Phatic emoji of Javanese netizens in social media: a cyberpragmatics perspective on a creative communicative strategy
Abstract
The massive shift of communication culture from direct to virtual channels due to the COVID-19 pandemic affected virtual politeness performance. The limitation of physical expression in digital platforms encourages emojis to replace gestures, mimics, and other expressions. This study aims to describe the types of speech acts and the function of the emojis along with the performance of politeness strategies in the WhatsApp group of Javanese netizens. Understanding politeness performance through the use of speech acts and emojis in virtual communication provides insights into how universal emojis are specifically used in a particular culture and shows the creativity of emoji use in phatic communication. The virtual textual data were taken from five WhatsApp group’s with 174 Javanese members by observation method. The emoji that occurred in the conversational texts were classified based on the types of speech acts and their functions. The analysis was conducted within the cyberpragmatics framework. The findings showed that emojis were used in assertive speech acts, directive speech acts, expressive speech acts, and phatic speech acts. The functions were to emphasize meaning, clarify meaning, direct certain actions, express feelings, and establish social rapport. The research contributes to the development of cyberpragmatics as the current approach in pragmatics study. Moreover, the findings depicted the current phenomenon of social media communication on a cultural basis.
Keyword : cyberpragmatics, emoji, Javanese netizens, phatic communication, politeness, social media, WhatsApp
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Aull, B. (2019). A study of phatic emoji use in WhatsApp communication. Internet Pragmatics, 2(2), 206–232. https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00029.aul
Baltezarević, R. V., Kwiatek, P. B., Baltezarević, B. V., & Baltezarević, V. N. (2022). The meaning of silence in personal communication: Spiral of silence or a stimulant of creativity? Creativity Studies, 15(1), 58–73. https://doi.org/10.3846/cs.2022.11374
Bauler, C. (2019). Speech acts and cross-cultural pragmatics. In N. Erdogan & M. Wei (Eds.), Applied linguistics for teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse learners (pp. 223–239). Information Science Reference. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-8467-4.ch009
Braslauskas, J. (2021). Developing intercultural competences and creativity: The foundation for succesful intercultural communication. Creativity Studies, 14(1), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.3846/cs.2021.14583
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Studies in interactional sociolinguistics: Vol. 4. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085
Gunarwan, A. (2007). Pragmatik: Teori dan kajian Nusantara. Penerbit Universitas Atma Jaya.
Kissine, M. (2013). From utterances to speech acts. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511842191
Konrad, A., Herring, S. C., & Choi, D. (2020). Sticker and emoji use in Facebook Messenger: Implications for graphicon change. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 25(3), 217–235. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmaa003
Kreidler, Ch. W. (1998). Introducing English semantics. Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203265574
Li, L., & Yang, Y. (2018). Pragmatic functions of emoji in internet-based communication: A corpus-based study. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education, 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-018-0057-z
Locher, M. A. (2013). Review of Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context. Journal of Pragmatics, 47, 128–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.12.002
Poedjosoedarmo, S. (2017). Language propriety in Javanese. Journal of Language and Literature, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.v17i1.579
Rahardi, R. K. (2020). Konteks dalam perspektif cyberpragmatics. Linguistik Indonesia, 38(2), 151–163. https://doi.org/10.26499/li.v38i2.132
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1996). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Wiley-Blackwell.
Sudaryanto, S. (2015). Metode dan aneka teknik analisis bahasa: Pengantar penelitian wahana kebudayaan secara linguistis. Sanata Dharma University Press.
Šliogerienė, J., & Valūnaitė-Oleškevičienė, G. (2017). Evoking teacher creativity while using social media. Creativity Studies, 10(1), 84–96. https://doi.org/10.3846/23450479.2017.1306808
Widiana, Y., & Prajoko, D. A. (2021). Javanese virtual communication and its politeness performance in cyberpragmatics perspective. In E. M. Dukut (Ed.), Arts and entrepreneurship in language studies (pp. 153–168). Universitas Katolik Soegijapranata.
Widiana, Y., Sumarlam, S., Marmanto, S., Purnanto, D., & Zain Sulaiman, M. (2020). Intrusive busybody or benevolent buddy: Phatic communication among Javanese women. GEMA Online: Journal of Language Studies, 20(2), 36–56. https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2020-2002-03
Yus, F. (2011). Pragmatics and beyond new series. Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context (Vol. 213). A. Fetzer (Ed.). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.213