emoticons

[Drew Danielson]

"Sonja L. Lanehart" wrote:
>
> I don't know if this issue has been raised on the ADS list before,
> but I had a question from one of my graduate students in the History
> of the English language class. He wanted to know if emoticons (e.g.,
> :) or ;) or :( etc.) could be viewed as a change to the graphic
> system of English. I wasn't so sure about that since they seem to
> function on a couple of different levels when assessing meaning and
> their physical existence. Any thoughts or ideas about where these fit
> in the history of the English language?     --Sonja

I wrote about this in a term paper for a discourse analysis class last
semester (well, more broadly about a variety of genre-defining features
from samples of synchronous and asynchronous CMC, but emoticons were
part of it).  I think that at this point in time they are
genre-specific, and only appear outside of text-based CMC in writing
that refers to or imitates CMC (I have seen a few print and TV ads that
uses them, but it's obvious from context they are meant to imitate
text-based CMC).  They are definitely a novel orthographic feature, but
IMH(student)O they barely exist outside of the genre that they
originated in.  I don't see them as representing a wholesale change in
orthography; they are still pretty much a genre-specific feature.

Also, they are not variety-specific - "computer talkers" use them
whether their writing in English or another language.