Among other textual and multimodal resources (GIF, stickers and meme), emojis are elements that allow, increasingly, managing much of expressiveness in digital written interaction. In fact, they function as contextualization keys of statements. Our research aims to investigate some emojis interpretative diversity and explain some features that they fulfil. Continuing a previous investigation, which allowed us to identify the emojis most used in messaging environments (in particular, WhatsApp), this paper analyzes data from two surveys applied to 70 speakers, frequent users of social networks. Based on different questions, we request to indicate how they value and interpret emojis without context and with context. The results indicate that the most commonly used emojis are more monosemantic and they express positive evaluative content, so that suggests a certain consensus of interpretation. On the contrary, the under-utilized emojis presented greater polysemy but, in such cases, the context allows the disambiguation of their meaning.
Cantamutto, L., & Vela Delfa, C. (2020). Interpretation of emoji in spanish digital discourse. Lenguas Modernas, (54), pp. 29–47. Retrieved from https://anales.uchile.cl/index.php/LM/article/view/56845
