Interpreting emoji pragmatics
Ashley R. Dainas, Susan C. Herring
Abstract
Abstract 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.