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.
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Cited by (7)
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Yus, Francisco
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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.
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