Multimodal strategies for balancing formality and informality

Abstract

This paper investigates multimodal strategies for balancing formality and informality online. The analysis of 300 comment-reply interactions on a recipe sharing site in Japan demonstrates that writers tend to avoid being overly formal or informal in their messages. For example, most comments and replies are written in polite forms but many incorporate some plain forms and colloquial expressions. Linguistic features, however, are not the only way through which the writers manage an appropriate level of formality and informality. The study examines the role of kaomoji or Japanese-style emoticons for socio-relational work online. Some kaomoji function locally as cues for interpreting the sentences featuring kaomoji. All kaomoji, including those with local functions, work to enhance the social presence of the writers on the screen via pictographic gaze and gestures, which increases the perception of intimate rapport. The findings underscore the importance of a multimodal perspective in examining how people handle social relationships online.

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

“…Kaomojis were found to be most significantly negatively correlated to the decrease of SFPs. Although kaomojis developed into a complex sign system for meaning construal in the Japanese context (Kaneyasu, 2022), the kaomojis in our corpus were mainly used for emotion expression. As graphicons evolved and kaomoji were largely replaced on Bilibili by emojis and stickers, the functions of the new graphicons expanded beyond emotion expression (e.g.…”