A general narratology

Abstract

of this chapter. The rise of visual language is one of the most typical characteristics of the age of the electronic global village with the frequent use of emoji in internet-based communication being so common nowadays. However, to date there has been a lack of thorough analyses of the emoji system, despite the study of visual communication being an important research trend in many fields such as semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis and conversation analysis. So to speak, this book is quite pioneering since it is the first publication that systematically studies emoji from a semiotic perspective. Undoubtedly, this is its most striking feature. It is worthy of careful reading for the following reasons. Firstly, this book gives a thorough semiotic and linguistic analysis of the system of emoji covering aspects from both its forms and its lexicons, both its practice and its competence, both its core representation and its variation. Secondly, this book gives a detailed discussion of emoji, which employs appropriate linguistic and semiotic terms and at the same time keeps its nontechnical style so as to provide an easy-to-understand book for both general readers and researchers in related fields. Thirdly, this book does not only answer pertinent semiotic questions about emoji, but also raises questions that will stimulate readers to think further about the significance and complexities of the emoji system. This is an impressive, book, which will be of great interest to scholars doing semiotic research of emoji as well as general readers.