A Study of the Syntactic Categorization of Emojis in Social Media Communication

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the functions of emojis as syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, phrases and sentences, etc. in social media communication. The rapid evolution in the field of social media communication urged the author to investigate emojis, used as a strategy to reconnoiter emojis as syntactically equivalent to words in social media communication (SMC). Computer-Mediated Discourse (CMDA) is an approach to research online behavior which is adopted as a framework for analyzing data, collected from a social media icon Twitter to find out the syntactic role of emojis in online text- based communication. This study follows a descriptive and qualitative research design in which the data will be analyzed and described thoroughly with a detailed description. According to CMDA, CMC users manipulate the grammatical rules to meet their communication needs which are analyzed in this study where various strategies such as omitting orthographic words to add graphic images, repeating the same emojis, mixing different emojis, etc. are used. The study showed that emojis performed different syntactic functions at both word and phrase level in text based social media communication. This study hopes to augment the knowledge in the field of SMC and CMC to persuade other researchers to conduct further studies in this area i.e., pragmatic use of emojis and use of emojis by social media users to convey intended meaning.