Although emoticons have arisen since the late 1990s, nearly after 2008 we saw their use, and use of the emoticon was increased hugely。 “Some Scholars seem to agree that emoticons are graphic signs which are used to indicate an emotional state (Rezabek & Cochenour, 1995; Raymond, 1996; Wolf, 2000; Derks, Bos, & Grumbkow, 2007; Derks, Bos, & Grumbkow, 2008)。 ”It is obvious that the emergence of emoticons meets the needs of modern people’s emotional expression。 And this kind of emerging communication phenomenon also causes wide attention in academic world。 However, there are few related academic researches and experiments in domestic and overseas researches。 And most of them are mainly focused on its appearance, structure and function but rare researches discuss about emoticons from linguistic angle。 

    It is found that the researches of emoticons at abroad are mainly concentrated on quantitative study to analyze the function of perceiving information in emoticon use, and it is often based on the basic emoticons in E-mail whereas a few researchers choose IM as media。 And as for the domestic study, most of them analyze emoticons from a nonverbal sign angle, which focuses on its symbolic function but lacks elucidating its cognitive process。 Therefore, this study will be based on prior studies and begin with the instant messaging to explore the cognitive process of emoticon in discourse and investigate the internal mechanism of its expressing way。

1。2 Research Purpose

    The overall purpose of the present study is to analyze the internal mechanism of emoticon use in instant messaging discourse and illustrate the cognitive process of emoticon, and provides a complete theoretical framework for relative researches。文献综述

    There are many studies of emoticons from different perspectives such as intercultural communication, semeiology, social psychological and so on。 However, as an extension of traditional facial expression on the Internet, emoticon plays a marginal role in linguistics。 And the present study will explore the reason of emoticon’s popularity from linguistic perspective assisted with Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity and Kress’ visual grammar,which can promote the development of linguistic study from a new way。

1。3 Thesis Outline

    The present study begins with the popularity of emoticons in instant messaging and introduces the background, motivation and objective of the thesis。 Chapter two reviews the literature in the field of intersemiotic complementarity, visual grammar, multimodal discourse analysis, systemic-functional linguistic and previous researches on emoticon to contextualize the present study。

    And chapter three will project the theoretical foundation for present study from three aspects。

    Chapter four analyzes emoticon from ideational complementarity, interpersonal complementarity and compositional complementarity and focuses on cohesion, interaction and layout in each part。 Then it will discuss the cognitive process of emoticon in terms of the results derived from the analysis。

    Finally, chapter five formulates the major findings, limitations and prospects of the present study。