Emoji and Compositional Meaning: A Configuration-Sensitive Semantic Analysis

Abstract

Emoji have been recognized as a permanent feature of written digital communication, where they co-occur with linguistic units and, in some contexts, seem to play an integral role in the interpretation of certain utterances that are not mere decoration or emotive gestures. However, their linguistic status is still theoretically ambiguous. Many previous studies have examined emoji from pragmatic, discourse, affective or computational perspectives, while little attention has been paid to how their meaning interacts with the compositional structure of an expression. This study takes a formal and compositional perspective on the semantic contribution of emoji. It develops an account of emoji interpretation which is based on semantic typing, functional combination, and the relationship between semantic and pragmatic information. The analysis distinguishes the predicative, modifying, and expressive uses of emoji in various configurations with linguistic material. It also examines the roles of contextual interpretation, negation and scope when investigating the contribution of emoji to shaping the meaning of a larger expression. The paper argues that emoji do not constitute a uniform semantic category: their role depends on three contextually determined factors, namely the structural position, interpretive environment, and relation to the proposition with which they occur. This diversity does not undermine compositionality; it simply means that any compositional account of emoji meaning must deal with interpretations reliant on truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional components. Through this, the study challenges the view that emoji are not a proper subject of formal semantic analysis while suggesting that the study of emoji can provide more general insights into the ways in which linguistic and non-linguistic resources interact in meaning construction.