Emoticons are text-based graphicons built from characters and are frequently used in computer-mediated communication. Emoticons serve multiple functions ranging from expressing emotions (Kaye et al., 2016; Vidal et al., 2016; Yus, 2014) to signaling the intended meaning behind a message (Dresner & Herring, 2010; Yus, 2014). While the repetition of characters within emoticons, such as the mouth, is a common practice for achieving various pragmatic effects, there is a notable absence of dedicated analyses exploring these effects. Previous studies (Yus, 2005; Park et al., 2013) have briefly noted that lengthened emoticons indicate heightened intensity and emphasis, but further detailed research is needed.

This thesis investigates the contexts in which lengthened :) smile and :( frown emoticons occur and their functions, compared to their unlengthened counterparts. A corpus of texts was collected from Twitter, consisting of 1,831 emoticon tokens in order to identify the contexts in which unlengthened and lengthened emoticons appear. Additionally, seven focus groups involving 24 participants discussed some of these tokens, and their interpretations were qualitatively analyzed. Corpus analysis revealed that unlengthened smiles are more common in expressions of gratitude, and lengthened smiles in expressions of friendliness and closeness. And while unlengthened frowns are frequently used in questions, lengthened frowns appear more often in expressions of solidarity and support. Results from the focus groups confirmed that intensification is a major use of emoticon lengthening and identified additional functions. First, a lengthened emoticon can signal a higher degree of closeness between the user and the recipient than an unlengthened one. Furthermore, emoticons are known to enhance and modify tone and emotion, and lengthening can further modify these effects. Lengthening can also mitigate certain aspects of a message and influence its overall prosody. These findings illustrate that emoticon lengthening serves functions beyond intensification. Moreover, they suggest that the increasingly visual role of character repetition observed in written words (Brody & Diakopoulos, 2011; Kalman & Gergle, 2014; Lamontagne & McCulloch, 2017; Myslín & Gries, 2010) extends to emoticons as well.