Emoji Usage and Interpersonal Relationship in Computer-Mediated Cmmunication

Based on 514 one-to-one chat corpus generated by 1028 interlocutors, this paper analyzed the way Chinese used emojis in computer-based communication (CMC) and explored whether interpersonal factors would affect people's emoji usage. The study found that people using emoji in instant messaging had formed certain customary features and preferences. People would concentrate on using a few emojis which occupied a large proportion of the total number of emojis used in daily communication. They were keen to use one type of emojis instead of multiple emojis at a time, and preferred to use emoji at the end of the turn or alone, and seldom put it at the beginning or middle of the turn. In addition, we found that different styles of emojis would affect the circumstances under which they appeared, which provided an angle for analyzing the usages and functions of different emojis. Studies also confirmed that as a key element of daily conversation, interpersonal relationships also influenced the way people used emoji in CMC. When communicating with people with higher intimacy, netizens tended to use more diverse and richer emojis; when users communicated with more alienated people, the types of emojisused were limited. In terms of the way to express information, compared with communicating with family members, close friends, classmates and colleagues, netizens were less likely to use emoji to convey information and more likely to use notional words in face of casual acquaintances, so as to avoid poor communication caused by different interpretations of emojis.