Emojis are used frequently in social media. A widely assumed view is that emojis express the emotional state of the user, which has led to research focusing on the expressiveness of emojis independent from the linguistic context. We argue that emojis and the linguistic texts can modify the meaning of each other. The overall communicated meaning is not a simple sum of the two channels. In order to study the meaning interplay, we need data indicating the overall sentiment of the entire message as well as the sentiment of the emojis stand-alone. We propose that Facebook Reactions are a good data source for such a purpose. FB reactions (e.g. "Love" and "Angry") indicate the readers' overall sentiment, against which we can investigate the types of emojis used the comments under different reaction profiles. We present a data set of 21,000 FB posts (57 million reactions and 8 million comments) from public media pages across four countries.

Conversation is often cast as a cooperative effort, and some aspects of it, such as implicatures, have been claimed to depend on an assumption of cooperation (Grice, 1989). But any systematic class of inference derived from assumptions of cooperation, such as implicatures, could also be, on occasion, used to deceive listeners strategically. Here, we explore the extent to which speakers might choose different kinds of implicature triggers in an uncooperative game of communication. Concretely, we present a study in the form of a cooperative or competitive signaling game where communicators can exploit three kinds of implicatures: exact reading of numeral expressions, scalar implicatures linked to the quantifier some and ad hoc scalar implicatures. We compare how these implicatures are used depending on whether the participants' co‐player is cooperative, a strategic opponent, or a non‐strategic opponent. We find that when the strategy of the co‐player is clear to the participants, the three types of implicatures are used to exploit the co‐player's interpretation strategy. Indeed, participants use numeral implicatures as reliably as truth conditional content in all three conditions, while scalar quantifiers and ad hoc implicature elicit different strategies. We interpret these findings as evidence that speakers expect their interlocutors to infer implicatures from their utterances even in contexts where they know that they will be perceived as uncooperative.

Metaphors are pervasive in literature and everyday speech. This chapter explores how metaphors are interpreted both by adults and by children. It reviews recent findings and directions of research on four main issues: What is the relation between figurative and literal meaning in metaphor processing? How is the metaphorical meaning arrived at and which factors are at play in the interpretative process? What are the differences and similarities in processing between different types of metaphors and between metaphors and other tropes? How does metaphor comprehension develop through childhood? The chapter concludes with a few fairly clear answers the psycholinguistic literature has provided and a lot of open questions to be investigated in future research.