2 A Semiotic Analysis of Internet Emoticons . 4
2.1 Signs and Meaning.4
2.2 The Signifier and Cultural Borders4
2.3 Emoticons5
2.4 The Denotation of :).6
2.5 The Connotation of :).6
2.6 Myth.7

3 A Pragmatic Analysis of Internet Emoticons8
3.1 Verbal and Nonverbal Communication8
3.2 The Differences between Verbal and Nonverbal8
3.3 The Positioning of Emoticons10
3.4 Expressives.11
3.5 The Generation Process12
3.6 The Interpretation Process13
4 Conclusions.16
Bibliography18

1 Introduction
With the development of society and the progress of science and technology, people have been more used to communicating on the Internet. This type of communication relying on the Internet is network communication. In network communication, people usually do not exchange information and convey feelings and ideas through the sound language (here does not consider online video chat), but using a keyboard-input text sequence as the main carrier of information.

Internet emoticons have been used for at least 30 years in the network communication. Scott Fahlman was the first documented person to use the emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they can be used to express emotion. The text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982, was thought to have been lost, but was recovered 20 years later by Jeff Baird from old backup tapes.

Internet emoticons can be roughly divided into two classes, western style and Japanese style. Usually, emoticons in Western style have the eyes on the left, followed by nose and the mouth. The two character version :) which omits the nose is also very popular. Users from Japan popularized a style of emoticons that can be understood without tilting one’s head to the left, such as (*_*) and (")(-_-)(").

Apart from its interesting appearance, there hide more profound reasons in why Internet emoticon is so trendy. When people are communicating on the Internet, they cannot see each other’s face, so basically they cannot ensure they have fully understood what they say. For instance your colleague sent you an email saying he was happy as you did not come to work today. Maybe it’s just a joke between friends but you take it seriously because you didn’t notice the smiley in the end of the sentence. This is why we need Internet emoticons.

So far, there are many discussions and researches on the Internet emoticons in the academic circles, but very few of them write articles for studying Internet emoticons particularly.   

Up till now several domestic periodicals and magazines have published some articles about Internet emoticons and some books about general linguistics. Miao Fangfang (2006) briefly introduced the generation and development of the Internet emoticons. She thinks that the Internet emoticons have gone a development process from just punctuated expressions to pectoral network expressions and then to rich variety of network expression. He Haiyan (2007) talked about the design of the network expression. The article points out that in terms of transverse symbols like “:-)”, “:-{“, “<:I” were mainly produced in Europe and the United States and then swept the world, while the vertical visual symbols like “^0^”, “( ^-^ )” basically are popular in Japan, which is called emoji. Liang Yanbi (2006) elaborated the cultural connotation in detail with that kind of Internet emoticons.

A few scholars have done some research on Internet emoticons from the perspective of linguistics. Chen Xianghong and Li Changbao (2006) briefly mentioned network expression language when talking about nonverbal form, but no further discussion is held. Tang Shiyao (2006) fully discussed the configuration classification, rules and its characteristics of QQ emoticons. She made some simple explanations on QQ emoticons in terms of its function, but only on a low level. Ji Lihong (2006) did some research related to the definition of network language and the classification and characteristics of nonverbal symbols, but the nature of Internet emoticons and its causes were not revealed. 从语言学视角浅析网络表情符号英文论文(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_1062.html