Emoji use validates the potential for meaning standardization among ideographic symbols

Abstract

Technological innovations for online communication reduce the impact of signal transience on meaning standardization while boosting access to reliable patterning across multiple linguistic and nonlinguistic contexts – both asynchronous and synchronous. We classify emojis as ideographic symbols, examine their interdependence with surrounding words when reading/writing, and argue that emoji use validates the potential for meaning standardization in ideographs.

Morin asserts that emojis are not yet ready to qualify as ideographic writing because, as the standardization account would predict, there is a lack of agreement over the meaning of emojis. The interpretation of isolated emojis tends to vary over participants, social groups, language/cultural as well as time and platform (Pei & Cheng, 2022). Thus, the author's cursory treatment of the category of face emojis seems to support his claim that meaning standardization for emojis, as for ideographic writing systems in general, poses an insurmountable challenge. Not mentioned, however, is that the category of face emojis is notoriously ambiguous, especially when defined in terms of the variability in one-word descriptions for those emojis in the absence of a context. Face emojis may be least representative of emojis in general, whereas other categories of emojis such as objects, people, activities, and food, tend to engender greater consensus in that verbal labels are mapped more systematically to similar meanings by speakers of a language (Barach, Srinivasan, Fernandes, Feldman, & Shaikh, 2020; Częstochowska et al., 2022). Even more controversial is the author's focus on symbols in isolation when searching for standardization of meaning. When interpreting emojis, analyses often consider not only lexical but also interpersonal, social, cultural as well as legal and other technical conditions of usage (Pei & Cheng, 2022). The implication is that single-facial emojis, despite their typically high-token frequency, are not the most representative symbols on which to base an argument about the expressive power and communicative potential of all emojis and, thus, their potential as ideographic symbols.

It is possible that digital communication may break the chains that keep ideographic communication bound according to Morin. For others, emerging technologies for digital communication with menus of emojis have popularized emoji use and already attest to meaning standardization for emojis as a category of ideographs. Online communication at asynchronous as well as synchronous time scales has become relatively easy to assemble and to analyze as a cumulative pattern (Kaye, Rousaki, Joyner, Barrett, & Orchard, 2022). The author asserts that shared understanding is optimized when communication entails transient symbols and is delivered face-to-face. Neither constraint is characteristic of emoji use. Rather, new transmission technologies ease the challenge of meaning standardization because the adoption of new symbols arises in the service of shared understanding within pairs and communities of interlocutors. Emoji meaning may reveal itself incrementally, based on the volley of messages that comprise an extended online written interaction. New technologies obviate the need that they be transient and conveyed face-to-face.

Newer analytic approaches to meaning move away from the stable representation of meaning and overcome the lack of agreement about how to interpret an isolated symbol by considering usage. To detect changes of a word's senses for example, one can compare words that accompanying it across different genres of text or texts created at different points in time. These quantitative semantic analyses work from the insight that words with similar meanings tend to appear in similar contexts. In fact, not only will words that tend to occur with similar words over many instances but tend to reduce to a similar semantic vector space (Günther, Rinaldi, & Marelli, 2019), but so will emojis (Barbieri, Ronzano, & Saggion, 2016; Wijeratne, Balasuriya, Sheth, & Doran, 2017). The insight is that decontextualized interpretation is no longer the ideal problem space in which to explore meaning standardization and the communicative potential of either words or ideographic symbols –emojis included.

The author acknowledges the “explosion in emoji and emoticon use, concomitant with the rise of digital communication” (target article, sect. 6.4, para. 1) and asserts that a standardization account predicts that that “emojis… and other digital pictographs should become increasingly endowed with precise and shared meanings” (target article, sect. 6.4, para. 1). However, unlike referential communication in experimental contexts when the goal is well defined and referents repeat (Morin, Müller, Morisseau, & Winters, 2022), as emoji use propagates in natural settings, emoji meaning may diffuse from a focus on the object as a whole to its properties (Danesi, 2016). Further, emojis can take on alternative meanings contingent on real world as well as linguistic constraints. Depending on the online community that uses it, can connote male genitalia and can connote buttocks. Likewise, often appears in anorexia-related contexts as well as in general contexts of biological transformation. As a general pattern, opportunities to detect alternative senses of an emoji emerge as communities and contexts of usage become more distinct. The implication is that as usage broadens, emoji meaning may become more nuanced and variable by context.

Finally, the author frames his ambitions for emojis in terms of replacing writing or complementing it. Although emojis seldom function as a self-sufficient ideographic system with the potential to fully replace sequences of words, the complementizing function of emojis and words already is prevalent and further, the influence is bidirectional. Experimental psycholinguistic literature demonstrates both parallels between emojis and words as well as ways in which emojis can interact with accompanying words to alter written communication. Sources of evidence are diverse and include measures of vocabulary richness in corpora of online communication with and without emojis among monolinguals as well as among bilinguals. More specifically, lexical diversity in a text tends to be more restricted when emojis are present than in comparable messages when they are absent (Feldman, Aragon, Chen, & Kroll, 2017), and the relation varies more for particular categories of emojis relative to others (Barach et al., 2020). In addition, like words, eye-fixation patterns on emojis vary according to the semantic relation between emoji and accompanying text (Barach, Feldman, & Sheridan, 2021) and recognition memory is greater for emojis that support an inference than a synonym interpretation of text (Christofalos, Feldman, & Sheridan, 2022; Feldman, Christofalos, & Sheridan, 2022). Here, emojis neither function autonomously from words nor do they serve as mnemonic props. Further, effects on written words demonstrate that emoji meaning can be systematic and their use wide-ranging rather than circumscribed to a single domain. Like words, the challenge of meaning standardization for emoji, a class of ideographic symbols, dwindles when examined systematically in the totality of their communicative function.