Abstract
Emoticons are widely spread on the whole Internet. Although emoticons are said to express primarily emotions, they may have other additional functions as well, e.g. highlight the most important word in the text, detect irony, or substitute punctuation.
This paper analyses the use of emoticons in tweets posted during a non-linguistic conference. Our analysis is based on 573 tweets containing the hashtag #nmi14.
Emoticons were used in a quarter of all tweets. The content analysis shows that emoticons were used mainly in tweets concentrated on personal relations, thanks, and prize competition.
On the other hand, the lowest frequency of emoticons had tweets with conference paper comments. These findings correspond with predictions that emoticons occur mainly in socio-emotional context. (Derks - Bos - von Grumbkow, 2007) The pragmalinguistic analysis focuses firstly on the integration of emoticon into tweets, i.e. their position in the text and the integration of their meaning into it, secondly on the function of emoticons, especially the substitution punctuation.
Our data contained Western emoticons (e.g. :)), two Eastern emoticons (surprising o.O, upset >.<) and one emoticon picture (<3). The most popular emoticon was :) which corresponds with findings from big data set of tweets. (Park - Baek - Cha, 2014) The whole set of Western emoticons was limited to five types with a rather settled meaning.
The comparison of emoticons with/without nose shows a higher frequency of variants without nose. Our data also show the gender difference in using emoticons.
This paper shows findings of the complex analyses of emoticon used in tweets. Despite of the formal conference setting emoticons occurred in all context types of tweets.
It may indicate that emoticons are integral to these types of computer-mediated communication.