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.

翻译：贴纸是日常数字对话中广泛使用的多模态资源。尽管贴纸广受欢迎，但现有研究多集中于表情符号与颜文字。因此，本研究基于社会语用学视角，分析了包含COVID-19疫情期间及后期发布的面子增强型礼貌行为的Facebook帖子评论中贴纸的使用情况。主要研究目标是识别贴纸的交际功能，并考量性别变量，确定其在多大程度上可作为面子增强型礼貌策略。研究结果显示：裸贴纸、表现人类情感与手势的贴纸以及节日情境贴纸占主导地位。我们识别出六项主要功能：情感功能、言外功能、互动功能、手势功能、美学功能以及表征或替代功能。研究发现贴纸能强化礼貌信息，并能自主表达面子增强型礼貌。此外，研究观察到性别差异：女性使用更多贴纸，尤其是可爱与亲昵类贴纸；而男性更偏好男性化人物形象。这些发现凸显了贴纸在情感化数字传播中的关键作用与多功能性。