Emoji and Social Media Paralanguage

Including a wide range of fascinating examples taken from social media, this unique book provides a comprehensive framework for analysing how we use emoji to convey meaning, and how emoji function in social bonding. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to investigate the role of emoji in digital communication.

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Emoji are now ubiquitous in our interactions on social media. But how do we use them to convey meaning? And how do they function in social bonding? This unique book provides a comprehensive framework for analysing how emoji contribute to meaning-making in social media discourse, alongside language. Presenting emoji as a visual paralanguage, it features extensive worked examples of emoji analysis, using corpora derived from social media such as Twitter and TikTok, to explore how emoji interact with their linguistic co-text. It also draws on the author's extensive work on social media affiliation to consider how emoji function in social bonding. The framework for analysing emoji is explained in an accessible way, and a glossary is included, detailing each system and feature from the system networks used as the schemas for undertaking the analysis. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to investigate the role of emoji in digital communication.