Pragmatic Potential of Shaping the Communicative Tonality in the Emoji-Accompanied Text Messages (on the Example of Public Pages in the VKontakte Social Network)

The relevance of the issues considered in the article is determined by the constant expansion and deepening of communicative connections between the addressee and the addresser in the 21st century. Communication, including the transfer and perception of information based on a common system of signs, acquires new semantic and semiotic configurations. One of them is the use of emoji in the presentation of discursive material. The purpose of the study is to determine the functions of emoji in the creolized text messages; to study and analyze the pragmatic potential of using emoji in the SMM content of public pages in the social network; to detail the implicitness of the “text + emoji” link and to prove its functional and pragmatic influence on the addressee; to consider the role of emoji in establishing social relations between recipients. The article examines a corpus of 100 messages in public pages on the VKontakte social network including semiotically complicated texts. The scientific novelty lies in the comprehensive linguistic and pragmatic study of emoji functions in polymodal text communication; identification of emoji functioning mechanisms in modern digital discourse; enrichment of the understanding of colour semiotics in electronic interaction. Attention is focused on the fact that due to their wide pragmatic potential, emoji in creolized text messages affect their perception and interpretation by the recipient. The article concludes that emoji contribute to a more accurate transmission of emotions, intonations and semantic accents while their colour and semantic characteristics, positioning in the text, play an important part in the formation of the communicative tonality of SMM messages. The author summarizes that the use of coloured pictograms contributes to creation of a more expressive, attractive and effective digital verbal content with broad functional and pragmatic possibilities.