Les smileys : une nouvelle forme de ponctuation ?

Abstract

The text has been for centuries a means of communication between human beings. It is made up of words, sentences and punctuation that enrich the content and give a certain rhythm to the reading. However, the text underwent some evolutions recently from the handwritten textual communication to the electronic textual communication. Among the results of this changeover: the appearance of a specific procedure called smileys. The latter are in the form of a smiley face made of a combination of typefaces like :- ) or a small graphic image like . In this essay, we will try to locate the smileys in the text and analyze their role in the electronic textual communication in order to determine their place as a linguistic tool. This is why it is necessary to find what functions they occupy to compare them with the functions of the traditional written or oral tools. Therefore, we think that the system of punctuation seems the closest to smileys. Through the analysis of a corpus consisting of several messages from three electronic modes of communication (chat, forum and blog), we will try to determine if it is possible to classify the smileys in the grammatical category of punctuation.