The role of face emojis in speech act marking

Abstract: Emojis are a human-made artifact that fills a communicative gap in written digital communication (see, e.g., Gawne & McCulloch 2019). Face emojis consistently amount to ~50% of the most frequently used 50 emojis, plausibly reflecting the use of face emojis as digital written counterparts of facial expressions (see, e.g., Maier 2023). This talk focuses on the role of face emojis in speech act marking. Imperative clauses (e.g. "call me!") are notoriously underspecified with regards to the speech act that they encode (Command, Permission, Request, Invitation, etc.), see Kaufmann (2012:169). Face emojis can disambiguate the speech act of an imperative. Since face emojis predominantly express emotive meaning (see Grosz et al. 2023), the fact that they disambiguate speech acts entails that emotive devices can play a role in speech-act marking. I propose to analyze face emojis as speech act cues (Grosz 2014): they do not semantically encode speech act information, but their emotive meanings support some speech acts while blocking others. We expect that facial expressions may exhibit a similar inference from emotive meaning (see Scherer et al. 2018) to speech-act disambiguation.