Are face emojis linguistic signals or merely text-accompanying pictures?
In this talk, Lea Fricke, Patrick Grosz and Tatjana Scheffler present recent experimental work from the ViCom project Semantics and Pragmatics of Emojis in Digital Communication. They investigate semantic differences in two groups of visually similar emoji pairs: Emoji pairs with a small visual difference that either does or does not correspond to a difference in a human facial expression according to an adaptation of the Facial Action Coding System for emojis by Fugate & Franco (2021). Their results show that the small difference between the two emojis of a pair creates a difference in meaning. The results support a lexicalist approach to emoji semantics, which treats face emojis as conventionalized linguistic signals (Grosz et al. 2023).