Blending of two words, ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’, emoticons ( such as :), :(, :D, ) are the typographic signs that are commonly used in computer mediated communication (CMC) discourse. In fact, emoticons, beyond typographic signs, are functional servers for the instant messaging users through which they seem to construct their situational identity by shaping the emotion embedded in text with a further stress upon that emotion. In this regard, due to this functional role, emoticons have been the focus of many studies in the last twenty years with its long history going back to nearly the born of instant messaging through mobil devices; studies from different contexts have outlined how these iconic servers of emoticons in digital platforms have given insight the written text, which is actually deprive of the paralinguistic and non-linguistic codes of spoken language.

Thus, this study aims to do linguistic analysis of emoticons as functional emotion servers in WhatsApp messages and to reveal the non-linguistic codes. On this basis, following corpus analysis study, a corpus of 321 Turkish messages, 83 of which was eliminitaed due to the non- use of emoticons, was collected through e-mail with asking for voluntary participation of individuals from different departments of a state university with an ensure of anonymity. In this process, For the analysis, the logic put by Amaghlobeli (2010) was followed to show morphological dimensions of emoticons used in WhatsApp instant messaging.

Accordingly, the results are as follows: 1) Structurally, the most frequently used emoticons in Turkish WhatsApp messages are alphagrams and topograms, which are in line with the findings of the previous studies, 2) Morphologically, these emoticons seem to function as lexical/ free morphemes with their outsanding meaning and as bound/ inflectional morphemes according to the context they are used in, and finally 3) Categorically, Turkish academics most frequently use facial expressions to provide emotional information, and they nearly never use pictorial emoticons representing figures as pictures.

Keywords: Emoticons, CMC discourse , Whatsapp Instant Messaging, Linguistic Analysis