ABSTRACT
Research on online extra-linguistic signs such as emoticons has tended to examine how they are used as substitutions for those verbal and visual cues which are missing in computer-mediated, text-based interaction. Some research has extended this inquiry to examine how these signs can index politeness and pragmatic intention. The majority of the literature looks at these extra-linguistic signs in the context of one-to-one interactions as in email or chatroom exchanges. They are, however, not just limited to direct interactions and dialogues. There is a place for these so-called semasiographic signs to be used outside of the boundaries mentioned above and within monologues and narratives. The use of these extra-linguistic signs within such contexts therefore does not fit with the assumptions made about them in the balk of the literature—which suggests that they merely fill in the blanks left by the absence of nonverbal cues online. The function and use of emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji in blog-post narratives or in one-to-many online platforms, where no specific reader is targeted, have largely been underrepresented in the current research literature.
