a Requested Task .................................. 143

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4.2.7 Emojis as Contextualization Cues .............................................................. 147

4.2.8 Substituting for Lexical Items ..................................................................... 157

4.2.9 Emojis as Indexical Signs ........................................................................... 164

4.3 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 168

CHAPTER FIVE: REPETITION OF EMOJIS: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS ............. 169

5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 169

5.2 Literature Review ............................................................................................... 170

5.3 Forms and Functions .......................................................................................... 174

5.3.1 Repetition of the Same Emoji in the Same Turn ........................................ 174

5.3.2 Repetition of the Same Emojis by the Same User Across Multiple Turns . 178

5.3.3 The use of an emoji and its equivalent lexis in the same turn .................... 187

5.3.4 The Repetition of Emojis by Multiple Users Across Turns ........................ 190

5.3.5 Repetition of the Same Emoji Over a Long Period of Time ....................... 193

5.4 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 215

CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION ................................................................................... 217

6.1 Forms, Frequency and Placement of Emojis ..................................................... 217

6.2 Communicative Functions of Emojis................................................................. 221

6.3 Repetition of Emojis: Forms and Functions ...................................................... 222

REFRENCES .................................................................................................................. 225

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction
This study examines the forms and functions of emojis as used by Omani men and
women friends and relatives in messages exchanged on the application called WhatsApp,
an Instant Messaging application that is very popular in the Middle East. Emojis are
colorful pictures representing many entities that exist around us in addition to facial
expressions. Therefore, emojis are more complex and varied than their predecessors,
emoticons, which are made of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange) characters to represent facial expressions.
In the last few decades, and with the prevalence of various computer-mediated
communication technologies, emoticons have been widely used, especially by young
generations in their daily online interactions. They are used in almost every online
communication channel, such as forums, emails, Instant Messages (IM), Facebook,
Twitter and countless other digital platforms. Their popularity among users makes them
unique and has attracted scholarly attention (e.g., Rezabek
 and Cochenour 1998; Walther
and D’Addario 2001; Dresner and Herring 2010). Many of these studies have been
conducted in the field of social psychology and have focused on emoticons as indicators
of emotional states; they have specifically examined the effect of emoticons on the
interpretation of textual messages they accompanied in emails (e.g.,Thompsen and
Foulger 1996; Rezabek and Cochenour 1998), online chat and Instant Messaging (e.g., Ip
2002; Garrison et al. 2011; Derks, Bos, and von Grumbkow 2007), website message

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boards (Provine, Spencer, and Mandell 2007), and text messaging (Amaghlobeli 2012;
Tossell et al. 2012). Others have focused on gender differences in emoticon use
(e.g.,Wolf 2000; Huffaker and Calvert 2005). Of all these studies, only a small number
have focused on how emoticons are used in naturally occurring online interactions, and of
those, very few are conducted by linguists such as Dresner and Herring (2010), Skovholt,
Grønning and Kankaanranta (2014), and Vandergriff (2014).
In addition, the majority of these studies are on the English language although a
few were conducted on the Japanese language (e.g., Katsuno and Yano 2007) and other
European languages, such as Amaghlobeli (2012) on French, and Skovholt, Grønning and
Kankaanranta (2014) on Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish. This practice accords
with Danet and Herring 's (2007) assertion that most computer-mediated communication
(CMC) literature has focused on CMC practices of English speakers and neglected the
developments of online communication among other populations speaking other
languages. There are some studies on the Arabic language, none of which has been
conducted on emoticon use in CMC.
Emojis are a recent development, extending what before were just emoticons.
They have been largely neglected in the literature and their usage and functions have not
received attention. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, no research has been
conducted on the use of emojis on WhatsApp. Thus, this study proposes to fill these gaps
by providing a linguistic understanding of how emojis are used in actual online
conversations by examining interactions that took place in Arabic on WhatsApp. It will
also extend the study of emoticons to include a wide range of emojis in addition to the

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