Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics, Humour and the Internet
Edited by Francisco Yus
[Internet Pragmatics 4:1] 2021
► pp. 87–110

Emojis and the performance of humour in everyday electronically-mediated conversation

A corpus study of Whats­App chats

| Jaume I University

Emojis are little pictographs commonly added to electronic messages on several social media platforms. Besides being considered as a way to express emotions in electronically-mediated communication (EMC), similarly to ASCII emoticons, emojis are strictly involved in the performance of humour in everyday digital conversation. Drawing on a corpus of casual Whats­App dyadic chats, this paper analyses the contribution of emojis to humour in conversation. Results show that these pictographs not only help to signal the opening and closing of the play frame, but also to respond to humour, graphically reproducing laughter. For these purposes, the most common emojis employed by Whats­App users are the popular yellow smiling and laughing faces. Nevertheless, other pictographs are also involved in electronic humour, as less common emojis can be used in playful ways by themselves.

Keywords: emoticons, emojis, Whats­App, electronically-mediated communication, humour, laughter
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.1Procedure
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Emojis signal humour
    • 4.2Emojis as a response to jokes, humour, irony
    • 4.3Emojis close the play frame
    • 4.4Playing with emojis
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00062.samp
References (75)
Alcántara Pla, Manuel
2014 “Las unidades discursivas en los mensajes instantáneos de wasap [Discourse units in whatsapp instant messages].” Estudios de Lingüística del Español 351: 223–242.Google Scholar
Alshenqeeti, Hamza
2016 “Are emojis creating a new or old visual language for new generations? A socio-semiotic study.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 7(6): 56–69. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore, Jodi Eisterhold, Jennifer Hay, and Isabella Poggi
2003 “Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm.” HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 16(2): 243–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker
2011 “Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation.” Pragmatics & Cognition 19(2): 224–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aull, Bethany
2019 “A study of phatic emoji use in Whats­App communication.” Internet Pragmatics 2(2): 206–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Avendaño, Tom C.
2012 “30 años de emoticonos [30 years of emoticons].” El País 28 October. [URL]
Azuma, Junichi, and Martin Ebner
2008 “A stylistic analysis of graphic emoticons: Can they be candidates for a universal visual language of the future?” In Proceedings of the World Conference on Educational Media, Hypermedia and Telecommunications (ED-Media), 972–977. Vienna: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).Google Scholar
Blagdon, Jeff
2013 “How emoji conquered the world: The story of the smiley face from the man who invented it.” The Verge 4 March. [URL] (accessed 28 July 2019).
Bou-Franch, Patricia
2011 “Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations.” Journal of Pragmatics 43(6): 1772–1785. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Vanessa
2015 Cool Shades: The History and Meaning of Sunglasses. London: Bloomsbury. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bucholz, Katarina
2019 “In 2019, global emoji count is growing to more than 3,000.” Statista. [URL] (accessed 5 March 2020).
Burge, Jeremy
2017 “5 billion emojis sent daily on Messenger.” Blog.Emojipedia.Org 17 July. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2019).
2019 “Correcting the record on the first emoji set.” Emojipedia 8 March. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2019).
Calero Vaquera, María Luisa
2014 “El discurso del Whats­App: Entre el Messenger y el SMS [Whats­App discourse: Between Messenger and SMS].” Oralia 171: 85–114.Google Scholar
Carvalho, Paula, Luís Sarmento, Mário J. Silva, and Eugénio De Oliveira
2009 “Clues for detecting irony in user-generated contents: oh…!! it’s ‘so easy’ ;-).” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 53–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coates, Jennifer
2007 “Talk in a play frame: More on laughter and intimacy.” Journal of Pragmatics 39(1): 29–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruz, Juan
2014 “¿Está usted tan contento como dice su emoticono? [Are you as happy as your emoticon is saying?].” El País 16 March. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2019).
Cuadrado Gordillo, Isabel, Guadalupe Martín-Mora Parra, and Inmaculada Fernández Antelo
2015 “La expresión de las emociones en la comunicación virtual: el ciberhabla [Expression of emotions in virtual communication: Netspeak].” Revista ICONO14. Revista Científica de Comunicación y Tecnologías Emergentes 13(1): 180–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Danesi, Marcel
2016 The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Derks, Daantje, Arjan E. R. Bos, and Jasper Von Grumbkow
2007 “Emoticons and social interaction on the Internet: The importance of social context.” Computers in Human Behavior 23(1): 842–849. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dresner, Eli, and Susan C. Herring
2010 “Functions of the nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocutionary force.” Communication Theory 20(3): 249–268. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dynel, Marta
2009 “Beyond a joke: Types of conversational humour.” Linguistics and Language Compass 3(5): 1284–1299. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dynel, Marta, Alexander Brock, and Henri de Jongste
2016 “A burgeoning field of research: Humorous intent in interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 951: 51–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evans, Vyvyan
2017 The Emoji Code: The Linguistics Behind Smiley Faces and Scaredy Cats. London: Picador.Google Scholar
Francesconi, Sabrina
2011 “Multimodally expressed humour shaping Scottishness in tourist postcards.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 9(1): 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fry, William F.
2010 Sweet Madness: A Study of Humor (2nd edn.). New Brunswich and London: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Ge, Jing, and Susan C. Herring
2018 “Communicative functions of emoji sequences on Sina Weibo.” First Monday 23(11). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra
2011 “ ‘On for drinkies?’: Email cues of participant alignments.” Language@Internet 8(4). [URL] (accessed 18 August 2018).
Gibson, Will, Pingping Huang, and Qianyun Yu
2018 “Emoji and communicative action: The semiotics, sequence and gestural actions of ‘face covering hand’.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 91–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giles, Howard, Nikolas Coupland, and Justine Coupland
1991 Contexts of Accomodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Glenn, Phillip
2003 Laughter in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Ervin
1971 Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer
2001 “The pragmatics of humor support.” HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 14(1): 55–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herring, Susan C.
2004 “Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior.” In Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, ed. by Sasha A. Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. Gray, 338–376. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 “A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse.” Language@Internet 41: 1–37. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2018).
Herring, Susan C., and Jannis Androutsopoulos
2015 “Computer-mediated discourse 2.0.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (2nd edn.), ed. by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 127–151. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herring, Susan C., and Ashley Dainas
2017 “ ‘Nice picture comment!’: Graphicons in Facebook comment threads.” In Proceedings of the Fifthieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2185–2194. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2018). DOI logo
Houston, Keith
2013 Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. New York: Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail, Harvey Sacks, and Emanuel A. Schegloff
1987 “Notes on laughter in the pursuit of intimacy.” In Talk and Social Organisation, ed. by Graham Button, and John R. E. Lee, 152–205. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Katsuno, Hirofumi, and Christine Yano
2007 “Kaomoji and expressivity in a Japanese housewives’ chat room.” In The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online, ed. by Brenda Danet, and Susan C. Herring, 278–302. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kavanagh, Barry
2016 “Emoticons as a medium for channeling politeness within American and Japanese online blogging communities.” Language and Communication 481: 53–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
König, Katharina
2019 “Stance taking with ‘laugh’ particles and emojis – Sequential and functional patterns of ‘laughter’ in a corpus of German Whats­App chats.” Journal of Pragmatics 1421: 156–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kotthoff, Helga
2006 “Gender and humor: The state of the art.” Journal of Pragmatics 38(1): 4–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, SooJin
2018 “Emoji at MoMA: Considering the ‘original emoji’ as art.” First Monday 23(9). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maíz Arévalo, Carmen
2014 “A pragmatic and multimodal analysis of emoticons and gender in social networks.” In New Insights into Genedered Discoursive Practices: Language, Gender and Identity Construction, ed. by A. Sánchez Macarro, and A. Cabrejas Peñuelas, 175–197. Valencia: Universitat de València.Google Scholar
Markman, Kris M., and Sae Oshima
2007 “Pragmatic play? Some possible functions of English emoticons and Japanese kaomoji in computer-mediated discourse.” In Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference 8.0: Let’s Play, 1–19.Google Scholar
McCulloch, Gretchen
2019 Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. New York: Riverhead books.Google Scholar
Meredith, Joanne
2017 “Analysing technological affordances of online interactions using conversation analysis.” Journal of Pragmatics 1151: 42–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortega-Bueno, Reynier, Carlos E. Muñiz-Cuza, José E. Medina Pagola, and Paolo Rosso
2018 “UO UPV: Deep linguistic humor detection in Spanish social media.” In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Evaluation of Human Language Technologies for Iberian Languages, ed. by Paolo Rosso, Julio Gonzalo, Raquel Martínez, Soto Montalvo, and Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz, 203–213. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2019).
Pavalanathan, Imashanthi, and Jacob Eisenstein
2016 “More emojis, less :) The competition for paralinguistic function in microblog writing.” First Monday 21(11). [URL] (accessed 18 August 2019). DOI logo
Pérez-Sabater, Carmen
2019 “Emoticons in relational writing practices on Whats­App: Some reflections on gender.” In Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions, ed. by Patricia Bou-Franch, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 163–189. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Petitjean, Cécile, and Étienne Morel
2017 “ ‘Hahaha’: Laughter as a resource to manage Whats­App conversations.” Journal of Pragmatics 1101: 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rashdi, Fathiya Al
2018 “Functions of emojis in Whats­App interaction among Omanis.” Discourse, Context & Media 261: 117–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reyes, Antonio, Paolo Rosso, and Davide Buscaldi
2012 “From humor recognition to irony detection: The figurative language of social media.” Data & Knowledge Engineering 741: 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rezabeck, Landra L., and John J. Cochenouor
1994 “Emoticons: Visual cues for computer-mediated communication.” In Imagery and Visual Literacy: Selected Readings from the Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (26th, Tempe, Arizona, October 12–16, 1994), 371–383. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2018).
Sampietro, Agnese
2016a “Emoticonos y emojis. Análisis de su historia, diffusion y uso en la comunicación digital actual [Emoticons and emojis: Analysis of their history, spread, and use in contemporary digital communication].” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Valencia.Google Scholar
2016b “Emoticonos y multimodalidad. El uso del pulgar hacia arriba en Whats­App [Emoticons and multimodality: The use of the thumbs-up on Whats­App].” Aposta. Revista de ciencias sociales 691: 271–295. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2018).
2019a “Cómo hacer palabras con emojis: sustitución y enfatización visual de vocablos en Whats­App [How to do words with emojis: Visual replacement and emphasis of terms on Whats­App].” Revista de Estudios sobre el Discurso Digital 21: 1–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019b “Emoji and rapport management in Spanish Whats­App chats.” Journal of Pragmatics 1431: 109–120. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 “Use and interpretation of emoji in electronically-mediated communication: A survey.” Visual Communication Quarterly 271: 27–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emmanuel A., and Harvey Sacks
1973 “Opening up closing.” Semiotica 8(1): 289–327.Google Scholar
Shep, Sydney J.
2010 “ ‘Smiley, you’re on candid camera’: Emoticons & pre-digital networks.” Mémoires Du Livre – Studies in Book Culture 2(1). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siebenhaar, Beat
2018 “Funktionen von Emojis und Altersabhängigkeit ihres Gebrauchs in der Whatsapp-Kommunikation [Functions of emojis and age differences in its use in Whats­App communication].” In Jugendsprachen [ Youth Languages ], ed. by Arne Ziegler, 749–772. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siever, Christina Margrit, and Torsten Siever
2020 “Emoji-text relations on Instagram: Empirical corpus studies on multimodal uses of the iconographetic mode.” In Shifts towards Image-Centricity in Contemporary Multimodal Practices, ed. by Hartmut Stöckl, Helen Caple, and Jana Pflaeging, 177–203. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Skovholt, Karianne, Anette Grønning, and Anne Kankaanranta
2014 “The communicative functions of emoticons in workplace e-mails: :-).” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 191: 780–797. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spagnolli, Anna and Luciano Gamberini
2007 “Interacting via SMS: Practices of social closeness and reciprocation,” British Journal of Social Psychology 46(2): 343–364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stahl, Levi
2014 “The first emoticon.” Ivebeenreadinglately 13 April. [URL] (accessed 18 August 2018).
Tang, Ying, and Khe Foon Hew
2019 “Emoticon, emoji, and sticker use in computer-mediated communication: A review of theories and research findings.” International Journal of Communication 131: 2457–2483. [URL]
Tsakona, Villy
2009 “Language and image interaction in cartoons: Towards a multimodal theory of humor.” Journal of Pragmatics 41(6): 1171–1188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vela Delfa, Cristina, and Juan Julián Jiménez Gómez
2011 “El sistema de alternancia de turnos en los intercambios sincrónicos mediatizados por ordenador [Turn-taking in synchronic computer-mediated exchanges].” Pragmalingüística 191: 121–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walther, Joseph B., and Kyle P. D’Addario
2001 “The impacts of emoticons on message interpretation in computer-mediated communication.” Social Science Computer Review 19(3): 324–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Andrew
1993 “A pragmatic device in electronic communication.” Journal of Pragmatics 19(4): 389–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yevstifeyev, Mykyta, and Karl Pentzlin
2012 “Revised preliminary proposal to encode six punctuation characters introduced by Hervé Bazin in the UCS.” [URL] (accessed 18 August 2018).
Yus, Francisco
2014 “Not all emoticons are created equal.” Linguagem Em (Dis)Curso 14(3): 511–529. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Pragmática del emoji: dentro, fuera y más allá [Pragmatics of emoji: Inside, outside, and beyond].” Keynote speech presented at the III Jornadas RECOD. Segovia 26 September.Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by 7 other publications

Dynel, Marta
2024. Do We Know Whether to Laugh or Cry? User Responses to at Ukraine’s Dark-humour Meme. Journal of Creative Communications DOI logo
Gibson, Will
2024. Flirting and winking in Tinder chats. Internet Pragmatics DOI logo
Roos, Carla Anne, Namkje Koudenburg & Tom Postmes
2024. The Social Dynamics Approach to mediated communication. European Review of Social Psychology ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Sinkeviciute, Valeria
2024. Multimodal joint fantasising as a category‑implicative and category‑relations‑implicative action in online multi‑party interaction. Internet Pragmatics 7:1 ► pp. 101 ff. DOI logo
Sinkeviciute, Valeria
2024. Introduction. Internet Pragmatics 7:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Yus, Francisco
2023. Humour in Messaging Interactions. In Pragmatics of Internet Humour, ► pp. 107 ff. DOI logo
Sampietro, Agnese, Samuel Felder & Beat Siebenhaar
2022. Do you kiss when you text? Cross-cultural differences in the use of the kissing emojis in three WhatsApp corpora. Intercultural Pragmatics 19:2 ► pp. 183 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.