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Emoji as graphic discourse markers Functional and positional associations in

German WhatsApp® messages

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DOI: 10.1075/pbns.325.10wie

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A d B j i
Emoji as graphic discourse markers

Functional and positional associations in German WhatsApp® messages

Heike Wiese and Annika Labrenz

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Abstract

We investigate emoji as graphic discourse markers in German WhatsApp® messages. As

comparably novel devices in the rapidly evolving domain of digital messenging, emoji

provide an interesting example to observe change in progress. We present a corpus study and

an experimental study. Main results are (i) an overall salience of subjective and

intersubjective discourse meanings for emoji, with (ii) a general advantage for the former,

especially for emoji that iconically include more active elements, while (iii) dominance

relations can be modulated by left- vs. right-peripheral positions in favor of subjective vs.

intersubjective meanings, respectively. By approaching emoji as discourse markers, the

studies contribute to our understanding of their pragmatic contribution and provide novel

evidence on positional-functional associations for pragmatic markers.

Keywords

discourse markers, intersubjective function, subjective function, emoji, WhatsApp®

messages, messenging, Computer-meditated communication (CMC), right and left periphery

1 Introduction: Pragmatic markers in WhatsApp® messages and the dynamics of

LP/RP differences

Phenomena of language variation can highlight ongoing tendencies of change and this is also

true for left-peripheral and right-peripheral associations of pragmatic markers. In particular,

the dynamics of pragmatic markers in progress might shed a light on functional preferences

for different loci. A promising empirical domain for this is digital messenging and the

comparably new and rapidly developing domain of WhatsApp® messages has a special

potential to reveal patterns of variation and change, given its prevalence as a means of

informal peer-group communication in the absence of normative, standard-language

restrictions.

WhatsApp® was developed in 2009 and, according to the company's website, it has

currently over two billion users worldwide.1 Instant messengers can be used for fast and

spontaneous communication among friends and family members in everyday life but there

are also additional usages, e.g. among work colleagues. They are not restricted to two

communication partners but also support group conversations, e.g. for school classes or

extended families, and temporary WhatsApp® groups are often used for organizing joint

activities.

Informal written language as used in WhatsApp® is interesting for at least two reasons.

First, informal language in general is particularly dynamic and open to innovations, since it is

less subject to the normative restrictions of standard language ideologies. Informal language

use is therefore especially suitable to investigate ongoing change. Second, in WhatsApp®

messages and similar computer- or digital-mediated communication, speakers do not only use

verbal markers but have also developed typographic and orthographic register-specific means

1
See https://www.whatsapp.com/about/ (last accessed 20.04.2020).
(e.g. Thurlow and Poff 2013, Androutsopoulos 2020a, 2020b). Among these are non-standard

spellings, punctuations and capitalizations, abbreviations and the use of emoji and emoticons

(e.g. Bieswanger 2013, Danesi 2017, Lamontagne and McCulloch 2017, Gawne and

McCulloch 2019; for recent studies on different varieties of German, see contributions in

Androutsopoulos and Busch 2020 and Marx et al. 2020; for recently published corpora, see

Ueberwasser and Stark 2017 and Beißwenger et al. 2020).

In this study, we are particularly interested in emoji as comparatively new devices that

have become characteristic of such informal written registers. Taking an integrative

perspective, we include emoji under the notion of discourse markers, which we understand as

a subset of pragmatic markers (cf. Fraser 2009). Following main approaches from the

literature, we define discourse markers (DM for short) as elements that are not fully

syntactically integrated and do not directly contribute to the propositional meaning and truth

value of an utterance but rather operate on the level of discourse (cf. Blakemore 2004, Fraser

2006, Blühdorn et al. 2017). This is a narrow definition in that it excludes modal particles and

connectives, as both are syntactically integrated. At the same time, as we will show in more

detail below, the definition is broad enough to include both verbal and graphic elements.

Furthermore, since it does not make any assumptions about the grammatical status of the

elements, it covers single as well as multi-word items (e.g. you know) and is also open, for

instance, to solitary occurrences of emoji where they constitute a message by themselves.

Another important point for our investigation is that the definition does not restrict DMs to a

particular position, e.g. the left periphery (as suggested for discourse markers by, for

instance, Imo 2012, who uses the term “discourse particles” instead for the more general

sense that we use for DMs here). Capturing DMs in both left and right peripheries will allow

us to investigate possible associations between different functions and positions.

 We distinguish three main functions of pragmatic markers in general: textual (e.g.

Müller 2005), subjective and intersubjective (e.g. Traugott 2010, 2012). The textual function

of DMs is primarily oriented towards discourse contents and text organization, whereas the

subjective and intersubjective functions of DMs are primarily oriented towards discourse

participants. Subjective DMs are oriented towards the speaker and encode the speaker’s

stance and attitudes through evaluation of discourse contents, and their side in turn-taking,

especially through turn-keeping. Intersubjective DMs are oriented towards the addressee;

they encode the speaker’s attention to the social identity of the addressee and the addressee’s

“face” and can signal politeness (including hedging), elicitation of responses (including

corroboration-seeking), turn-giving, discourse expectations and common ground

management.

As a background for our investigation into the dynamics of DMs, we build on

Traugott’s (2010, 2012) influential hypothesis on left-peripheral vs. right-peripheral

associations with emerging subjective vs. intersubjective functions of DMs, respectively (cf.

also Degand and Fagard 2011, Beeching and Detges 2014, Detges and Waltereit 2014). The

hypothesis states that elements in the left periphery (LP for short) are more likely to fulfil

subjective discourse functions, whereas elements in the right periphery (RP) are more likely

to be used for intersubjective functions. In this context, left and right peripheries are

understood with respect to sentences, identifying positions to the left or right, respectively, of

a core sentence. As emphasized in the literature, this functional asymmetry is hypothesized as

a strong tendency rather than a strict rule (e.g. Traugott 2012, Beeching and Detges 2014).

From a diachronic perspective, the hypothesis suggests that “expressions recruited to LP are

likely to undergo subjectification, while those recruited to RP are likely to undergo

intersubjectification” (Traugott 2012, 8; cf. also Traugott 1982 on (inter)subjectification).

 In our study, we investigate functional associations with LP/RP positions for emoji in

German WhatsApp® messages. While previous research has focused on verbal DMs, we will

focus on these graphic DMs. This adds an interesting additional empirical area to the

discussion, since emoji are comparably novel and particularly dynamic devices belonging to

the rapidly evolving domain of digital informal communication.

In what follows, we first provide the background on emoji as graphic DMs (Section 2)

and then present two empirical studies: a corpus study that explores positions and discourse

functions of emoji in naturalistic WhatsApp® messages (Section 3) and an experimental

study based on the findings from the corpus study, which tests subjective vs. intersubjective

interpretations of emoji in LP vs. RP positions in such messages (Section 4). The final section

(Section 5) summarizes our results.

2 Emoji as graphic discourse markers

Emoji are pictures based on Unicode. Coming from Japanese, the word emoji combines the

meanings ‘picture’ (e), ‘write’ (mo) and ‘character’ (ji). These graphic symbols were first

introduced in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita (Bai et al. 2019). Unlike emoticons, which have

already been in use for a longer time, emoji are not limited to facial expressions but can also

depict objects (e.g. animals or food), actions (e.g. clapping hands) and symbols (e.g. flags).

Meanings of emoji found in the literature (e.g. Al Rashdi 2015, Cramer et al. 2016, Danesi

2017, Dürscheid and Siever 2017, Pappert 2017, McCulloch 2019, Beißwenger and Pappert

2019, Dürscheid 2020a, 2020b, Dainas and Herring forthc.) are manifold and not labeled

consistently. Understanding them as DMs in the sense defined above allows us to systematize
their diverse pragmatic contributions by subsuming them under subjective, intersubjective,

and textual meanings.

Emoji fulfil all the criteria we listed for DMs. As an illustration, consider (1) and (2),

taken from the RUEG corpus with WhatsApp® messages where speakers described a traffic

accident they just saw (Wiese et al. 2019; see below for details of the corpus).

(1) Viel Spaß noch bei der Arbeit

a.lot.of fun still at the work

‘Have fun at work ’

(RUEG-DE_0.3.0, DEmo44FD)

(2) viel erlebt heute

lots experienced today

‘Lots going on today ’

(RUEG-DE_0.3.0, DEmo43MD)

In these examples, the emoji are not syntactically integrated but are rather placed outside the

sentence itself, following it right-peripherally. Furthermore, they do not directly contribute to

the propositional meaning and truth value of the utterances but rather operate on the level of

discourse: they do not change the lexical semantics of the sentences but add a discourse

meaning to the message. In (1), the kiss emoji adds an intersubjective element of intimacy or

friendliness towards the addressee; in (2), the laughing-with-tears emoji conveys a subjective

discourse meaning of happiness and/or adds an intersubjective aspect of friendliness to the

narrative.

Note that in both cases, the emoji are not standing for the literal meaning depicted

iconically: in (1), the speaker does not convey that she is actually kissing at the moment of
writing and, in (2), the speaker does not express that he is in fact laughing with tears. As

pointed out by Glikson et al. (2017: 614), who found differences between the iconic meaning

of emoticons and their perceptions: “a smiley is not a smile” (cf. also Sergeant 2019, Albert

2020).

This points to semantic bleaching of the original iconic meaning, suggesting a process

of pragmaticalization and discursive conventionalization that is parallel to what has been

observed for verbal DMs. Verbal DMs are often derived from referential elements with

lexical meanings through a process of semantic bleaching, where they lose this original

content in favor of a discourse meaning that is not truth-conditional, yet conventionalized

(e.g. Traugott 2020). In this process, the original element typically does not get lost but forms

a lexical counterpart to the DM. For instance, in English, man or you know are often used as

DMs (e.g. you know, this is great, man!). However, these expressions are still also used

referentially (e.g. do you know the man over there?).

Similarly, emoji that are used as DMs can also have a referential counterpart with a

lexical meaning. This is evident for emoji depicting objects or actions. Consider the two uses

of such an emoji in the RUEG corpus in (3) and (4).

(3) … als vor meinen Augen ein Autounfall passiert ist

when in.front.of my eyes a car.accident happened has

‘… when in front of my eyes, a car accident happened ’

(RUEG-DE_0.3.0, DEbi84MR)

(4) Auf einem Parkplatz ist ein einem anderen draufgefahren

on a car park has a [car] an other [car] on.driven

‘On a car park, one crashed into another ’

(RUEG-DE_0.3.0, DEmo42FD)
In (3), the car emoji does not add to the propositional content of the message but rather is

used as a DM, acting on the discourse level: it visually emphasizes the message contents and

contributes intersubjectively by making the message more engaging. In contrast, the two

occurrences of the same emoji in (4) are not used as DMs but as icons that refer to concrete

objects, namely two cars. As such, they are even syntactically integrated, replacing lexical

items, i.e. nouns that could be used in those slots (cf. Danesi 2017, Dürscheid 2020a, 2020b,

Dainas and Herring forthc.). When understanding emoji as DMs, then, we refer to emoji in

their usage for discourse functions rather than to their possible counterparts with a referential

meaning – just as one refers to verbal elements (e.g. man) as DMs only in their discourse

usage.

Such emoji contributions as indicating friendliness or intimacy and other instances of

marking tone have been characterized as “pragmatic functions” (Dainas and Herring forthc.).

Investigating emoji under the perspective of graphic DMs covers such functions, while

adding a novel empirical domain to the discussion of discourse markers that can shed new

light on associations of different positions (LP/RP) and different discourse functions. This

way, the view of emoji as DMs can integrate and further systematize different emoji

taxonomies and help us understand their dynamic meaning in terms of general patterns of

variation and change in the pragmatic domain.

In what follows, we summarize central meaning aspects of emoji identified in the

literature and subsume them under textual, subjective and intersubjective DM functions. Note

that, in each case, the categorization is not exclusive, since different meanings overlap and

emoji can – and often do – serve more than one function (as confirmed by our experimental

study, see Section 4).

 Under textual functions, we can subsume emoji uses where they: serve as

conversational openings or closings (e.g. Al Rashdi 2015, McCulloch 2019); organise text,

replacing punctuation marks (Sergeant 2019, Albert 2020, Androutsopoulos 2020b; cf.

Provine et al. 2007 for emoticons); and, interacting with intersubjective functions, emphasize

a topic through visual repetition or illustration of what has already been expressed verbally

(e.g. Al Rashdi 2015, Dürscheid and Siever 2017, Siebenhaar 2018, Dainas and Herring

forthc.) and indicate the type of speech act (e.g. Gawne and McCulloch 2019, Albert 2020;

cf. also Dresner and Herring 2013 on emoticons).

Subjective functions cover usages where emoji express the speaker’s emotions or their

evaluation of the content (cf. Al Rashdi 2015, Cramer et al. 2016, Na’aman et al. 2017,

Pappert 2017) and generally convey the speaker’s state of mind (cf. Danesi 2017 on

“emotive” functions of emoji).

While such functions can be regarded as central for emoji – in particular for those that

depict facial expressions and thus indicate emotions – several studies also point to functions

that can be analyzed as intersubjective. Most notably, emoji have been characterized as

adjusting the tone, e.g. in sarcasm or politeness, thus: serving as cues to guide the addressee’s

understanding (Cramer et al. 2016, McCulloch 2019); contextualising a message (Albert

2020); making it more engaging to the recipient through “spicing up a text” (Cramer et al.

2016, 4); seeking a reaction from the addressee and keeping the communication channel open

(Danesi 2017 characterizes this as the “phatic” functions of emoji in the sense of Jakobson

1960).

As mentioned above, emoji can serve multiple, often interrelated functions at the same

time. For example, an emoji that indicates the type of speech act at the textual level is at the

same time intersubjectively guiding the addressee’s understanding, for instance, by indicating

the tone of the message. Such multifunctional uses can also bring together intersubjective and
subjective domains. Especially smile emoji can serve such related meanings: their subjective

function to express positive emotions can support an intersubjective pragmatic meaning, such

as indicating positive intent. By doing so, they can downgrade a strong complaint and signal

a friendly attitude towards the addressee (e.g. Dresner and Herring 2013, Gawne and

McCulloch 2019) or mark the speaker as friendly to present a positive social persona. Against

this background, we do not draw a hard line between subjective and intersubjective functions

for individual DMs but assume a continuum, parallel to what Traugott (2010) suggested for

verbal DMs. In particular, our analyses will allow for both functions to be present in one DM,

with possibly different dominance relations.

Approaching emoji from the perspective of co-speech gestures, Gawne and McCulloch

(2019) show that, like gestures and to a much larger extent than verbal language, the meaning

of emoji is shaped by context-specific use. Furthermore, the meaning of emoji can be culture-

dependent (Siever 2015) and can even differ within one cultural context, depending on setting

and interlocutor (Frick 2017).

Taken together, this demonstrates that the analysis of emoji meanings and their

categorization under different DM functions – textual, subjective and intersubjective – cannot

solely be based on interpretations of isolated elements alone but crucially needs to involve

their contextualization (cf. also Dainas and Herring forthc.), which constitutes an additional

parallel to verbal DMs.

In the following sections, we present two studies on emoji that take into account these

findings and approach them from the perspective of graphic DMs to investigate possible

associations of LP/RP positions and discourse functions.

3 A corpus-linguistic investigation into emoji in WhatsApp® messages

3.1 Empirical basis: The RUEG corpus

The RUEG corpus (Wiese et al. 2019) has been compiled by the Research Unit “Emerging

Grammars in Language Contact Situations”.2 It consists of naturalistic data elicited with the

“Language Situations” set-up (Wiese 2020). In this set-up, participants are familiarized with a

fictional event, e.g. a traffic accident, through a non-verbal stimulus. They picture themselves

as a witness and describe the incident acting out different communicative situations that can

cover spoken and written modes and different settings. In the specific set-up used in RUEG,

the stimulus was a video of a (minor) car accident. Participants were asked to imagine

themselves as a witness of this accident and to tell different interlocutors about it in different

communicative situations, yielding 2x2, formal vs. informal and spoken vs. written settings.

In the situation relevant for the present study, participants were asked to send a text message

to a friend via WhatsApp® (informal-written condition).

Participants came from two age groups: (i) 15- to 18-year-old adolescents who were

still attending school and (ii) young adults from 22 to 35 years of age. These age groups are

particularly suitable for our investigation, since both started using digital media when

creating and maintaining social relationships had already become a key function of the

internet (McCulloch 2019). This makes digital messenging in these cohorts particularly open

to new developments in the domain of discourse organization.

2
FOR 2537; see hu-berlin.de/rueg. Stimuli and other information, including a training video for elicitors, are
freely accessible on: https://osf.io/qhupg/. The study presented in this chapter was part of a larger investigation
into discourse patterns in different communicative situations. For corpora focusing on WhatsApp data alone, cf.
the MoCoDa2 corpus with digital messages from Germany (Beißwenger et al. 2020), and the corpus “What’s
Up Switzerland?” with WhatsApp messages from Switzerland (Stark et al. 2014–2020)
 All data is integrated in a multimodal corpus that includes sound files and transcriptions

for spoken data and text for written data that preserves such graphic elements as emoji. The

corpus includes multiple annotation layers (normalization, lemma, part-of-speech, Universal

Dependencies) and metadata on each speaker. The corpus is automatically searchable in

ANNIS (Krause et al. 2016).3 It is openly available at Zenodo,4 with new versions regularly

released which contain more and revised data.

In our study, we concentrate on the German data from Germany5 in the corpus version

RUEG-DE_0.3.0, which contains 121,998 tokens from 193 speakers in four communicative

settings, with the informal-written (WhatsApp®) productions covering 15,793 tokens

(punctuation marks and filled pauses were excluded from the token count).

3.2 Discourse-marking emoji in WhatsApp® messages

For our investigation of emoji as DMs, we excluded all emoji that depicted concrete objects

and replaced lexical items (e.g. instead of ‘car’, as in 4), and included all emoji that fitted

our defining criteria for DM, that is, those that had no propositional content but rather

operated at the level of discourse and were not syntactically integrated. This way, we

identified a total number of 142 emoji tokens, covering 43 different emoji types. A bit more

than a third of the speakers used emoji, namely 67 out of a total of 192 speakers (34.89%). In

our analysis, we therefore focused on those 67 speakers. In their productions, we found 2.2

emoji per 100 tokens.

3
https://korpling.org/annis3/
4
https://zenodo.org/record/3236069#.XXo2x3tCRPY
5
In addition, the corpus contains data from heritage speakers of German in the US. For the purpose of the
present chapter, this data was excluded from the analysis, though.
 The six most common emoji types in our data are *Face with Tears of Joy* (16 hits;

0.24 per 100 tokens), *Facepalming* (woman or man) (11 hits; 0.17 per 100 tokens),

*Face with Rolling Eyes* (10 hits; 0.15 per 100 tokens), *Face Screaming in Fear* (10

hits; 0.15 per 100 tokens), *Flushed face* (10 hits; 0.15 per 100 tokens), and *Grinning

Face with Sweat* (10 hits; 0.15 per 100 tokens).

3.3 Discourse contexts and functions

Emoji as graphic DMs in our data are exclusively positioned in the right periphery, in line

with findings from the literature that emoji occur most frequently at the end of messages and

rarely at the beginning (e.g. Al Rashdi 2015, Cramer et al. 2016, Dürscheid 2020a). If the

association of RP positions with intersubjective DM functions holds for graphic DMs as well,

this might then be related to intersubjectivity. However, as mentioned above, emoji are highly

context-sensitive and it is therefore important to take the context into account when analyzing

their meaning.

In the corpus, simple smiling or grinning emoji often occur after salutations – as in

example (5) – or conversational closings, as in (1) above.

(5) Hiii omg wisst ihr was mir grade passiert ist ?

hi omg know you what to.me just.now happened has

‘Hi omg do you know what just happened to me?’

(RUEG-DE_0.3.0, Demo57MD_iwD)
In such cases, we can assume that the emoji signals politeness and friendliness towards the

addressee, rather than simply providing the information that the speaker is happy, and hence

indeed serves an intersubjective function.

A prototypical case reported in the literature of emoji with an intersubjective function is

a smile emoji that is used to downgrade a strong complaint (cf. Cramer et al. 2016,

McCulloch 2019, cf. also Dresner and Herring 2013 for emoticons). In order to check for this

function, we classified the content preceding each emoji as: negative, as in (6) and (7);

neutral, as in (8); or positive, as in (9).

(6) Ich war gerade einkaufen und wurde fast Zeugin

I was just shopping and was almost witness

eines Unfalls

of.an accident

‘I was just shopping and was almost witness to an accident

(RUEG-DE.0.3.0, DEbi12FR)

(7) ich hatte voll angst um den hund

I had totally fear for the dog

‘I was really scared for the dog ’

(RUEG-DE.0.3.0, DEmo57FD)

(8) Hier war ja gerade was los

here was MP just something happening

‘There was a lot going on here just now ’

(RUEG-DE.0.3.0, DEmo02MD)

(9) Zum Glück ist niemanden etwas passiert

luckily is no.one something happened

 ‘Luckily no one was hurt ‘

(RUEG-DE_0.3.0, DEbi12FT)

Over two thirds of the emoji in our data appear after negative content (72.21%).6 Looking at

the six most frequent emoji in our corpus, for three of them, namely , , , such

negative messages were the only context in which they were used, while the other three

additionally appeared after neutral ( ) and positive content ( , ). Consider Table 1.

Negative content Neutral content Positive content

10 - -

11 - -

10 - -

9 1 -

9 6 1

6 3 1

Table 1: Classification of the preceding content for the most common emoji in RUEG-DE_0.3.0 (absolute

numbers)

Given the findings on intersubjective uses for softening negative contents, these emoji might

hence fulfil intersubjective functions. However, a closer look at our data did not provide such

a clear-cut picture since, in many cases, the interpretation could not be determined

unambiguously. An example is given in (10).

6
Note, though, that negative content is probably somewhat over-represented in our data given the elicitation
stimulus (a video of a car accident).
 (10) ein Auto hat schön nen Schaden in den Hintern.

one car has nice a damage in the butt

bekommen

gotten

‘one car has nicely gotten some damage in the butt ’

(RUEG-DE_0.3.0, DEbi24FR)

In this example, the emoji might indicate that the speaker is happy or amused or indeed feels

schadenfreude about what happened or it could signal the speaker’s intention to soften the

statement and make clear for the addressee that nothing really bad happened. While the first

interpretation points to a subjective use, the second function would be addressee-orientated

and hence intersubjective.

As discussed in Section 2, subjective and intersubjective DM functions of emoji are not

mutually exclusive but can both be involved in the same occurrence. Given that emoji used as

DMs typically represent happy, unhappy etc. faces, we can regard subjective functions as

more basic, since they are closer to an iconic indication of the speaker’s emotion.

Intersubjective functions, then, involve additional steps towards conventionalized social,

interactional meanings. The interesting question is then whether the dominant usage of emoji

in the RP is associated with additional intersubjective functions that interact with subjective

ones and build on them. Corpus data can give a first indication for this but it does not allow

us to unambiguously infer such intersubjective functions (cf. also Dürscheid 2020a on this

issue). To test this question, we therefore conducted an experimental study, presented in the

next section.
4 The discourse interpretation of emoji: An experimental study

We conducted a study to test whether emoji do not only serve subjective functions but also

acquire intersubjective functions that are salient in interpretation. To link up with our corpus

findings, we looked at speakers comparable to one of the age groups in the corpus, namely

young adults born and raised in Germany.

4.1 Methods

4.1.1 Participants

A total of 44 adults between 21-34 years old were tested. Subjects were recruited by student

assistants using their networks.

4.1.2 Material

Experimental stimuli were twelve short sentences constructed to look like parts of

WhatsApp® messages. Each stimulus sentence was presented with an emoji and each in two

versions: with an emoji at the end and with an emoji at the beginning. Stimulus versions were

mixed, yielding two sets of stimuli, each with an equal number of sentences with an emoji at

the beginning and an emoji at the end, and each stimulus sentence appearing only once in

each set. An example (translated from German) is given in (11), with the different versions of

two stimuli, once from set 1, and once from set 2 (all stimuli are listed in the Appendix, with

emoji located as in set 1).

(11) a. The women strolled across the car park (from set 1)

b. The women strolled across the car park (from set 2)

To minimise the influence of the verbally expressed content on the interpretation of the

emoji, we used sentences with a neutral content loosely related to the narratives in the RUEG

corpus. As illustrated by (11), each sentence followed a specific scheme to ensure

comparability. Semantically, all stimulus sentences described a person or persons moving to

or in a particular location. Syntactically, each sentence involved an NP identifying the

person(s), a motion verb in the perfect tense (the commonly used tense for informal

narratives about past events in German) and a locative adverbial.

The emoji employed in this study are frequently used positive emoji of facial

expressions. Based on our corpus data and findings from previous studies (e.g. Gullberg

2016, Ljubešić and Fišer 2016, Annamalai and Salam 2017, Dürscheid 2020a, 2020b), we

identified the following 12 emoji for this: , , , , , , , , , , , .

For eliciting evaluations of possible interpretations, each stimulus sentence was

followed by three different paraphrases that provided (i) a neutral interpretation, (ii) a

subjective interpretation and (iii) an intersubjective interpretation. The order of paraphrases

was counterbalanced across stimuli sentences. Paraphrases followed a fixed pattern. The first

part was identical in all paraphrases and picked up the verbal contents of the stimulus

sentence. In the paraphrases for subjective and intersubjective paraphrases (ii) and (iii), this

was followed by a second part expressing, for subjective interpretations, the speaker’s stance

towards the contents and, for intersubjective interpretations, the speaker’s desire to convey a

certain social persona. Hence, paraphrases were constructed according to the pattern in Table

2.

Paraphrase of sentence semantics Paraphrase of emoji DM contribution

neutral verbal contents /

 subjective verbal contents speaker’s stance towards the verbal contents

intersubjective verbal contents speaker’s desire to convey a certain social persona

Table 2: Parts of different paraphrases

As an illustration, (12) provides an English translation of one example stimulus with

paraphrases (see the Appendix for the German original), where (12a) provides a subjective

interpretation, (12b) an intersubjective one, and (12c) a neutral one.

(12) The women strolled across the car park

a. Your friend wants to tell you that the women strolled across the car park and

likes it.

b. Your friend wants to tell you that the women strolled across the car park and

wants to come across as positive.

c. Your friend wants to tell you that the women strolled across the car park.

This set-up allows us to systematically tap into subjective vs. intersubjective discourse

meanings through a number of features that distinguish it from previous studies on emoji

meaning where participants were asked to describe the intended meaning of emoji (e.g.

Cramer et al. 2016) or to choose from a list of descriptions (e.g. Dainas and Herring forthc.).

In contrast, our set-up does not isolate the emoji interpretation but integrates it into that

of the context sentence. This does not only systematically take into account the context-

dependence of emoji meanings but it specifically captures it as a discourse function building

on the propositional semantics of the message in its scope. Since this semantics is part of all

paraphrases, it also allowed us to include a neutral paraphrase as part of the choices, which

we considered relevant in view of findings for emoticons suggesting that these sometimes do

not have an effect on the interpretation (Walther and D’Addario 2001). Another key feature
of our set-up is that it targets two general types of DM meaning, namely subjective and

intersubjective functions, for emoji, rather than more specific meaning aspects. The main

reason behind this was to contribute to the ongoing debate on functional-positional

associations of pragmatic markers in general and, vice versa, benefit from it for our

understanding of emoji. This led to a smaller and more streamlined set of options, which had

the further advantage of making it possible to ask participants to rank all options, rather than

to choose only one. This allowed us to take into account the multifunctionality of DMs,

which has also been observed for emoji (see section 2).

4.1.3 Procedure

Participants were invited via email to take part in an online study. The study was conducted

using SurveyMonkey. On that site, we provided information on the study and the terms and

conditions for informed consent. After giving their consent, participants got the following

instructions (translated from German):

“In what follows, you will see short sentences, one at a time. Imagine that a friend

has written this sentence to you via WhatsApp®. There are three explanations under each

message. Which explanation is most appropriate? Please rank the explanations by

marking them with 1-3:

1 for the message that fits best,

2 for the one that fits second best, and

3 for the one that fits the least.”

Participants were divided into two groups, with each group seeing one of the two stimulus

lists (see Section 4.1.2). Stimulus sentence, together with their respective paraphrases, were
presented one by one. After ranking paraphrases for all stimulus sentences, participants filled

out a short questionnaire asking their age, gender, languages spoken in the family in

childhood and their place of birth.

4.2 Results

One item was excluded from the analysis because participants commented afterwards that

one of the paraphrases did not fit the contents. A post hoc poll with ten additional speakers

confirmed this. Another item was excluded because the emoji was accidently positioned at

the beginning of the sentence in both lists. Hence, we included in the analysis two sets of ten

stimuli (five stimuli with emoji at the beginning, five stimuli with emoji at the end) ranked by

22 participants each. Table 3 summarizes how often each paraphrase (subjective,

intersubjective and neutral) was ranked as “1”, “2” or “3”.

Rank 1 Rank 2 Rank 3

subjective 256 94 81

intersubjective 128 194 118

neutral 47 152 241

Table 3: Frequencies of rankings for the three paraphrases

Pearson’s Chi-square test of independence showed a significant interaction between ranking

and type of paraphrase (X2 (4, N = 440) = 285.4, p < 2.2e-16). The patterns indicate three

main results:

(i) The neutral paraphrases, without a discourse-pragmatic content, were evaluated as least

fitting, receiving rank 3 most often both across paraphrases and across rankings for
 neutral paraphrases. This indicates that the emoji in our stimuli contribute a discourse

meaning, which further confirms their status as (graphic) DMs.

(ii) Paraphrases that involved an additional subjective discourse meaning received rank 1

most often, both across paraphrases and across rankings for subjective paraphrases.

This confirms our suggestion that subjective meanings are a central part of emoji used

as DMs.

(iii) Paraphrases that involved additional intersubjective discourse meanings received rank 2

most often, followed by rank 1, in both cases across paraphrases and across rankings

for intersubjective paraphrases. This confirms the relevance of intersubjective discourse

meanings for emoji.

Hence, even though emoji depicting facial expressions point to the emotions that these

expressions reflect and thus to subjective meanings, these findings confirm that they are also

associated with intersubjective functions. Our results further confirm that emoji meanings do

not exclude each other but they can be multi-faceted, indicating that the two functions

identified here build on each other, with intersubjective meanings based on subjective

meanings and interacting with them.

As hypothesized, the intersubjective meaning of DM emoji might be related to their

primary RP association that was evident from our corpus study and is also confirmed in the

literature (e.g. Cramer et al. 2016, Dainas and Herring forthc.; see 3.3). To further investigate

this, we looked at the results for the two stimuli variants separately, comparing rankings for

stimulus sentences that were preceded by an emoji (LP) with those for the same sentences

followed by an emoji (RP). In each case, we calculated the relative rankings for subjective vs.

intersubjective ratings. We counted how often participants rated the subjective paraphrase

higher than the intersubjective one (i.e. we counted each time that the subjective paraphrase

was ranked 1 and the intersubjective paraphrase was ranked 2 or 3 or that the subjective
paraphrase was ranked 2 and the intersubjective paraphrase was ranked 3). And vice versa,

we counted how often participants rated the intersubjective paraphrase higher than the

subjective one. Figure 1 shows the respective figures for all stimulus sentences (across the

two sets) with an emoji in the LP or RP, respectively.

Figure 1: Distribution of relative rankings over the two stimuli variants (emoji in the left vs. right periphery)

160
146
139
140

120

100
80
80 72

60

40

20

0
emoji left emoji right

subjective > intersubjective intersubjective > subjective

As the figures show, there was an advantage for the subjective reading in both conditions, but

this became smaller when the emoji was on the right, with the subjective reading less often in

the lead and the intersubjective reading more often in the lead than when the emoji was on

the left. However, this difference is not large and it did not reach significance in a Chi-square

test, which might also be due to the comparably small number of stimulus items and of

participants. Hence, there might be a tendency for intersubjective functions to increase in

salience for right-peripheral graphic DMs but this will need further corroborations through

larger studies.

When we looked at the frequencies for different individual stimuli, we observed

interesting specific patterns for different subgroups of emoji, suggesting a continuum along
different dominance relations between subjective or intersubjective meanings, which interact

with LP and RP positions. In our data, this continuum is characterized by three patterns:

(i) clear dominance of subjective paraphrase, across LP and RP position;

(ii) dominance of subjective paraphrase only for LP position, approximation of subjective

and intersubjective paraphrase for RP position;

(iii) dominance of intersubjective paraphrase, in particular for RP position.

The first pattern is attested for , , . For stimuli with these emoji, the overwhelming

majority of participants ranked the subjective paraphrase higher than the intersubjective one

for both LP and RP occurrences. The second pattern is displayed by four emoji in our data:

, , , . For this group, the subjective paraphrase received a higher rank when the

emoji was in the LP but not when it was in the RP. The third pattern is represented by one

emoji in our study, . For this stimulus, the intersubjective paraphrase received a higher

rank than the subjective one when the emoji was in the RP, while relative ranks were about

the same when it was in the LP. Table 4 gives an overview of the frequencies within the

different patterns.
 Pattern Emoji position Emoji Subjective >intersubjective Intersubjective >subjective

(i) LP 21 1

17 5

22 0

RP 22 0

21 1

21 0

(ii) LP 15 7

15 7

13 9

12 10

RP 10 11

11 10

10 12

10 12

(iii) LP 10 11

RP 8 14

Table 4: Frequency of higher relative ranks for subjective vs. intersubjective paraphrases (out of 22 responses)

While the numbers for each group are too small to allow a definite conclusion, these findings

suggest that the distribution of emoji over different patterns is related to their form. Emoji

that are more complex and depict not just smiles but include more active elements, pointing

to activities such as laughing, tend to display pattern (i). Since facial emoji are understood to

represent the speaker, such active elements anchor the interpretation more strongly on the

speaker’s side, which then favor subjective discourse interpretations. In contrast, for emoji

that depict smiling faces with no such additional active elements, as in group (ii), the

intersubjective aspect is strong enough to compete with the subjective one for a higher rank.
The association of linear (LP/RP) and functional aspects (subjective/intersubjective) can then

support a more pronounced differential pattern. This points to an ongoing process of

intersubjectification for these emoji related to their position in the RP, in line with what

Traugott (2012) hypothesised for verbal pragmatic markers.

These group-differentiated patterns suggest that different emoji involve intersubjective

functions to a different degree, depending not only on the context they are presented in but

also on the type of pictorial elements they combine. Further research is needed to investigate

this for a larger range of emoji types and tokens.

5 Conclusions

In this chapter, we presented an investigation into emoji as graphic discourse markers (DMs).

We showed that emoji are typically used in a way that meets key criteria for DMs: they do

not contribute to the propositional meaning and truth value of a message but rather operate on

the level of discourse organization and they are not a syntactically integrated part of

sentences but occupy external positions at the peripheries. We showed that specific emoji

meanings identified in the literature can be subsumed under subjective, intersubjective and

textual discourse functions and argued that emoji share functional and positional properties

with verbal DMs. Further parallels to verbal DMs include: the existence of referential

counterparts for some emoji, especially (but not only) those depicting concrete objects; a

strong reliance on context for their meaning contribution; and, related to this, the possibility

for individual elements to be used for several different functions.

As part of a comparably novel and vibrant area, namely that of digital social

interaction, emoji are a particularly interesting domain to investigate developments of DMs.

Focusing on WhatsApp® messages in German, we showed how this perspective can throw

further light on the pragmatic contribution of emoji on the one hand and on associations

between intersubjective and subjective discourse meanings of DMs with left periphery (LP)

vs. right periphery (RP) on the other hand, which have been an ongoing topic in the

discussion of (verbal) pragmatic markers.

We presented two studies investigating this for the example of emoji depicting facial

expressions: a corpus study of emoji in WhatsApp® messages and a controlled, experimental

study testing subjective and intersubjective interpretations for sentences with emoji in their

left vs. right periphery. The corpus study was based on the open-access RUEG corpus that

provides naturalistic language productions by speakers from two age groups, adolescents and

young adults, and includes WhatsApp® messages as an example of informal-written

registers.

Given that a lot of emoji used as DMs represent happy, unhappy etc. faces that indicate

emotions and thus relate to the speaker, we regarded subjective functions as more basic.

However, since intersubjective and subjective functions do not exclude each other but rather

can be realized by the same element, we hypothesized that the emoji in our corpus might

involve additional intersubjective functions that interact with these subjective ones and build

on them. Such intersubjective functions were plausible for the emoji in our data and they

were further supported by their contexts: emoji depicting facial expressions appeared

exclusively in the RP and they appeared mostly after negative contents, that is, in a position

that favors such intersubjective functions as softening.

In the second study, we tested this hypothesis experimentally, investigating whether

emoji do not only serve subjective functions but also acquire intersubjective functions that

are salient in interpretation. Participants saw sentences with emoji in the RP or LP and had to

indicate, through ranking, how suitable they found paraphrases expressing only the
sentence’s content (neutral), or additional subjective discourse meanings (speaker expressing

their stance) or intersubjective discourse meanings (speaker conveying a certain social

persona to the interlocutor).

Our study yielded three main results: (i) neutral paraphrases were evaluated as least

fitting, indicating that the emoji in our stimuli contribute a discourse meaning, which further

confirms their status as (graphic) DMs; (ii) subjective paraphrases received rank 1 most often,

confirming our assumption that subjective meanings are a central part of emoji used as DMs;

(iii) intersubjective paraphrases received rank 2 most often, followed by rank 1, indicating the

salience of intersubjective discourse meanings for emoji.

While there was an overall advantage for subjective paraphrases, this advantage was

smaller for stimuli with RP emoji compared to those with LP emoji, which points to an effect

of the association of intersubjective meanings with the RP. Analysis of responses to

individual emoji revealed three patterns that could be located on a continuum along different

dominance relations between subjective or intersubjective meanings, which interact with LP-

and RP-positions. Our findings suggest that subjective meanings are particularly strong for

emoji that include more active elements, e.g. laughing. As an explanation for this, we

suggested that such active elements anchor the interpretation more strongly on the speaker’s

side, thus making subjective discourse meanings more salient. In contrast, for emoji that

depict smiling faces with no additional active elements, the subjective aspect was comparably

less strong and thus their interpretation was open to intersubjective aspects as well. Our

findings suggest that this can be modulated by their position in the RP (vs. LP), indicating

parallels to the intersubjectification of verbal DMs related to RP positions.

Taken together, such results further contribute to the complex picture of associations

between linear and functional aspects of DMs. A key finding in our study was the coexistence

and interaction of different discourse meanings within the same DM, and their interaction
with left vs. right positions. By understanding emoji as a special, graphic case of DMs, our

results, on the one hand, provide novel evidence supporting findings on left vs. right

associations and intersubjective vs. subjective discourse meanings. On the other hand, they

contribute to the discussion of emoji as vibrant and quickly developing elements of written

communication. As we have shown in this chapter, understanding emoji as DMs allows us to

systematize their diverse pragmatic contributions by subsuming them under subjective,

intersubjective and textual discourse meanings. From an empirical and methodological point

of view, we believe our study has shown that informal-written language as captured by

WhatsApp® messages is a particularly interesting domain to investigate: a domain whose

linguistic dynamics makes it valuable not only for research into computer- or digitally-

mediated communication but also for lexical, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic analyses.

Acknowledgments

The work presented here was conducted within the Research Unit FOR 2537, projects P6

(#394838878’) and Pd (#394844736’), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG,

German Research Foundation). For their support in collecting data for the emoji study, we

thank Guendalina Reul, Luisa Koch, Myrto Rompaki, Yeşim Bayram, Tjona Sommer, Lea

Coy, Marvin Brink and Marius Keller. We thank Oliver Bunk for valuable input on the two

studies. For helpful suggestions, we thank the editors of the present volume, Jolanta

Šinkūnienė and Daniël Van Olmen, and two anonymous reviewers. For the discussion of

different aspects of the work presented here, we thank the participants of the workshop

“Pragmatic Markers and Clause Peripheries”, organized by Jolanta Šinkūnienė and Daniël

Van Olmen as part of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea,
Leipzig, August 21st to 23rd, 2019, and of the workshop “Empirical Studies of Word Sense

Divergences across Language Varieties”, organized by Sabine Schulte im Walde and

Dominik Schlechtweg as part of the Annual Meeting of the German Society for Linguistics

(DGfS 2020), Hamburg, March 4th to 6th, 2020.

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Appendix

Stimulus list [position of emoji as in set 1]

Die Frau ist über den Parkplatz geschlendert

Deine Freundin möchte dir mitteilen, dass die Frau über den Parkplatz geschlendert ist, und

findet das gut.

Deine Freundin möchte dir mitteilen, dass die Frau über den Parkplatz geschlendert ist, und

möchte positiv wirken.

Deine Freundin möchte dir mitteilen, dass die Frau über den Parkplatz geschlendert ist.

Der Junge ist dem Ball hinterher gerannt

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Jungen mit dem Ball erzählen und dabei humorvoll

wirken.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Jungen mit dem Ball erzählen.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Jungen mit dem Ball erzählen und findet es sehr lustig,

was passiert ist.

Das Pärchen ist mit Baby im Kinderwagen in Richtung Park gegangen

Deine Freundin möchte dir berichten, in welche Richtung die Familie gegangen ist.

Deine Freundin möchte dir berichten, in welche Richtung die Familie gegangen ist, und freut

sich darüber.

Deine Freundin möchte dir berichten, in welche Richtung die Familie gegangen ist, und

möchte freundlich wirken.

Der Mann ist an dem schwarz-weißen Hochhaus lang spaziert

Deine Freundin erzählt dir von dem Mann, der an dem Hochhaus entlang ging.

Deine Freundin erzählt dir von dem Mann, der an dem Hochhaus entlang ging, und möchte

fröhlich wirken.

Deine Freundin erzählt dir von dem Mann, der an dem Hochhaus entlang ging, und findet das

Gebäude amüsant.

Der Postbote ist über die Straße gesprintet

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Sprint des Postboten erzählen und findet sehr komisch,

wie der gerannt ist.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Sprint des Postboten erzählen.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Sprint des Postboten erzählen und möchte witzig wirken.

Die Kinder sind hintereinander über die Mauer balanciert

Deine Freundin möchte dir von den Kindern berichten und findet sie süß.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von den Kindern berichten und möchte herzlich wirken.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von den Kindern berichten.

Die Polizistin ist über die Straße gerannt

 Deine Freundin möchte dir von der Polizistin berichten und möchte nett wirken.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von der Polizistin berichten.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von der Polizistin berichten und ist gut gelaunt.

Der Typ ist über die Bordsteinkante gehüpft

Deine Freundin möchte dir erzählen, wie der Typ die Bordsteinkante überwunden hat.

Deine Freundin möchte dir erzählen, wie der Typ die Bordsteinkante überwunden hat, und ist

davon begeistert, wie er das gemacht hat.

Deine Freundin möchte dir erzählen, wie der Typ die Bordsteinkante überwunden hat, und

möchte vergnügt wirken.

Die Rentner sind über den Zebrastreifen geschlichen

Deine Freundin möchte dir von den langsamen Rentnern berichten.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von den langsamen Rentnern berichten und möchte humorvoll

wirken.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von den langsamen Rentnern berichten und findet die lustig.

Der Verkäufer ist zum Geschäft gespurtet

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Verkäufer erzählen und amüsiert sich darüber.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Verkäufer erzählen.

Deine Freundin möchte dir von dem Verkäufer erzählen und möchte lässig wirken.

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