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Results largely support Herring and Dainas’s graphicon-function taxonomy, yet respondents (n=523) strongly preferred tone modification over other functions. 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In C. Xie, F. Yus, & H. Haberland (Eds.), Internet pragmatics: Theory and practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  \nInterpreting Emoji Pragmatics  \nAshley R. Dainas Susan C. Herring  \n[ardainas@iu.edu](ardainas@iu.edu) [herring@iu.edu](herring@iu.edu)  \nDepartment of Information and Library Science Indiana University, Bloomington  \nAbstract  \nThis 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 .  \nIntroduction  \nThe popular press (at least in the English-speaking world) is currently rife with speculation that emoji are becoming a new, global “language.”1 However, in order for a set of symbols to become a language that can be used to communicate effectively with other people, users of the symbols must agree on their meanings, and a number of studies have shown that even within the same culture, internet users often disagree in their interpretations of emoji (e.g. Miller, Thebault-Spieker, et al. 2016; Tigwell and Flatla 2016). Starting from the assumption that the basic function of emoji is to express emotion, most of these studies have focused on the emotion, sentiment, or mood conveyed by individual emoji in experiments involving emoji presented either in isolation (e.g. Jaeger and Ares 2017, Miller, Thebault-Spieker, et al. 2016) or in the context of Twitter tweets (e.g. Miller, Kluver, et al. 2017) . A limitation of this approach, however, is that it views meaning as residing solely on the semantic level, in the emoji icons themselves, rather than in emoji-in-use. Emoji do not only express emotions such as ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, or ‘positive’or ‘negative’ sentiment; they also have pragmatic functions whose meanings derive from the contexts in which they are embedded, such astone modification, illustration or repetition of accompanying text, and performance of virtual actions (e.g. Herring and Dainas 2017) . Thus research that seeks to understand how emoji are interpreted in authentic contexts of use – which is where most people encounter them, rather than as isolated tokens – needs to account for their pragmatic functions.  \nTo address this need, we conducted an online survey, the Understanding Emoji Survey, to determine how social media users interpret the pragmatic functions of 13 popular types of emoji (smiles, frowns, winks, etc.) in the discourse context of comments posted to public  \n1 See e.g. Cohn (2015), Oliveira (2017), and Thompson (2016) . Emoji are small, colorful graphical icons used in text fields in digital communication and that represent facial expressions, objects, actions, and symbols. The word emoji comes from Japanese e- (‘picture) + moji (‘character’) .  \nINTERPRETING EMOJI PRAGMATICS  \nFacebook groups. For each emoji-containing comment, respondents selected from a list of functions that was adapted from Herring and Dainas’s (2017) taxonomy of graphicon functions. This chapter describes the survey study methodology and reports on its overall findings. Drawing on example survey items and the responses they received, we demonstrate that although the semantics of individual emoji inform their pragmatic uses, understanding emoji semantics is often insufficient to understand the intended meaning of emoji-containing messages. Further, different emoji types specialize to varying degrees in expressing particular pragmatic functions.  \nAnother ","cbCaiiSRxWF4nmR6","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiiSRxWF4nmR6","pdf",721505,34,"English","# Abstract\n# Introduction\n# Background Literature\n## Emoji as Language\n## Understanding Emoji Survey Method and Findings","[{\"question\":\"What is the Understanding Emoji Survey trying to measure?\",\"answer\":\"It measures how social media users interpret the pragmatic functions of popular emoji types in the discourse context of comments posted to public Facebook groups.\"},{\"question\":\"Do the survey results support an existing emoji function taxonomy?\",\"answer\":\"Yes. The findings generally validate Herring and Dainas’s (2017) taxonomy of graphicon functions, though respondents overwhelmingly preferred tone modification.\"},{\"question\":\"How do interpretations vary across emoji types?\",\"answer\":\"Preferred interpretations of pragmatic function vary depending on the specific emoji type used in the comments.\"}]","Interpreting Emoji Pragmatics - Introduction to Understanding Emoji Survey Findings | PDF",1791887788]