Conversational implicatures of Whatsapp stickers chats of Unizik students

Abstract

This is a study of implicatures of whatsapp Stickers just as words are used to communicate ideas
and exchange feelings. These stickers carry mental pictures that express different ideas, and interlocutors use them for communicative purposes as they use words. The study identifies and describes the different stickers used by the interactants in inferring implicature, and classifies the stickers according to their forms and meanings. In order to achieve this, the theory of conversational implicature as propounded by Paul Grice in 1975 is used as the framework of this research.
Conversational implicatures, or simply put, implicatures; has to do with the implicit meaning of an utterance as against what is literally expressed. The data are sourced from the Whatsapp chats of random students of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka (Unizik). It is discovered that there are various reasons why whatsapp users decide to use stickers in communicating their thoughts. Here, it is determined that students mostly rely on stickers in communicating some thoughts to enforce meaning words alone could not express. The work therefore recommends an extension of the implicature theory to accommodate sticker analysis.