Abstract
The article deals with the structures that are specific to Internet texts and SMS, which are called emoticons (or smileys). The article summarizes the results of scientific literature on the use of emoticons as carriers of emotions in written texts.
The first part focuses on their origin, then several different concepts (or definitions) of emoticons are discussed in relation to different functions of emoticons in Internet texts. In addition, a description of the form (of emoticon) and brief characterization of their parts which are supposed to represent eyes, nose, and mouth is included.
Different classifications are discussed - e.g. in relation to cultural background or expressed entity. The characteristics of emoticons in the text are discussed in the context of blogs and Internet discussions.
In the last part of the article we presented and critically evaluated four studies that deal with emoticons. Each of them is designed with respect to other areas of science - gender studies, psychology and linguistics.
The first type of linguistic research compares the use of emoticons in several Indo-European languages, such as English, German, Italian and Swedish, while the second deals with the analysis of emoticons from the NLP point of view.