Form and function of emotive pictorial signs in casual letter writing

Young Japanese women effectively construct and manipulate their emotive stances through the use of special pictorial signs and their graph(em)ic modifications in casual letter-writing among friends. To achieve this, the writers use a para-/metalinguistic and indexical means of “contextualization” for the socio-cultural mediation of affect and textual awareness. At the same time, they heavily rely on such cognitive mechanisms as “schematization” and “semantic reduction” — phenomena widely observed in grammaticalization processes. I propose that these devices not only provide the basis for mutual appreciation of the emotive (con)text, but also suggest a mode of literacy aimed primarily at emotive, phatic, and poetic communication.