THE PRAGMATICS OF EMOJI IN AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS - Social Review Vol. 13, No. 1, 2025

Aug 23, 2026

Uploaded by Callum

The article explores the pragmatic functions of emoji in online awareness campaigns within digital communication, a key element of contemporary capitalism. Often treated as decorative symbols, emoji perform essential communicative roles: expressing emotions, shaping and enhancing text, and constructing meaning through context. Using Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory, the study analyzes five English-language campaigns from 2014 to 2024 to show how emoji reinforce messages and engage audiences across social media platforms.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages10

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Emoji

The pragmatics of emoji in awareness campaigns

Table 1. Emoji’s Functions

| SOCIAL REVIEW | Vol. 13, No. 1, 2025 | ISSN 2695-9755 | | | --- | --- | | International Social Sciences Review / Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales | | | | | | | [https://doi.org/10.62701/revsocial.v13.5449](https://doi.org/10.62701/revsocial.v13.5449) | | | | THE PRAGMATICS OF EMOJI IN AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS THIAGO TÚLIO BESEN PEREIRA Federal University of Paraná of Curitiba (Brazil) | KEYWORDS | ABSTRACT | | --- | --- | | Emoji
Digital communication Pragmatics Awareness campaigns | This article explores the pragmatic functions of emoji in online awareness campaigns within the framework of digital communication, a key element of contemporary capitalism. Emojis, often perceived as decorative symbols, serve crucial communicative roles, such as expressing emotions, enhancing text, and shaping meaning through context. Drawing from Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory, the study analyzes five English-language awareness campaigns produced between 2014 and 2024. These campaigns use emojis strategically to reinforce messages and engage audiences across social media platforms. The article aims to contextualize emoji in digital discourse, outline their communicative potential in hybrid messages (text, audio, image), and show how they function pragmatically within structured speech acts. The research contributes to the broader field of linguistic studies by highlighting emoji as significant tools in virtual communication, particularly in digital campaigns that seek to raise awareness on social issues and foster public engagement | RECIBIDO: 17 / 02 / 2025 ACEPTADO: 24 / 05 / 2025 SOCIAL Review, 13(1), 2025, pp. 75-84 1. Introduction Digital communication is one of the bases of the current stage of Capitalism globally. This kind of communication is the structure that allows information, money, and data to circulate throughout the world, including smartphones, computers, social media, and instant messaging apps. Using these resources, people communicate in a hybrid and multimodal way, i.e., using writing, speaking, pictures, audio, video, and so on. One of the most important phenomena that stands out within this range are the emoji, which are pictograms people use with the writing in online messaging. According to Padilla (2024, p. 53), these pictograms are not only illustrations to what people talk or communicate online, but they also have communicative functions. These functions include emotion expression, conversational uses, textual indexing, and so on, with a diverse range of pragmatic functions, i.e., creating meaning through the interaction of words, emoji, and their specific context (Pagani et al; 2022, p. 10) . For instance, if a person types “Hello, have a nice day!” to a friend, the emoji “ ” adds meaning to the utterance, like a kiss or an intimate farewell. Using the premises above, this article analyses the pragmatic functions of emoji in a specific act of speech called “awareness campaigns”. As the name suggests, these campaigns are designed to conscientize people about social and relevant issues (Cavalcanti, 2013, p. 36) . In the current context, the most effective way to broadcast these campaigns is online, using social media and smart gadgets, so this research analyses these texts in a virtual context. The analysed campaigns are in English and produced within the last ten years (2014-2024) . The pragmatics theories used to analyse these texts are the Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987) and the Speech Acts Theory (Austin, 1962), which guide the research. Five campaigns are analysed, which signals the importance of emoji in this context and how these resources can be useful when it comes to propaganda and digital communication. The campaigns appear aside the analyses to facilitate the reading and allow the pragmatic relations using the theories mentioned above. 1.1. Emoji According to Danesi (2017, p. 2), emoji is an English adaptation o

FAQs

What pragmatic roles do emoji serve in online awareness campaigns?

Emoji express emotions, enhance and index text, and contribute to meaning by interacting with surrounding words and their context.

Which theoretical frameworks guide the analysis of emoji?

The study uses Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory to interpret emoji within structured speech acts.

What is the scope of the analyzed awareness campaigns?

Five English-language campaigns produced between 2014 and 2024 are examined, focusing on how emoji are strategically used to reinforce messages and engage audiences on social media.

Aug 23, 2026

Uploaded by Callum