The different functions of emojis : The pragmatic use of five emojis in London and New York

Abstract: Emojis are useful and efficient tools in computer-mediated communication. The present study aims to find out how English-speaking Twitter users employ five specific emojis, and if they utilize them for the same pragmatic functions. The five emojis were chosen based on earlier research on the subject. One of them was deemed unambiguous and four were deemed ambiguous in previous studies. To investigate whether these emojis are ambiguous and if they are used for several pragmatic functions, a corpus was made by collecting tweets from Twitter. 100 tweets were gathered for each emoji: 50 from New York and 50 from London. Each tweet was analyzed in order to see what function the emoji served in each tweet. Another objective was to find out if cultural differences had any importance for the pragmatic function of the emojis. Three of the four emojis that had been deemed ambiguous by previous research were considered to be ambiguous in the present study as well, as they displayed a multitude of different pragmatic meanings. The single emoji that was considered to be unambiguous by previous research, was used in a consistent manner in the present study, which confirmed the theory that it truly is unambiguous. The results also showed that cultural influences do play a role in how people use emojis for different pragmatic functions.