On the relation between expressive meaning and information structure: Exploring focus-marking with emoji

Abstract

Written digital communication (e.g. text messages, email) lacks prosody, but innovations like emoji have emerged to enrich this communicative channel. In speech, prosody can indicate information structure, e.g. contrastive or new-information focus. In this paper I investigate the relation between focus and emoji, and propose that (i) one class of emoji (e.g. sparkles, pointing hands, what I call ‘plain focus emoji’) act as semantically flexible focus signalers, and (ii) another class (e.g. angry-face, heart-eyes-face, what I call ‘affective focus emoji’) can signal focus while also resembling linguistic expressives (e.g. yay, damn) in conveying information about speakers’ attitudes, in a way that I show to be scopally dissociable from their focus-related behavior.