From compensation to competition: The impact of graphicons on language use in a Chinese context

Abstract

This study examines the impact of graphicons (emoticons, emojis, and stickers) on the use of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Chinese based on a 13-year longitudinal corpus of 941,020 comments posted on the popular Chinese social media platform Bilibili. Quantitative analysis shows that graphicon frequencies increase while SFP frequencies decrease over time, and that the correlation between these two trends is statistically significant. However, the more an SFP encodes a grammatical function or has a negative connotation, the less likely it is to be replaced by graphicons. Qualitative analysis suggests that the relationship between graphicons and SFPs is evolving from syntagmatic, where the two co-occur in the same sentence, to paradigmatic, where either can fulfill the function of expressing (positive) attitude or sentiment. This suggests that the functions of graphicons are shifting from compensation to competition with language, as an alternative to SFPs.