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This paper applies a social semiotic framework for exploring the functions of emoji in digital discourse about working from home (WFH). This is an important and prevalent discourse in the on-going COVID-19 pandemic due to widespread ‘lockdowns’ aimed at reducing the spread of the virus which have had a profound impact upon how and where people work...
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The COVID-19 pandemic affects almost all aspects of life, including social and language aspects. One of the phenomena of language change is the emerging of new words during COVID-19. Taken from a linguistic perspective, this research aims to analyze the new words created during COVID-19, to analyze their meaning of the new words, and how they affec...
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... Working at home has the potential to reshape existing work practices in novel ways. Emojis are ubiquitous in this work-at-home communication, and they play an important role in "expressing emotions, conveying positions, and negotiating interpersonal coordination" [5]. In a survey in which participants were required to vote for the most accepted emojis at work and in professional environments, 71% of participants voted for the emoji "Thumbs Up" ( ) as the most accepted one. ...
In the digital era, Emojis have emerged as a critical component of online communication, transcending linguistic barriers while introducing new challenges in cross-cultural conversations. This paper explores the complex ways in which cultural backgrounds influence the selection and interpretation of Emojis, providing a nuanced understanding of digital nonverbal communication. By using a comparative analysis between Eastern and Western usage of popular Emojis, the research highlights significant cultural discrepancies. The study traces Emoji popularity trends from 2019 to 2021, a period notably affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which catalyzed the global shift towards online interaction and promoted the usage of specific Emojis related to work, empathy, and emotional connection. Through a sociolinguistic lens, this study illuminates the role of Emojis as a modern pictographic language that encapsulates the inherent diversity of cultural emotion, nuance, and global digital communication. The paper's findings highlight the need to increase cultural awareness of Emoji interpretation and application to reduce misunderstandings in the increasingly connected world.
... Yet, recently anecdotal examples from discourse studies show that a variety of emoji categories can appear at the beginning, middle or ending part of sentences, the positional information of which provides syntactic clues for understanding the meanings and functions of emojis (Ge & Herring, 2018;Herring & Ge, 2020;Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). Psychological experiments have found that emojis at the final position were read significantly longer than those substituting for words in the middle of a sentence because sentence-final emojis might trigger a reanalysis of the sentence relative to the emojis (Cohn et al., 2018). ...
... This provides a partial explanation to the fact that emojis are more likely to be used as subjects (the category of Person & Body) but less likely to function as verbs (Activities), as shown by studies based on case analysis (e.g. Ge & Herring, 2018;Herring & Ge-Stadnyk, in press;Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). The statistics of type-token ratios show that the Smileys & Emotion category has the lowest level of lexical richness (0.010), while Flags has the greatest level (0.499). ...
... Another aspect of the recontextualisation of narrative in museum social media relies on the use of emoji, a form of non-standard language based on pictograms (Danesi 2017: 2) and increasingly used in digitally mediated communication "to add visual annotations to the conceptual content of a message" (Danesi 2016: 10). While at the scholarly level debate on the semiotics of emoji, alternatively interpreted as an independent language (Ge -Herring 2018), or as a paralinguistic modality (Gawne -McCulloch 2019;Logi -Zappavigna 2021, Zappavigna -Logi 2021, is in full bloom, at the level of professional communication, museums have been among the first to acknowledge the ground breaking contribution of emoji to digital communication. Notably, in 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired the original set of 176 emoji characters designed by Shigetaka Kurita and contextually organised an exhibition celebrating the new acquisition (Lee 2018). ...
... Another aspect of the recontextualisation of narrative in museum social media relies on the use of emoji, a form of non-standard language based on pictograms (Danesi 2017: 2) and increasingly used in digitally mediated communication "to add visual annotations to the conceptual content of a message" (Danesi 2016: 10). While at the scholarly level debate on the semiotics of emoji, alternatively interpreted as an independent language (Ge -Herring 2018), or as a paralinguistic modality (Gawne -McCulloch 2019;Logi -Zappavigna 2021, Zappavigna -Logi 2021, is in full bloom, at the level of professional communication, museums have been among the first to acknowledge the ground breaking contribution of emoji to digital communication. Notably, in 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired the original set of 176 emoji characters designed by Shigetaka Kurita and contextually organised an exhibition celebrating the new acquisition (Lee 2018). ...
Storytelling is at the core of museum activities (Bedford 2001), but little attention has been paid to its role in museum communication (MC) from a discourse-analytical perspective. This paper aims to show how narrative has developed as part of MC since the 1970s, appearing in a wide array of museum texts, from press releases to digital genres. Typically, museum storytelling goes hand in hand with evaluative language, lexical markers of affect and forms of non-standard language (emoji). The methodological toolkit for the study is qualitative in focus and draws on frameworks developed for the analysis of museum discourse (Ravelli 2007). The dataset consists of a corpus of museum press releases, dating from 1950 to 2016, and a sample of digital museum texts, dating from 2015 to 2021. The study confirms that MC represents an interesting field for discourse studies, providing a repertoire of innovative practices not only in terms of storytelling techniques, but communication strategies in general.
... Warto wspomnieć, że w ostatnich latach powstały prace analizujące wykorzystanie emotikonów i emoji z perspektywy lingwistyki korpusowej -por.König, 2019;Zappavigna, Logi, 2021. ...
W artykule zrekonstruowano oraz poddano analizie dyskursy kandydatów ubiegających się o stanowisko prezydenta Rzeszowa w 2021 roku. Materiałem badawczym były wpisy na kontach na Twitterze (obecnie serwis funkcjonuje pod nazwą X) Konrada Fijołka, Marcina Warchoła, Ewy Leniart i Grzegorza Brauna w okresie kampanii wyborczej. W celu precyzyjnego zobrazowania dyskursów polityków w opracowaniu posłużono się metodami lingwistyki korpusowej, które umożliwiają przeprowadzenie analizy na poziomie ilościowym. Wykazano, iż kandydaci skupili się przede wszystkim na pozytywnej autoprezentacji oraz podkreślaniu swoich związków z miastem. Można jednak dostrzec pewne cechy charakterystyczne dyskursów poszczególnych polityków: Marcin Warchoł dokonywał autoprezentacji jako polityk popierany przez mieszkańców miasta i prezydenta Tadeusza Ferenca, Konrad Fijołek podkreślał wsparcie elit politycznych i medialnych, natomiast dyskurs Grzegorza Brauna w największym stopniu odróżniał się od pozostałych kandydatów (jako najbardziej radykalny). W artykule pokazano, w jaki sposób metody lingwistyki korpusowej mogą stanowić uzupełnienie badań dyskursu medialnego czy politycznego.
... This means that corpus linguistic software will not necessarily be able to capture all emoji unless it has the capability for recognising these sequences as a single unit. Thus some kind of work-around for concatenating relevant emoji sequences will be required to meaningfully process emoji (Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). Accordingly, this book relied on a custom script, along with a python library, to accurately count and inspect emoji concordance lines. ...
This chapter introduces the framework for exploring emoji-text relations in social media that is used in this book. The chapter begins by explaining the discourse semantic systems that have been developed in Systemic Functional Linguistics for describing ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning. This is in order to lay the foundation for exploring the linguistic meanings with which emoji coordinate in subsequent chapters. The chapter then introduces the concept of ‘intermodal convergence’ used in social semiotics to describe how semiotic modes such as language and images coordinate to make meaning. The chapter outlines the principles that we use for determining emoji-text convergence, including proximity, minimum mapping, and prosodic correspondence. It concludes with an overview of the system of emoji-text convergence, presenting the system network guiding the close textual analysis conducted on the social media corpora used in the book.
... This means that corpus linguistic software will not necessarily be able to capture all emoji unless it has the capability for recognising these sequences as a single unit. Thus some kind of work-around for concatenating relevant emoji sequences will be required to meaningfully process emoji (Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). Accordingly, this book relied on a custom script, along with a python library, to accurately count and inspect emoji concordance lines. ...
This chapter focuses on the technical aspects of emoji, including how emoji are encoded and rendered for use in digital communication. The chapter explains how emoji are developed by the Unicode Consortium as well as considering the social implications of this process. Unicode characters, and emoji codepoints, modifiers, and sequences are explained. The chapter also deals with emoji design and aesthetics, and explains how emoji are visually rendered as glyphs by different ‘vendors’ such as social media platforms. The chapter then examines the role of semiotic technologies in both enabling and constraining the ways they are used. It concludes by discussing the implications of emoji encoding and rendering on corpus construction, annotation, and concordancing.
... This means that corpus linguistic software will not necessarily be able to capture all emoji unless it has the capability for recognising these sequences as a single unit. Thus some kind of work-around for concatenating relevant emoji sequences will be required to meaningfully process emoji (Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). Accordingly, this book relied on a custom script, along with a python library, to accurately count and inspect emoji concordance lines. ...
This chapter explores the role of emoji in the negotiation of meaning in exchanges in TikTok comment feeds. It draws on a model of affiliation, together with the emoji text relations of concurrence, resonance, and synchronicity developed in the three previous chapters, to undertake detailed analysis of the social bonds at stake in these exchanges. Affiliation is a framework developed within social semiotics for describing how language and other semiotic resources support both social connection and disconnection, and aid in the construction of social relations more generally. The corpus used for the analysis undertaken in the chapter is a specialised dataset of TikTok comment threads made on a video series reviewing the food delivered during hotel quarantine in New Zealand in 2021. The TikTok comment exchanges featured users negotiating social bonds about food, daily life, and the pandemic. Most exchanges involved convivial alignments around shared values, with the occasional heated discussion about whether quarantine was a justifiable approach to the pandemic.
... This means that corpus linguistic software will not necessarily be able to capture all emoji unless it has the capability for recognising these sequences as a single unit. Thus some kind of work-around for concatenating relevant emoji sequences will be required to meaningfully process emoji (Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). Accordingly, this book relied on a custom script, along with a python library, to accurately count and inspect emoji concordance lines. ...
Social media is resplendent with a creative blend of non-standardised graphical resources such as images, memes, digital stickers, avatars and GIFs that extend beyond the rigid parameters of Unicode emoji character encoding. This chapter explores how emoji interact with other kinds of visual resources beyond language in social media posts such as graphicons. The chapter aims to give the reader a sense of how a social semiotic intermodal approach furnishes a flexible toolkit for an analyst to explore emoji’s relations with other modes. It primarily analyses the meanings made through combinations of emoji, language and GIFs in tweets. The analysis reveals how graphicons such as GIFs and digital stickers often realise a salient ‘New’ of the posts wherein they occur, and thus foreground interpersonal meaning.
... This means that corpus linguistic software will not necessarily be able to capture all emoji unless it has the capability for recognising these sequences as a single unit. Thus some kind of work-around for concatenating relevant emoji sequences will be required to meaningfully process emoji (Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). Accordingly, this book relied on a custom script, along with a python library, to accurately count and inspect emoji concordance lines. ...
This chapter explores the interpersonal function of emoji as they resonate with the linguistic attitude and negotiation of solidarity expressed in social media posts. We have introduced a system network for describing the ways in which this resonance can occur, making a distinction between emoji which imbue the co-text with interpersonal meaning (usually through attitudinally targeting particular ideation) and emoji which enmesh with the interpersonal meanings made in the co-text (usually through coordinating with linguistic attitude). We then explain the more delicate options in this resonance network where emoji can harmonise with the co-text by either echoing or coalescing interpersonal meaning, or can rebound from the co-text, either complicating, subverting or positioning interpersonal meaning. Following this traversal of the resonance network we considered two important dimensions of interpersonal meaning noted in the corpus: the role of emoji in modulating attendant interpersonal meanings in the co-text by upscaling graduation and emoji’s capacity to radiate interpersonal meaning through emblematic usage as bonding icons.
... This means that corpus linguistic software will not necessarily be able to capture all emoji unless it has the capability for recognising these sequences as a single unit. Thus some kind of work-around for concatenating relevant emoji sequences will be required to meaningfully process emoji (Zappavigna & Logi, 2021). Accordingly, this book relied on a custom script, along with a python library, to accurately count and inspect emoji concordance lines. ...
This chapter introduces the study of emoji as a form of social media paralanguage. It delves into the semiotic versatility of emoji as ‘picture characters’ enabling users to express a wide range of meanings through their use with language in social media communication. The book approaches emoji as a form of paralanguage due to their close dependency on the meanings conveyed in their written co-text and their social context. The chapter highlights the significance of the social semiotic perspective to emoji-text relationships adopted in the book with its focus on understanding how they converge with the meanings made in other semiotic modes. It concludes by introducing the structure of the book and the focus of the upcoming chapters on both emoji-text relations and social affiliation.
