Interpreting Emoji Pragmatics
Ashley Dainas and Susan Herring
Indiana University Bloomington
There is speculation that emoji are becoming a new “language” that is supplanting text (Dürscheid & Siever, 2017). Speakers must agree on the meanings and uses of words for a language to function. However, research has shown that internet users often disagree in their interpretations of the semantics or sentiments of individual emoji (Miller et al., 2016, 2017). However, that research provided respondents with minimal or no context. Studies of emoji function in discourse contexts exist (e.g., Al Rashdi, 2015; Authors, 2017; Dürscheid & Siever, 2017), but these focus on researchers’, rather than users’, interpretations. Researcher interpretations are useful, but their validity can be questioned.
To address these issues, we created an online survey to assess how internet users interpret the pragmatic functions of emoji in their local discourse contexts. The survey consisted of 12 examples drawn from 46 anonymized messages containing emoji collected from our research on public Facebook groups. The emoji used represent 13 of the most common emoji types (smiles, winks, blushes, tears of joy, etc.). In our previous research (Authors, 2017) we created a taxonomy to describe the pragmatic functions of emoji. We reworded this taxonomy to make it accessible to laypersons. Respondents interpreted each emoji’s function in context, e.g., as tone modification, virtual action, reaction, illustration, etc. Each participant also provided information about their gender, age and social media usage. In January 2018, we shared the survey with students and colleagues at our university as well as via social media. Roughly 570 completed surveys were submitted over a one-month period.
Preliminary results show that tone modification is the least ambiguous function of the emoji. It was also the default interpretation chosen by the respondents, followed by virtual action, even in examples where the researchers had assigned a different function. As researchers, we tended to make more nuanced distinctions. Nevertheless, the respondents preferred each of the other functions from our taxonomy for at least some examples. Their choices mostly aligned with ours, validating our taxonomy. However, in examples not coded as tone, respondents tended to agree less among themselves. Differences in ambiguity of emoji functions were also found according to emoji type. In concluding, we revisit the issue of emoji ambiguity raised by Miller et al. (2016, 2017), consider how well providing discourse context resolves (or does not resolve) it, and (re)evaluate the status of emoji as a “language” with shared conventions and meanings.
References
Al Rashdi, F. (2015). Forms and functions of emojis in Whatsapp interaction among omanis. PhD thesis, Georgetown University. http://hdl.handle. net/10822/761502.
Authors. (2017).
Dürscheid, C., & Siever, C. M (2017). Beyond the alphabet – Communication with emojis. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik, 45(2), 256-285.
Miller, H., Kluver, D., Thebault-Spieker, J., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2017). Understanding emoji ambiguity in context: The role of text in emoji-related miscommunication. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017) (pp. 152-161). AAAI Press.
Miller, H., Thebault-Spieker, J., Chang, S., Johnson, L., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2016). Blissfully happy or ready to fight: Varying interpretations of emoji. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2016). http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~bhecht/publications/ICWSM2016_emoji.pdf