Expressivity and Emojis

Abstract This chapter investigates emojis as devices of visual communication that encode expressive meaning in written digital communication. While only a subset of emojis classifies as expressive emojis in the narrow sense (including face emojis, heart emojis, and a range of hand-gesture emojis), these emojis are consistently among the most frequently used emojis, and this chapter demonstrates that they exhibit the hallmarks of expressive meaning. Within a classification of expressive items as use-conditional items, which can be captured in a multidimensional semantics, the respective emojis cover at least the isolated expletive and the functional expletive class. This chapter also discusses the projection behavior of emojis and compares two approaches to emoji semantics: the lexicalist approach treats emojis as lexemes with a conventionalized meaning that limits the role of pragmatics; by contrast, the pictorial approach treats emojis as little pictures with a relatively minimal iconic semantics and a richer role for pragmatics.