Silvia Murillo analyses emoji in Twitter for Research Dissemination Purposes from a relevance-theoretic perspective at CILC2024 Conference
The XV International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CILC2024), which is anually organised by the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics (AELINCO), has taken place these past 22nd, 23rd and 24th May at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Under this year's theme, "Corpus Linguisticis, (Digital) Discourse and AI: Unlocking new horizons", the conference has gathered a wealth of applied linguists and discourse analysts to present their latest investigations and make a great event full of food for thought. The plenary lectures were carried out by keynote speakers Prof. Dr Ruslan Mitkov (Lancaster University), Prof. Patricia Rodríguez Inés (Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona) and Prof. María Luisa Carrió-Pastor (Universitat Politècnica de València).
Our colleague Silvia Murillo participated in CILC2024 by delivering a paper on Wednesday 22nd, as part of the panel "Linguistic variation and change through corpora". She gave a presentation on her latest research findings about the use of emoji in X/Twitter, and discussed how they are exploited in this social medium for Research Dissemination Purposes from a relevance-theoretic approach. The analysis of Twitter accounts selected rests on the EUROPROtweets Corpus, which was compiled for our recent EUROPRO project. She emphasised the reformulative functions of emojis and the need to expand corpus-driven analyses to faithfully point out salient trends, in this case related to these visual resources, in digital discursive practices hosted in social media.
More information about this great academic event can be checked out at the conference website. You can read Silvia Murillo's proposal as follows:
A relevance-theoretic account of the use of emoji in Twitter for Research Dissemination Purposes
As well as their websites, international projects use social media in their dissemination and communication activities, specifically Facebook and Twitter/X (Gertrudix et al. 2021). In the Twitter/X accounts associated to their websites, tweets are relayed with several purposes (for instance, live reporting of conferences, and giving visibility to their research meetings and to their academic publications), and emoji are often introduced in the messages, with different functions. These graphic elements can be attitudinal or speech act clues for the intended interpretation of the messages, or they can contribute to the actual content of the messages (Scott 2022, Yus 2022).
In this paper I will examine a subset of the EUROPROtweets database (Pascual et al., 2020) that comprises the tweets of 10 Twitter accounts associated to H2020 research websites, coded through NVivo. In a corpus such as this it is possible to find enough examples to display the versatility of the emoji in the construction of messages in research communication processes. The emoji used in the messages are in general associated to the keywords of the projects, and their activities, contributing to the dissemination of their results and to their promotion. Bearing in mind this contextual information, I intend to advance a corpus-driven comprehensive explanation of how the emoji are used in order to build the messages, from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Emoji can be used instead of words, or they can be used next to words in a process that resembles verbal reformulations (words can be translated into emoji which appear afterwards, and also the other way round, emoji can be introduced first and then expressed in words); in fact, it is possible to identify examples with emoji in typical reformulation processes such as explanation, identification, specification and even conclusion or consequence, cf. Author. In my approach, I will draw from the notion of perceptual resemblance as used by Sasamoto (2022) and take into account Scott’s (2022) and Yus’s (2022) explanations for some of the uses of the emoji, along with some insights from previous accounts of reformulation processes in verbal language (Blakemore, 1996; Author).
For some authors, these latter ‘reformulation’ uses of emoji are redundant (Panckhurst & Frontini, 2020), or colourful (Siever & Siever, 2020) additions, unnecessary to understand the content of the text. On the other hand, for Logi & Zappavigna (2021), these occurrences form part of ‘ideational emoji’, interacting with text in order to create meaning. However, I will argue that these instances are ideational and interpersonal at the same time. Essentially, these emoji patterns display a mixture of reformulation processes and modal reinforcement, also present in some verbal reformulations; the emoji are not used in order to clarify the messages, but they reinforce them and contribute to their engagement (c.f. Völkel et al., 2019). Some examples from the corpus also point to the polyfunctionality of emoji, as they may include additional discourse roles, such as topicalizing and discourse organizing functions.
References
Blakemore, D. (1996). Are apposition markers discourse markers? Journal of Linguistics, 32(2), 325-347.
Gertrudix, M., Rajas M., Romero-Luis J., & Carbonell-Alcocer, A. (2021). Comunicación científica en el espacio digital. Acciones de difusión de proyectos de investigación del programa H2020. Profesional de la información/ Information Professional, 30(1). https://DOI.org/10.3145/epi.2021.ene.04
Logi, L., & Zappavigna, M. (2021). A social semiotic perspective on emoji: How emoji and language interact to make meaning in digital messages. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://DOI.org/10.1177/14614448211032965
Panckhurst, R., & Frontini, F. (2020). Beyond the binary: Emoji as a challenge to the image-word distinction. In C. Thurlow, C. Dürscheid and F. Diémoz (Eds.), Visualizing digital discourse: interactional, institutional and ideological Perspectives (pp. 81-103). De Gruyter Mouton.
Pascual, D., Mur-Dueñas, P., & Lorés, R. (2020). Looking into international research groups’ digital discursive practices: Criteria and methodological steps in the compilation of the EUROPRO digital corpus. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 8(2), 87-102. https://DOI.org/10.32714/ricl.08.02.05
Sasamoto, R. (2022). Perceptual resemblance and the communication of emotion in digital contexts: A case of emoji and reaction GIFs. Pragmatics, 33(3), 393-417. https://DOI.org/10.1075/prag.21058.sas
Scott, K. (2022). Pragmatics online. Routledge.
Siever, C. M., & Siever, T. (2020). Emoji-text relations on Instagram: Empirical corpus studies on multimodal uses of the iconographetic mode. In H. Stoeckl, H. Caple & J. Pflaeging (Eds.), Shifts towards image-centricity in contemporary multimodal practices (pp. 177-203). Routledge.
Völkel, S. T., Buschek, D., Pranjic, J., & Hussmann, H. (2019). Understanding emoji interpretation through user personality and message context. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, MobileHCI ’19, New York, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Yus, F. 2022. Smartphone communication. Interactions in the app ecosystem. Routledge.