The "Face with Tears of Joy" Emoji. A Socio-Semiotic and Multimodal Insight into a Japan-America Mash-Up

Abstract

The blog site of the Oxford Dictionaries features a post dated November 16 2015, which announces that, "for the fi rst time ever", their "Word of the Year" is not a word, but a pictograph: the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji. The term emoji, which is a loanword from Japanese, identifi es "a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication" (OED 2015).The sign was chosen since it is the item that "best refl ected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015". Indeed, the Oxford Dictionaries' President, Caspar Grathwohl declared that emojis are "an increasingly rich form of communication that transcends linguistic borders" and refl ects the "playfulness and intimacy" of global digital culture.Adopting a socio-semiotic multimodal approach, the present paper aims at decoding the many semantic and semiotic layers of the 2015 "Word of the Year", with a special focus on the context of cultures out of which it originates. More in detail, the author will focus on the concept of translation as "transduction", that is the movement of meaning across sign systems (Kress 1997), in order to map the history of this 'pictographic word' from language to language, from culture to culture, from niche discursive communities to the global scenario. Indeed, the author maintains that this 'pictographic word' is to be seen as a marker of the mashing up of Japanese and American cultures in the discursive practices of geek communities, now gone mainstream thanks to the spreading of digital discourse.

Emoji and communicative action: The semiotics, sequence and gestural actions of ‘face covering hand’

“…This is a re-framing of an old question in sociolinguistics, which is, as Kress puts it, 'how does this signifying object work here' (Kress, 2010: 1). Emoji have a rich socio-semiotic history, which creates a complex domain of potential meanings (Moschini, 2016;Sampietro, 2016a): they were first developed in Japan in the mid-1990s where a telecom company created them as a new communication form for pager users. Since then, the Unicode consortium 2 instantiated a set of standardised characters that form a cross-industry coding standard for emoji representation.…”

“…Moschini suggests that emoji represent "a marker of the mashing up of Japanese and American cultures in the discursive practices of geek communities, now gone mainstream..." (Moschini, 2016: 9). Emoji signification has roots in the semiotics of Japanese manga cartoons, American 1960s counter-culture, the 1980s/90s acid house movement and, before all of that, an internal marketing campaign of a life insurance company in Massachusetts (Danesi, 2016;Moschini, 2016;Stark and Crawford, 2015). This paper focusses on analysing the face covering hand emoji.…”

Combination of Emoji and Text in Musicians’ Twitter Posts

“…While, some researchers used semantical approach (Ai, Lu, Liu, Wang, Huang & Mei: 2017;Wijeratne, Sheth, Balasuriya & Doran: 2017) and sentiment analysis (Wolny: 2016). The combination of semantic and sentiment approach on analyzing interpretations on emoji has been done by Miller, Spieker, Chang, Johnson, Terveen and Hect (2016). Those researches discussed mainly on the structure of the clause along with emoticons and how the emoticons affect the reader's understanding on the messages.…”

Emoji and Chernoff - A Fine Balancing Act or are we Biased?

“…The study focused on use within relationships. Moschini [37] traces the history and usage of Emoji (specifically the tears of joy). It documents that Emoji can move beyond portrayal of emotions, to also convey ideas.…”