A social semiotic perspective on emoji: How emoji and language interact to make meaning in digital messages

Abstract

This article presents a social semiotic analysis of emoji-language semiosis. Combining the theoretical architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics and methodology of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, we propose an analytical framework that can identify how emoji make meaning both individually and in interaction with language. Using the web-based coding software WebAnno, we apply this framework to a dataset of text messages and social media posts. The results identify typical realisations of particular semiotic features by emoji as well as noteworthy dynamics in how emoji interact with language to realise meaning. We observe (1) how emoji and language jointly construing ideational meaning realise intermodal taxonomies (where hyper/hyponyms are distributed across modes) and particular fields of discourse (domains of experiential meaning), (2) how resources in one mode can serve to foreground particular regions of meaning potential in other modes, and (3) how attitudinal meaning realised by emoji appears to differ from the prosodic patterning of linguistic attitude.

#ThisIsMeChallenge and Music for Empowerment of Marginalized Groups on TikTok

“…On the other hand, we found expressions that praised the content created by TikTokers: "your transitions are amazing 💯💞💪,'' "look at that picture quality," "those transitions are cleaner than my face 😳,'' "super talented 😻❤,'' and "you are a crack and you deserve to be duetted." In most cases we observed that comments introduced multiple emoji with attitudinal meaning that differed from the linguistic prosodic pattern, making evident other emotions (Logi & Zappavigna, 2021). For the cases previously reported, we found facial expressions that consumer science scholars Jaeger and Ares (2017) classified as (a) 🙂 = happy, satisfied; (b) 😍 = excited, happy; and (c) 😳 = surprised, shocked.…”

“…This issue was mainly due to the limited posts created for #ThisIsMeChallenge. In addition, we noted that the SA approach was created by predesigned algorithms that did not provide a semiotic discourse analysis of aspects such as emojis (Logi & Zappavigna, 2021), which produced biases between polarity-subjectivity and reality. Accordingly, we suggest that future research approaches music empowerment on social media using the proposed codebook, as well as diving deeper into the aspects that make music a transmedia storytelling tool for platforms such as TikTok.…”

Graphicon Evolution on the Chinese Social Media Platform BiliBili

“…Extensive studies have addressed the meaning, function, and usage of each type of graphicon in different cultural contexts (e.g., Al Rashdi, 2018;Ge, 2020;Ge & Herring, 2018;Logi & Zappavigna, 2021;Sampietro, 2019). Interrelations among the three types, however, have not attracted much attention until recently.…”

Emoji semantics/pragmatics: investigating commitment and lying

“…Studies on emoji meaning have ranged from how emoji supplement text with pragmatic information like irony (Garcia et al, 2022;Weissman & Tanner, 2018), emotional valence (Pfeifer et al, 2022), and indirect meaning (Holtgraves & Robinson, 2020) to more direct investigations of emoji meaning ratings and norms (Rodrigues et al, 2018;Was & Hamrick, 2021). In light of the wide range of communicative functions that emoji can fulfill (e.g., Beißwenger & Pappert, 2019;Dainas & Herring, 2021;Ge & Herring, 2018;Logi & Zappavigna, 2021;Yang & Liu, 2021), the nature of emoji meanings across these varied uses is rich ground for further research.…”