NAVIGATING THE POLITENESS STRATEGIES ON TWITTER IN PAKISTAN: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PUNCTUATIONS AND EMOJIS AS MARKERS

Abstract

Nonverbal elements of emojis and punctuations have crucial pragmatic roles in digital communication that balance the lack of tone and gesture. These visual and orthographic signs determine the ways the users express politeness, emotion and identity on such platforms as Twitter. The current study explores the use of emojis and punctuation marks as politeness strategies through Twitter in Pakistan and looks at differences in their application in various situations and themes. The 650 publicly available tweets were analyzed qualitatively in a pragmatic manner by the use of purposive sampling in order to gather the information. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory and Leech’s (2014) Politeness Principle were used to analyze the data with the help of the thematic coding as it is described by Braun and Clarke (2006). Findings indicated that emojis and punctuations are indicators of positive and negative politeness. Social situations were dominated by positive politeness and political texts with irony and mitigation. Emojis and punctuations serve as multimodal politeness resources, which indicate the multifaceted and hybrid Pakistan culture of digital communication.