Building a typology of the linguistic functions of emoji: a cross-linguistic and cross-platform corpus analysis of emoji in conversation

This thesis aims to identify and to define all the different linguistic functions that emoji can have in computer-mediated discourse. Emoji are graphical icons, representing attitudes or concepts, that became popular around 2010 and that can be used on any smartphone or computer to fill a variety of communicative roles inside a message or a conversation. A multimodal corpus, containing 1200 emoji and the messages in which they were used, was composed and analyzed in order to verify the effectiveness of an initial typology of emoji functions which was inspired by previous frameworks. The emoji in this corpus were collected on Facebook and on Twitter, in French and English messages, and in discussions about three different subjects. This allows for a comparable analysis of emoji functions depending on four external factors: platform, language, topic and speaker’s gender. The quantitative analysis of the data, along with the qualitative analysis of specific examples of the corpus, led to the construction of a new typology of emoji functions, consisting of three primary functions (expressive, interpretative and referential) and five secondary functions (relational, politeness, emphatic, structural and aesthetic). Regarding variation, all four external factors appear to have a significant influence on the frequencies of the different emoji functions used in the corpus