#1 31Jan06 — A — Emoticons as a Lingual Convention

Emoticons in online communication, whether it's AIM, IRC, forums, or even email, are an excellent example of a language convention in a technological setting. In fact, emoticons make up a sort of conventional signaling system for the community of internet users.

Emoticons developed as a convention in online communication because of the associated problems with conveying emotions through hastily jotted text. Particularly in chat, where the user does not have time to sufficiently consider or edit their words in order to convey their intended emotion, it is very important that participants be able to quickly and intuitively indicate emotions to each other. Emoticons fill this need nicely: most of them require fewer than 4 keystrokes, and the most commonly used of them closely resemble the types of expressions they are meant to indicate. They certainly allow people who only have text interfaces to coordinate their understandings of the emotional content of each other's statements, and this makes them a very valuable convention since emotional intent is extremely important in building common ground (e.g. is "That's some 'stache!" sarcastic or sincere?).

Although they are a relatively young development in language emoticons have become fairly stable and regular. There are slight variations, such as noseless emoticons (compare ":-)" and ":)"). There are many exceptions to this, such as the drunk smiley ":*)", where the nose actually is the most vital part of the construction for communicating the desired point. Nonetheless, I would argue that in most cases where different constructions are used to indicate the same emotion the differences are superficial, such as with the dropping of noses, and so emoticons do display a great deal of consistency across their usage.

Another requirement Clark gives for conventions is that they be at least somewhat arbitrary. In keeping with Clark's examples of different greeting conventions in different cultures, I think it's useful to compare American and Japanese emoticons, which have developed in very different ways. Where an American might type ":-)", a Japanese person might type "( ^ ^ )": the only character these two constructions share is the ")", and they use it to indicate completely different parts of the face. It's also interesting to note that where American emoticons are meant to be read left to right, just like normal English text, Japanese emoticons are meant to be read vertically, just like a person's face in face to face conversation.

From all of the evidence of how emoticons have developed and are used, it seems they fit and support Clark's formulation of lingual conventions quite well. They are semi-arbitrary, consistent and well understood within communities, and efficient at solving the problem of how to convey emotion through text that lacks the subtlety of voice communication. If you're interested, here are lists of common and not-so-common (sometime completely in jest) Japanese and American emoticons.

~will out.