Multimodal humor in emoji-mediated emotive communication

Abstract

Drawing on the features of sociality, mobility, and multimodality, the researcher presents emoji-mediated discussions among 43 university students in a Facebook group. The results of discourse-pragmatic analyses show the participants’ frequent use of expressive and representative communicative acts and various types of multimodal humor, alongside laughing and thinking emojis. Utterance-final face emojis and other affective expressions have particularly been employed to make communicative moves and construct humorous discourses. This article discusses expressive and playful potentials of emojis in computer-mediated communication. This study may help to understand the impacts which social media are having on the students’ development of digital literacy and affective linguistic practices.