Stickers on Facebook: Multifunctionality and face-enhancing politeness in everyday social interaction

TL;DR

This study explores how Facebook stickers serve multifunctional roles in digital communication, especially in expressing politeness and face enhancement, with gender differences influencing their usage during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contribution

It identifies six main functions of stickers in online politeness strategies and highlights gender-based preferences in their use, expanding understanding of multimodal communication.

Findings

Stickers predominantly depict emotions, gestures, and festive themes.

Six functions of stickers in politeness strategies were identified.

Gender differences influence sticker preferences, with women using more affectionate stickers.

Abstract

Stickers are multimodal resources widely used in everyday digital conversations. Despite their popularity, most studies have focused on emojis and emoticons. Therefore, this study analyzes, from a sociopragmatic perspective, the use of stickers in the comments from a corpus of Facebook posts containing acts of face-enhancing politeness, created during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The main objective is to identify their communicative functions and determine the extent to which they act as strategies of face-enhancing politeness also considering the gender variable. The results show a predominance of naked stickers and those representing human emotions and gestures, and festive situations. Six main functions were identified: affective, illocutionary, interactional, gestural, aesthetic, and representative or substitutive. It was found that stickers can intensify polite messages and express face-enhancing politeness autonomously. Furthermore, gender differences were observed: women use more stickers, especially cute and affectionate ones, whereas men prefer masculine human figures. These findings highlight the key and multifunctional role of stickers in affective digital communication.