Semiotics of Emoticons and Emoji in the Discoursive Space of Spanish Political Internet Communication

The purpose of the study is to establish significance of graphic symbols - semiotic, cognitive and functional characteristics of emoticons and emoji as paralinguistic means of written communication in Spanish political Internet communication. The materials of the study are the publications of Spanish government bodies, political parties and politicians in the official Twitter accounts. The relevance of the study stems from the need to analyze the functional and impact potential of emoticons and emoji as an integral part of modern Spanish political discourse in the Internet and determine their characteristics from the standpoint of theoretical linguistics, discourse theory, semiotics and pragmalinguistics. The paper concludes that the semiotic characteristics of emoji and emoticons as iconic signs and symbols allow them to perform a number of important functions in the discursive Internet communication, for instance, nominative - identifying referents, due to the fact that they are associated with them by physical similarity; syntactic - structuring the punctuation and intonation contour of the message; cognitive - conveying additional conventional meanings implied by the interpretation of the represented objects; communicative - creating an intonation contour and emotional background of the message; influencing - setting the vector of pragmatic interpretation of the message and its empathic component. At the same time, the verbal and non-verbal components of polycode Internet messages are not opposed to each other, but mutually determine the integral perception, representation and interpretation of reality.