Experimental Evidence for a Semantic Typology of Emoji: Inferences of Co-, Pro-, and Post-text Emoji

Emoji symbols are widely used in online communication, particularly in instant messaging and on social media platforms. Existing research draws comparisons between the functions of emoji and those of gestures, with recent work extending a proposed typology of gestures to emoji, arguing that different emoji types can be distinguished by their placement within the modified text and by their semantic contribution (the linguistic inferences that they give rise to). In this paper, we present four experiments designed to test the predictions of this extended typology, the results of which suggest that emoji symbols indeed trigger the hypothesised linguistic inferences. The findings provide support for a semantic typology of emoji and contribute further evidence of the parallels between gesture and emoji.