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The process of generation and interpretation of emoticons is also essential for better understanding how emoticons work. There will be two Models to illustrate my point.
The communication between people is not only the exchange of information which is objective, but also the exchange of mental state which is subjective. In fact the exchange of information is always along with the emotional exchange. We all wish others can feel what we feel sometimes.
In the beginning of communication, the speaker is already in a certain state of mind. And this kind of state cannot be conveyed with text or image before it has been conceptualized and categorized. According to the Experience Philosophy, concept can be understood only through experience (Lakoff & Johnson 1999). When experienced mental state is conceptualized, it is categorized at the same time. Conceptualization and categorization are complementary. The conceptualization and categorization in fact is the encoding or imaging process of mental state. (It means you can now use language to express your metal state, including voice and text or in the form of pictures).
The point is the users of emoticons will go further, they will use a tool what we called metaphor to make their abstract mental state more specific. In other words, to use some interesting, vivid images to express their emotion and feeling, so this is the reason we see a variety of emoticons.
The whole process can be illustrated as follows:
3.6 The Interpretation Process
When Internet emoticons are sent by one side of the communicators, the other side of the communicators would have to make interpretation of these symbols. According to cognitive pragmatics theories, the process of interpreting the emoticons is shown as follows:
In the network communication, once either side receives emoticons, the first step he will do is to analyze and deduce the concept and meaning of these emoticons, combining with the context at that time. After that, through the process of encoding or imagining, the speaker will soon understand the semantic meaning of the emoticons. Then combining with their own experience, he will understand the pragmatic meaning expressed by these symbols.
In the middle of understanding the Internet emoticons, context plays an essential role. Because if an emoticon one sent is totally new or cannot be well understood by the recipient (just like we meet a new word as reading a book), usually he would have to rely on the communication context to derive its semantic concept and pragmatic meaning that you wanted to express.
According to the Association Theory, Context is a psychological construct (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). It is like a series of hypothesis existed in our brains, so context is also known as cognitive context. Cognitive context is a result of continually choosing in the middle of trying to fully understand each other. It also can be considered as re-building process for the recipient, and it is not pre-determined before the interpretation process.
During the rebuilding process of the cognitive context, the recipient will make use of encyclopedic knowledge, logic knowledge and language knowledge to help generate a context or hypothesis related to the dialogue information there and then. Therefore, the maximum similarity, between the words information extended by the speaker and understanding results received by the recipient, can only be realized if both sides’ cognitive context information or hypothesis are tending to unanimity, thus achieving the purpose of facilitating the exchange of ideas.
Li Jun (2001) analyzed the uniqueness of the nonverbal language for its context creating function, i.e. when we are not able to, unnecessary to, unwilling to or inappropriate to use oral language and written language, nonverbal language can convey the meaning and emotion with its unique context creating function. Likewise, the emoticons in network communication have the capacity to create context by means of graphics and animation etc. For instance, a little bunny is in a daze in front of a pile of books, then a virtual learning scenario is created, therefore regarding such emoticons, we need to derive and experience its meaning from the context it has created.