The Indirect Speech Acts of College and University Students' Meant Intentions in Social Media Communication

摘要

Communication in social media does not necessarily take place by making use of words. Words in written form, texts in social media communication are often combined with images. This qualitative descriptive study addresses young people's meant intentions by interacting using emoji in posts and comments in social media. To obtain the data, 150 set of questionnaires were distributed, filled out and then gathered from 68 students of a college and a university in Surabaya. The results of the investigation revealed that sometimes they reacted using emoji in social media for different reasons with the emoji's apparent meaning. Thus, the emoji as the indirect speech acts they used to communicate in the social media revealed their various true meant intentions. The use of emoji in social media nowadays has been serving more than that of its well-known purpose.