Emojis as Pictures

Maier, Emar

doi:10.3998/ergo.4641

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…According to the pictorial approach (Maier, 2023), which proposes purely iconic semantics for emojis, face emojis are pictures of faces, which are interpreted to represent the face of the author of the message. For example, Maier (2023, p. 31) argues that is a stylized picture of a face and that pragmatic enrichment gives rise to the understanding that this is a rendering of what the author's face looks like when typing the emoji.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic differences in visually similar face emojis

Fricke,

Grosz,

Scheffler

2024

Lang. cogn.

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The literature on face emojis raises the central question whether they should be treated as pictures or conventionalized signals. Our experiment addresses this question by investigating semantic differences in visually similar face emojis. We test a prediction following from a pictorial approach: small visual features of emojis that do not correspond to human facial features should be semantically less relevant than features that represent aspects of facial expressions. We compare emoji pairs with a visual difference that either does or does not correspond to a difference in a human facial expression according to an adaptation of the Facial Action Coding System. We created two contexts per pair, each fitted to correspond to a prominent meaning of one or the other emoji. Participants had to choose a suitable emoji for each context. The rate at which the context-matching emoji was chosen was significantly above chance for both types of emoji pairs and it did not differ significantly between them. Our results show that the small differences are meaningful in all pairs whether or not they correspond to human facial differences. This supports a lexicalist approach to emoji semantics, which treats face emojis as conventionalized signals rather than mere pictures of faces.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic differences in visually similar face emojis

Fricke,

Grosz,

Scheffler

2024

Lang. cogn.

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Almost Faces? ;-) Emoticons and Emojis as Cultural Artifacts for Social Cognition Online

Viola

2024

Topoi

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Emoticons and facial emojis are ubiquitous in contemporary digital communication, where it has been proposed that they make up for the lack of social information from real faces. In this paper, I construe them as cultural artifacts that exploit the neurocognitive mechanisms for face perception. Building on a step-by-step comparison of psychological evidence on the perception of faces vis-à-vis the perception of emoticons/emojis, I assess to what extent they do effectively vicariate real faces with respect to the following four domains: (1) the expression of emotions, (2) the cultural norms for expressing emotions, (3) conveying non-affective social information, and (4) attention prioritization.

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Going ✈️ lexicon? The linguistic status of pro-text emojis

Storment

2024

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Emojis, introduced in the US in 2011 and now ubiquitous, are a set of iconic expressive symbols that are incredibly widespread in computer-mediated communication (CMC), especially among young people. The majority of linguistic research on emojis focuses only on the semantics; however, emerging data suggest that emojis are far more linguistically interesting than merely their semantic contributions to a sentence. Data from Twitter demonstrate that emojis can actually appear as contentful morphological units that behave according to regularly predictable morphosyntactic rules. In this paper I analyze data from several languages including English, German, and Spanish and reach several conclusions about emojis that appear as words. First, these emojis are not merely replacements in text for existing words in a language, but rather they represent the morphosyntactic of a lexically-typed stem, to which inflectional and derivational affixes can be productively added. Second, these emoji stems can undergo morphological changes such lexicalization and grammaticalization. Within pro-speech emojis, I also differentiate two sub-categories of emoji according to how they are interpreted: emojis which have both an iconic and symbolic mechanism of interpreted, and emojis that are interpreted iconically. This work introduces and strengthens the idea that pictures can be part of the morphosyntactic derivation of an utterance and that they can be represented in a language user’s lexicon.

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Emojis as Pictures

Cited by 4 publications

References 50 publications

Semantic differences in visually similar face emojis

Semantic differences in visually similar face emojis

Almost Faces? ;-) Emoticons and Emojis as Cultural Artifacts for Social Cognition Online

Going ✈️ lexicon? The linguistic status of pro-text emojis

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