Gli emoji e le dinamiche di faccia. Politeness e funzioni discorsive degli emoji in un corpus di conversazioni su WhatsApp

Emojis are frequently used in social media to enrich written verbal messages with typical components of face-to-face communication. Yet, emojis cannot be synchronous with the verbal message, but they have to be assigned to a specific sequential position on the verbal chain, thus carrying new functions that gestures are not able to express. This work aims at exploring the different functions of emojis in a corpus of 1711 emojis (in overall 10 WhatsApp conversations and 1986 messages). “Referential icons” and “Cultural icons” convey denotative or connotative functions, while “Diagrams” and “Anthropomorphic icons” display discursive, pragmatic and politeness functions. The long coding/decoding time in writing increases the facework: all the expressive acts in the corpus include at least one emoji. Significantly enough, the facework carried out by the emojis is always devoted to the co-construction of the Connection face.