Abstract
The purpose of this study is to analyze the interactional achievement of emoji and other graphicons in WhatsApp communities created by and for school parents. Using a conversation analytic approach, 4824 messages written by 161 Mexican Spanish users, members of six different WhatsApp communities were examined in this study. The results show that task-oriented speech acts were the most common in this community of practice. Speech acts such as requests and responses to requests were mainly accompanied by graphicons. It was also observed that these speech acts formed adjacency pairs in which requests most often formed the first part of the sequence. It was also found that depending on the communicative purpose of the message and the type of speech act used, the graphicons functioned as either upgraders or mitigators. Graphicons also have the function of managing WhatsApp conversations by signalling conversational turns. Another finding revealed that standalone graphicons formed part of an adjacency system, replacing the verbal part of the message. Drawing on Locher and Watts’ (2005) relational work model, the analysis revealed that the interactional use of graphicons was influenced by the politeness rules of this community of practice.
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