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Part of
Approaches to Internet Pragmatics: Theory and practice
Edited by Chaoqun Xie, Francisco Yus and Hartmut Haberland
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 318] 2021
► pp. 107–144

Chapter 4
Interpreting emoji pragmatics

 | Indiana University, USA
 | Indiana University, USA
This chapter describes the methods and the overall findings of the Understanding Emoji Survey, which we administered online in early 2018 to determine how social media users interpret the pragmatic functions of popular emoji types in the discourse context of comments posted to public Facebook groups. The findings generally validate Herring and Dainas’s (2017) taxonomy of graphicon functions for emoji, although survey respondents (n = 523) overwhelmingly preferred one function, tone modification, over the others. Moreover, preferred interpretations of pragmatic function varied according to emoji type. Based on these findings, we argue for the importance of analyzing emoji meaning from the perspective of pragmatics.
Keywords: context, discourse, emoji, emotion, Facebook, interpretation, pragmatic functions, semantics, survey, tone
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background literature
    • 2.1Emoji as language
    • 2.2Emoji semantics
    • 2.3Explanations for semantic ambiguity
    • 2.4Emoji pragmatics
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1Survey design
      • 4.1.1Survey items and discourse context
      • 4.1.2Emoji types
      • 4.1.3Pragmatic functions
      • 4.1.4Multiple-part items
      • 4.1.5Pilot study
      • 4.1.6Final survey structure
    • 4.2Distribution
    • 4.3Quantitative measures
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Respondent demographics
    • 5.2Respondents’ social media usage
    • 5.3Respondents’ interpretations of pragmatic functions
      • 5.3.1Overall
        • By emoji type
      • 5.3.2Individual items
    • 5.4Agreement
    • 5.5Multi-part questions
    • 5.6Open-ended responses
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Research questions revisited
    • 6.2Emoji ambiguity: Pros and cons
    • 6.3The role of discourse context
    • 6.4The status of emoji as a language
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.318.04dai
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