Expressing Emotions in Spanish Internet-mediated Communication

This thesis explores the topic of emotional expression on social media in Spanish. Based on a corpus consisting of over 13.000 comments collected from El País journal's Facebook and Instagram profiles, it aims to analyze the principal tendencies utilized by users in order to express their emotions. There are two parts to this work, one theoretical and the other one practical. The theoretical part addresses emotional expression in face-to-face (F2F) communication as a whole and mentions the various options people have at their disposal. It then proceeds to describe internet language and characterize comments on social media as a form of communication. The following practical part consists of an analysis of the individual features of the language used in the corpus. The tendencies intend to compensate for the lack of many means of expressive communication in an F2F environment (prosody, kinesics, etc.). Amongst the principal features are non-standard orthography (capitalization, prolongation, etc.) and non-verbal signs (emoticons, emoji etc.), interjections and initialisms are also analyzed. The results show that there are no exact matches in F2F communication for the features used online, although some correspond to speech more than others. Internet language provides a new, alternative system of..