LingLunch : Patrick Grosz

Patrick Grosz (University of Oslo)
What face emojis can teach us about natural language semantics

Face emojis are a means to integrate features of multimodal communication into written digital communication (exemplified for the happy face in the written message "is there coffee? ?"). They appear to be digital counterparts of facial expressions, intonation in speech, or natural language expressions such as the interjections "wow", "ugh", and "yuck". Based on a semantic analysis of text-accompanying face emojis, this talk raises the question of what they can teach us about the accompanying text itself. In other words: what can we learn about language (as the traditional object of study in linguistics) from looking at face emojis? A particular focus in this talk will be on the anaphoricity of face emojis with regards to their propositional subject matter, i.e. the proposition towards which they express an affective/emotional attitude. In exploring the range of anaphoric relations that emerge in emoji-text combinations, the talk will particularly focus on conditional clauses.