Digital tildes (“∼”) may convey more: analyzing innovative uses of tildes in Chinese WeChat messages

1 Introduction

With text messaging being such a ubiquitous activity (Truss 2003: 195), digital punctuation (Androutsopoulos and Busch 2021) (henceforth, DP)—punctuation in digitally-mediated interaction—is emerging with a divergence from its formal and standard functions in offline texts. This kind of DP use has been variously defined, such as re-purposing traditional marks (Baron and Ling 2011), nonstandard punctuation (Houghton et al. 2018), typographic deviation (Busch 2021), and innovative uses of DP (Androutsopoulos and Busch 2021), etc. We adopt the term “innovative uses”, in that DP in this paper will be investigated not “in terms of ‘deviation’ or ‘linguistic rebellion’, but as a resource for cooperative mediated interaction” (cf. Androutsopoulos and Busch 2021: 1). Since the 2000s, innovative DP has undergone a process of “pragmaticalization” to convey implicit social and pragmatic meaning as stance indicators (Androutsopoulos 2018; Androutsopoulos and Busch 2021). For instance, the message-final period, which inherently shows that a sentence is complete grammatically and syntactically, is used to indicate a sense of insincerity (Gunraj et al. 2016), consistency of topics, and unwillingness (Androutsopoulos and Busch 2021), etc.

So far, much of the research on the innovative use of punctuation marks in digital communication has been based on periods (“.”) (e.g., Gunraj et al. 2016; Houghton et al. 2018), exclamation marks (“!”) (e.g., Hancock et al. 2007; Waseleski 2006), ellipses (“…”) (e.g., Baron and Ling 2011; Hancock 2004; Raclaw 2006), etc. As a matter of fact, a new punctuation in Chinese social media has recently been extensively and actively used—the tilde (“∼”). According to the National Standards of the People’s Republic of China (GB/T15834-2011), general rules for punctuation^[1] have officially designated the tilde as one of the connection symbols for indicating the start and end of a numerical span or range composed of Arabic numerals or Chinese characters, as shown in example (1). When the tilde is employed for a connection, it is placed between two numerals and pronounced as “dào” (到) or “zhì” (至) in Mandarin, which is equivalent to universal “en dashes”, e.g., on pages 45–53.

However, the innovative tildes on social media, different from the above official function, are commonly distributed at the end of sentences. In the following example (2), the sentence-final tilde used by two females’ online chats is in place of a question mark and a period to indicate certain tones, which differ in representing spans or ranges in the example (1). The divergence from formal offline texts that is found in digital communication is neither arbitrary nor sloppy (Houghton et al. 2018: 116). Therefore, the current study aims to explore the innovative uses of tildes on Chinese social networks, which has recently been under-researched.

The article is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews previous research related to the innovative uses of DP. Section 3 describes the data collection, the analytic framework, and the design of follow-up interviews, followed by the findings in Section 4. In Section 5, we discuss the reasons for innovative uses of tildes online. The final section concludes this study.

2 Literature review

In the late 1980s, punctuation in digital communication that strayed from norms and standards was one of the distinguishing features of computer-mediated language. After decades of sporadic attention, DP remains a non-systematic and non-mainstream research topic, albeit with a greater frequency of omission and repetition of punctuation marks in computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Bieswanger 2013: 476; Busch 2021: 2; Jonsson 2019: 227). For instance, repeated punctuation marks are used for emphasis (e.g., How did things go yesterday????/oh, my God!!!!) (Murray 1988: 12). Since the mid-2000s, the innovative uses of DP, distinguished from omission and repetition, have attracted researchers’ attention. The innovative DP keeps the same form as the standard orthographic norms in offline writing, but redefines or re-purposes its traditional function to convey implicit social, pragmatic, and interpersonal meanings.

More common are studies focusing on the innovative uses of digital ellipses. On the one hand, innovative ellipses could be used to convey implicit irony. Hancock (2004) was among the first to observe the interpersonal function of DP. He compared the ironic conversations collected in face-to-face and computer-mediated conversations by English-speaking students through the irony framework. The findings showed that an ellipsis, which originally indicated that a statement was unfinished by omitting one or more words from a sentence (Kirkman 2006: 58), was employed as a cue to signal the ironical intention of CMC speakers. On the other hand, ellipsis could be used as a softer to politely mitigate disagreements (Busch 2021). For example, Ong (2011) conducted a conversational analysis of elliptical turns in multi-party chats among tertiary students in Singapore English and found that the digital ellipses illustrated several turn actions, e.g., signaling disagreement, confusion, and disapproval. In Baron and Ling’s (2011) study, they analysed the punctuation frequency in a corpus of text messages sent by American university students and reported that ellipses were used in lieu of 80 % of periods to soften the directness of messages. Similarly, Vandergriff (2013) investigated the pragmatic function of turn-medial ellipses based on the conversational analysis of extracts from task-based conflictual chats among German learners. It was found that turn-medial ellipsis can mitigate disagreement by delaying or avoiding the dispreferred responses.

Two studies provided an analysis of the innovative exclamation marks in English digital interactions. Waseleski (2006), for example, analysed 200 exclamations in online discussion groups for the library and information science profession in a 16-category coding frame. The results suggested exclamation marks rarely served as markers of excitability but might function as markers of friendly interaction. Hancock et al. (2007) also revealed the emotional function of exclamation marks by examining how people express and detect emotions during text-based communication. It was found that comprehenders relied heavily on exclamation marks to figure out how their partner was feeling, as evidenced by the fact that positive users employed approximately six times as many exclamation marks as negative users.

Periods, which are frequently used to denote the conclusion or finality of sentences in offline writing, have also been employed to convey additional pragmatic and social information. Gunraj et al. (2016) examined how people understood and perceived the sincerity of a sentence-final period in short text exchanges in rating tasks. It was discovered that text messages that ended with a period were rated as less sincere than those that did not end with a period. Houghton et al. (2018) replicated and expanded Gunraj et al.’s (2016) experiment and findings. They came to the conclusion that the insincerity of the sentence-final period might be partially attributed to the possibility that punctuating a single word might been interpreted as being excessively formal in the context of an informal text interaction and resulted in the response appearing abrupt (Houghton et al. 2018: 116). Besides this, Androutsopoulos and Busch (2021) found that the sentence-final periods performed more pragmatic functions at the expense of syntactic ones, i.e., indicating the unwillingness to continue a thematic sequence and indexing emotional distance among messengers. This conclusion was reached after analyzing the frequency of German WhatsApp messages containing periods as well as semi-structured group interviews.

Recently, Busch (2021) compared the use of periods, colons, question marks, and ellipses between formal, non-interactional writing in school and informal, interactional writing in WhatsApp, based on a quantitative analysis of German adolescents’ text-messaging threads and a close qualitative analysis of message samples. From his analysis, Busch (2021) found that even punctuation signs whose codification in descriptive and prescriptive grammars was based on pure syntactic criteria were used to achieve interactional goals in digital interactions. In other words, punctuation in online communication serves more interactional than grammatical roles. In addition to frequently-used punctuation, several studies have contributed to the innovative uses of less-used punctuation in digital communication. For example, Fiorentini and Sansò (2019) analysed the function of tra parentesi (“( )”) in present-day Italian, based on the ItTenTen corpus, and suggested that tra parentesi experienced a functional transformation from digressing markers to turn shifting mostly for politeness reasons.

The advent of the internet age has also derived more innovative uses of tildes. However, to our knowledge, research on innovative uses of tildes remains scarce. Lu et al. (2008: 185–186) in their book referred to the innovative uses of tildes on Chinese social media applications (e.g., QQ) in the following example (3). The authors interpreted the tilde (“∼”) as a symbol of sound extension to enhance a certain emotional effect in that, from the perspective of physics, sounds have amplitudes and they are shaped like “∼”. The number of tildes represented the extent to which the sound was elongated. In their opinion, originally, people have often used the extension of voice to express certain emotions in oral communication, such as surprise, dislike, etc., while in network verbal communication, the sound has been transformed into a visible symbol to enhance the communicative effects in online communication.

To briefly summarize the discussion so far, previous research has focused on the pragmatic, social, and interpersonal meanings conveyed by the innovative uses of ellipse (Baron and Ling 2011; Busch 2021; Hancock 2004; Ong 2011; Vandergriff 2013), exclamation marks (Hancock et al. 2007; Waseleski 2006), and periods (Androutsopoulos and Busch 2021; Gunraj et al. 2016; Houghton et al. 2018) etc., while research related to innovative tildes, the popular punctuation on Chinese social media, is still scarce and unsystematic. It is noteworthy that prior works on the innovative uses of sentence-final punctuation marks (e.g., periods, exclamation marks, and ellipses) could not clearly distinguish the traditional uses from the innovative uses of sentence-final punctuation, in that the two uses share the same place or distribution in naturally occurring messages. In this regard, the tilde’s separation of uses through different places or distributions allows us to discern if tildes are employed innovatively or standardly.

In light of this, the current research adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate the tildes on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media platform, thus expanding the research on the innovative uses of DP. Three research questions are addressed in the study:

1. What types of speech acts are performed in the messages with sentence-final tildes?

2. What functions do the innovative tildes perform on WeChat?

3. Why do Chinese WeChat users resort to innovative tildes to perform these functions on WeChat?

3 Methodology

This section outlines the methodology employed in this study, which includes quantitative and qualitative analysis. It explains how the data was collected, coded, and analysed.

3.2 Data collection

Twelve WeChat users were randomly selected (6 males and 6 females; aged 20–30; mean age = 24.58, SD = 2.50) and volunteered to participate in our study. They are university students and Chinese native speakers. They were asked to search their chat records on WeChat’s search box by inputting “∼”. Then, they handed over the screenshots of WeChat chatting records involving tildes in person-to-person chatting (except group chatting and moment records) from June 1st to November 30th, 2020. Concerning ethics and privacy, all information that might be used to identify users, such as names, nicknames, profile photos, etc., was removed, as shown in Figure 1. A total of 548 messages containing tildes were collected, and five messages with traditional uses of tildes (percent: 0.91 %) were deleted based on their distribution, while 543 messages with sentence-final tildes (percent: 99.09 %) were the basis for data analysis. The observation that innovative tildes are used more frequently than traditional tildes in online communication justified the focus on innovative uses of tildes in our study.

Figure 1:

Screenshots of texts with tildes in both the Chinese and English versions.

4 Findings

This section is a combination of quantitative and qualitative results of innovative tilde uses on WeChat, displaying their frequencies and percentages and illustrating the findings adhered to by the two main questions in the interview. After coding all data, we found that the sentence-final tildes in messages also co-occurred with onomatopoeia and vocatives to imitate sounds, which is transparently different from informative speech acts. As a result, the innovative tildes were overall separated into two categories: sounds and speech acts. The former involves two kinds of messages: onomatopoeia and vocatives, while the latter includes four types of speech acts, i.e., representatives, directives, expressives, and commissives. The reason for the absence of declaratives might be that person-to-person online communication is too informal to perform such illocutionary force. Table 1 shows the categories, subcategories, frequency counts, and percentages of innovative tilde uses analysed from 543 collected WeChat messages.

As observed in Table 1, innovative tildes were predominantly used for performing speech acts (89.32 %) rather than implying sounds (10.68 %). For sounds implied by tildes, onomatopoeia accounts for 3.13 %, while vocatives account for 7.55 %. The tildes in performing speech acts were more often used in expressives (41.07 %) and directives (24.31 %) than representatives (15.84 %) and commissives (8.10 %). The following subsections analyse each type of message co-occurring with tildes in more detail. The data may employ multiple sentence-final tildes (e.g., Beep∼∼∼∼∼), we only list one tilde in examples for convenience.

5 Discussion

In the previous section, we analysed different innovative uses and functions of tildes in WeChat messages supported by the interview data. The main finding is that innovative tildes are frequently used in speech acts (expressives and directives in particular) to convey pragmatic functions, i.e., enhancing or mitigating the illocutionary forces of speech acts, in online communication. In this part, we will discuss the pragmaticalization of innovative tildes and the reasons for pragmaticalized tildes.

Discursive creativity in new media is often poetic, usually playful, and always pragmatic (Thurlow 2012: 170). The innovative uses of tildes in online communication demonstrate the pragmaticalization of DP, which refers to the transformation from pure grammatical markers to pragmatic markers (cf. “to convey implicit social and pragmatic meaning’, Androutsopoulos 2018; Androutsopoulos and Busch 2021). As the literature demonstrates, the sentence-final periods could be used to convey abruptness and insincerity (Gunraj et al. 2016; Houghton et al. 2018); the ellipses become the stance indicator of irony (Hancock 2004) and polite disagreement (Vandergriff 2013); and the exclamation marks redefine the function of friendliness (Waseleski 2006). The pragmaticalized innovative tildes, in line with other innovative punctuation, have recently become positive stance indicators indexing interpersonal and social meaning, i.e., to enhance the emotional effects of neutral or positive context or to reduce the potential face-threatening context. In this sense, pragmaticalized punctuation serves the same purpose as emoticons and emojis in digital communication, e.g., signaling the illocutionary force of the utterance (Dresner and Herring 2010), mitigating threatening formulations (Wilson 1993), eliminating indifference (Cao and Jin 2016), and enhancing informality (Yang and Liu 2021).

As a whole, it has been roughly concluded that DP has undergone two stages. Since the late 1980s, DP has deviated from the norms in offline texts through changes in form, such as repetition for emphasis or omission for typing shortcuts (Bieswanger 2013: 476; Busch 2021: 2; Jonsson 2019: 227). This kind of deviation retains the inherent syntactic functions of punctuation and is explicit enough to recognize the intended meaning encoded by senders. By the mid-2000s, DP kept the forms unchanged but redefined and repurposed their innovative uses to express pragmatic meanings subtly and implicitly, which require receivers to make inferences based on contextual information. It is evident that the innovative tildes in our study belong to the second stage of DP development.

Then, why have the sentence-final tildes been pragmaticalized into positive emotional markers? From the perspective of semiotics, the innovative tildes in online communication were interpreted as a symbol of sound extension to enhance a certain emotional effect (Lu et al. 2008: 185). According to some interviewees, the wave-like tildes visually seemed like the ups and downs of tones or a slight lift in the voice in the same way that “撒娇” (pronounced as sajiao) was realized. Sajiao is defined as a behavior to incite tenderness by deliberately acting like a spoiled child in front of someone (Qiu 2013), and this kind of culture is prevalent in East Asian countries (e.g., China, Japan, and Korea). In acoustic terms, sajiao can be realized as sentence-final rising intonation, stretched intonation or elongated tone, childlike articulation, etc. (Hardeman 2013: 45/51). When used appropriately, sajiao can shorten the interlocutors’ social distance (Yueh 2017), index the social meaning of cuteness (Gao 2020), contribute to rapport management in the online context (Yang 2022), and serve as a polite negotiating strategy in disagreements (Wang et al. 2022). In our study, adding sentence-final tildes in messages is more like a Sajiao behavior through deliberately elongating sentence-final tones, to some extent. As a result, there is no doubt that innovative tildes have been accepted by Chinese messengers and have been regarded as a kind of positive stance indicator to actively adjust the illocutionary forces of speech acts and to represent cuteness, gentleness, friendliness, playfulness, etc., as opposed to abruptness or directness, in online communication.

Moreover, from the perspective of communicative principles, politeness, as a universal communicative strategy (Brown and Levinson 1987), aims to maintain human relationships both in real and virtual communication. Since online communication often takes place in a cue-filtered environment and lacks nonverbal communication, with fewer options and resources for contextualization (Lu et al. 2008: 188; Xie and Yus 2018), such as tones of voice and gestures (Houghton et al. 2018), it is necessary to add emotional and voice cues to messages so as to convey politeness in digital interaction. The innovative tildes, as positive stance indicators, compensate for the absence of extra-linguistic cues and have also been realized as politeness markers to maintain rapport and achieve successful online communication. The politeness motivation for tilde users echoes prior research on innovative punctuation in messages. The point case is the turn-medial ellipsis that is employed to mitigate the impact of negatively connoting acts (e.g., disagreements) by delaying or avoiding the dispreferred response (Baron and Ling 2011; Busch 2021; Ong 2011). Meanwhile, it is mostly for politeness reasons that tra parentesi (“( )”) in present-day Italian experienced a functional transformation from digressing markers to turn shifting (Fiorentini and Sansò 2019).

6 Conclusions

The present study examined the innovative uses of tildes on WeChat, in which 543 messages with sentence-final tildes in person-to-person chatting were analysed, followed by interviews with 12 people. It has been found that a) the innovative tildes are frequently used in messages performing speech acts and rarely used in messages implying sounds; b) the innovative tildes perform sound extension, pragmatic function, and entertaining function; c) the innovative tildes are pragmalicalized due to the semiotic features of themselves and the politeness motivation of messengers for maintaining rapport management and achieving successful online communication.

The results of the present study have theoretical significance, for they contribute to a further understanding of the innovation of punctuation on Chinese social media, enriching the research on innovative non-verbal signals in digital discourse. Meanwhile, we hope that our study might have an application to chatting online so as to guide people to achieve more efficient and cooperative interpersonal communication. The findings of this article motivate us to investigate other innovative punctuation marks, such as repeated Chinese full stops (“。。。”), left parenthesis (“(”) in digital interaction, the combined uses of punctuation (e.g., “∼∼∼!!!”), and innovative use of DP in triadic or multi-party contexts, such as group chatting.