Chapter Two   Literature Review 4

2。1 Systemic-functional Linguistic 4

2。2 Multimodal Discourse Analysis 5

2。3 Other researches on emoticon 5

Chapter Three   Theoretical Foundation 7

3。1 Intersemiotic Complitemtarity 7

3。1。1  Ideational Intersemiotic Complementarity 7

3。1。2  Interpersonal Intersemiotic Complementarity 8

3。1。3  Compositional Intersemiotic Complementarity 9

3。2 The Grammar of Visual Design 9

Chapter Four   Analysis of Emoticon 10

4。1 Cohesion: the ideational intersemiotic complementarity of emoticon 10

4。2 Interaction: the interpersonal intersemiotic complementarity of emoticon 11

4。2。1   Content 12

4。2。2   Modality 13

4。3 Information Value: the compositional intersemiotic complementarity of emoticon 14

4。4  Discussion 16

Chapter Five   Conclusion 20

5。1 Major findings of the study 20

5。2 Limitations of the study 20

5。3 Prospects for further researches 20

References 22

Chapter One  Introduction

1。1 Research Background

    In recent years, with the popularity of Internet, network has been applied in all fields of people’s life。 One of its significant features is that network has changed people’s life, which includes people’s mind, life style, ways of communication and so on。 On the Internet, we communicate, negotiate and cooperate with others via computer-mediated communication (CMC)。 And as a branch of CMC, instant messaging（IM）, a popular form of electronic communication, is greatly favored by the public in virtue of its timeliness, visualization, variety and practicability, such as QQ, Wechat, Twitter, which has manifested as part of the daily words used in friends conversing, inter group information exchanging, business collaborating, and many other social groups who want to break the temporal and spatial communicative constraints。 What’s more, by the end of June in 2016, as China Internet Network Information Center( CNNIC) reported, the biggest scale of Chinese internet users is about instant messaging, which involves 642 million members and has 90。4 percent utilization。 From the data it can be seen that instant messaging has been an indispensable part of internet users’ daily life。 (see figure 1)论文网

    Samovar has said that “The most experts thought, in face to face communication, only 35% social content of information was verbal behavior and others were transmitted by nonverbal behavior。 ”(Samovar et al, 1981:155) And another American psychologist, Albert Mehrabian, has proposed the 7%-38%-55% Rule, which also illustrated the importance of nonverbal behavior, or nonverbal sign。 Since people communicated via instant messaging were not required to converse face to face, emoticon, a pictorial representation of a facial expression, to an extent, can replace the body language in real life, which can enhance the effectiveness of information expression,