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A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of English Emoticons of COVID-19 from the Perspective of Visual Grammar

Ting Zhu

Abstract


As a special kind of language symbols for communication, English emoticons of COVID-19 have played an important role in the people’s communication on the Internet in the pandemic era. Scholars have studied the definition, development, classifications and meaning of emoticons and achieved great success. But few people analyze the meaning of emoticons of COVID-19 from the perspective of visual grammar. Therefore, this paper will select some symbolic English emoticons of COVID-19 and analyze their representational meaning, interactional meaning and compositional meaning in terms of their representational methods, shots, angles, information value, salience and frames. The study reveals that most of the sample emoticons vividly present people’s life disturbed by COVID-19 and express emoticon producers’ determination to fight against COVID-19 by adopting the narrative representation, a close or medium shot, a frontal angle, the salience of images and a weak frame.

Keywords


Emoticons; Visual grammar; Multimodal discourse analysis; COVID-19

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18686/ahe.v7i3.7204

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