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

arXiv:2602.07089v1 Announce Type: new
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.