Emoticons, Smileys and Emojis as Politeness Strategies in Facebook Messages

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Communications - Interpersonal Communication, grade: 2,0, University of Regensburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seminar, language: English, abstract: Of course, oral conversation is not going to extinct because of the enormous increase of the usage of (online) message services, but nevertheless: many conversations that would have been taken place orally in face-to-face communication before the invention of the Internet, are nowadays often relocated to the medial text layer. Short phone calls or personal chats are decreasing in their frequency in favour of SMS and text messages via WhatsApp and Facebook. When we keep in mind that more and more conversations take place on a textual basis, we come across the question if linguistic theories, like Brown and Levinson's, can be applied to digital conversations as well.

This paper deals with this particular question and will prove that politeness strategies can also be found in written communication. Since it is not possible to transfer facial expressions or gestures of the sender via messages, smileys, emoticons, and emojis are created and they can also act as politeness strategy markers. This term paper will focus on Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies and explain that the principles of their thesis can also be found in Facebook text messages.