Emoticon and Textual Utterances on Facebook

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to examine the role of emoticon in FB discourse newlineand its relationship with the textual utterance on FB platform. The major aspects newlineconsidered to understand the role of emoticon is the illocutionary force of the textual newlineutterance and emotional aspects of emoticon. Other aspects of emoticon like newlineemoticon act as a politeness marker, and convey the tone of the communication is also newlineconsidered to understand the role this visual icon in association with textual utterance. newlineThe location of the study is Delhi and the age group considered for this study is youth age group of 15 to 29 year. Descriptive research design has been adopted. Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been considered for this study. The methodology adopted for this study has two distinct purposes, one to understand this phenomenon from the FB users newlinepoint of view based on their opinion about various aspects of emoticon. So survey newlinemethod was used for quantification of their opinion with the use of the questionnaires newlinetool. The survey data is collected from 450 youth participants from Delhi. 400 post newlineand 1575 responses generated by 170 Facebook users. The study is primarily qualitative in nature though researcher considered survey as one of the method but main ingredients of this study is FB discourse and multiple hidden factors that influence emoticon usage pattern. FB discourse considered for this study contained lot of localized words written in English alphabets hence the framework of the study may help future researcher to design better theoretical framework to overcome the limitation of existing theories. The observation drawn from the thesis concludes that the Indian user s usage pattern of emoticon is similar with the global phenomena. newline newline newline