The Roles of Emoticons as Multifunctional Communicative Devices

As a significant part of electronic communication, there is little argument that emoticons have changed, even revolutionized, the way people text online. Their swift, clever, but sometimes abstract and ambiguous nature is perfectly suited to modern-day people who are living in a fast-paced society but vulnerable to emotional pressure. It is commonly accepted that the first documented use of a smiley-face :-), along with a frowny face :-(, dates back to 1982 when computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman suggested that it be used to identify jokes on an online bulletin board for Carnegie Mellon Computer Science community (Krohn, 2004, p.321). By allowing online users to share emotion in an efficient and nuanced manner, emoticons have dramatically changed the nature of “electronic language” that was originally “divorced from gestures, facial expressions, and prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and volume” (Amaghlobeli, 2012, p.348). Although some language scholars, such as Provin…