The project studies emojis from a formal semantics perspective informed by experimental data. As different emoji types make distinct meaning contributions, and face emojis (such as 😄) are by far the most frequently used, our research primarily concentrates on the semantics of face emojis and in particular, whether they can be decomposed into building blocks of meaning.

Objective 1: Determine the individual meaning parts contributing to a face emoji and how they combine to yield the whole emoji meaning. We focus more specifically on the question of whether the lexical entries of face emojis can be decomposed into parts that parallel the main features of the faces, i.e., eyes, mouth, eyebrows. Correspondingly, we ask whether the overall meaning of a face emoji can be compositionally calculated based on its features, e.g., [[grinning face with smiling eyes]] as a composition of [[smiling eyes]] and [[laughing open mouth with only upper teeth showing]]. In experiments, we will investigate which emotions and appraisals emoji features are associated with, and how they combine. Our goal is to study the alignment of appraisals and emotions with emoji parts and emojis, similar to what has been proposed for human facial expressions. This would yield a parallelism between the visual composition of facial action units in emojis and the dynamic composition of appraisals in human emotions, and contribute to the cluster goals on degrees of iconicity and the role of conventionalization.

Objective 2: Identify whether the overall meaning contribution of face emojis is isolated (similar to interjections such as “ouch”) or functional (such as discourse particles like “ja”). Face emojis have been shown to contribute primarily expressive evaluations of the context. However, it is controversial whether the expressive evaluation is merely triggered by circumstances and semantically isolated, or whether the emojis’ semantics includes a functional component which must explicitly relate to an argument provided from the (linguistic) context. We aim to distinguish between the two cases and delineate whether face emojis are always functional or can be seen as ambiguous between isolated and functional uses.

This will get us closer to a full, formal, decompositional characterization of the denotation of face emojis and their visual parts. Our hybrid approach to the semantics of face emojis, which treats them as having both iconic and symbolic properties, connects to the question of kinds and degrees of iconicity in that we will be able to answer questions like whether some emojis are more or less iconic than others. Finally, questions of conventionalization, lexicalization, and stabilization of visual content are central to an understanding of emoji semantics, given that we have established conventionalized/lexicalized aspects of emoji meanings, and a recurring question of our project is the extent to which such meaning aspects are stabilized across emoji user populations.