Emoji semantics/pragmatics: investigating commitment and lying (2022)

Abstract: This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the directness of emoji in constituting speaker meaning. This relationship is examined in two ways, with Experiment 1 testing whether speakers are committed to meanings they communicate via a single emoji and Experiment 2 testing whether that speaker is taken to have lied if that meaning is false and intended to deceive. Results indicate that emoji with high meaning agreement in general (i.e., pictorial representations of concrete objects or foods) reliably commit the speaker to that meaning and can constitute lying. Expressive emoji representing facial expressions and emotional states demonstrate a range of commitment and lie ratings: those with high meaning agreement constitute more commitment and more of a lie than those with less meaning agreement in the first place. Emoji can constitute speaker commitment and they can be lies, but this result does not apply uniformly to all emoji and is instead tied to agreement, conventionality, and lexicalization.

## introduction despite a multitude of studies focusing on emoji meanings, there has not yet been much research on the nature of these meanings with respect to semantics and pragmatics. the present research steps in this direction by investigating the relationships between emoji meaning and commitment and emoji meaning and lying. this paper presents the results of two studies probing the extent to which emoji constitute speaker commitment to content and the possibility of lying via emoji in order to better understand perceptions of the strength of meaning of emoji. studies on emoji meaning have ranged from how emoji supplement text with pragmatic information like irony @xcite , emotional valence @xcite , and indirect meaning @xcite to more direct investigations of emoji meaning ratings and norms @xcite . in light of the wide range of communicative functions that emoji can fulfill (e.g., @xcite @xcite @xcite , the nature of emoji meanings across these varied uses is rich ground for further research. in research at the semantics/pragmatics interface, commitment offers a way to explore the meaning-making process -what we take a speaker to mean is related to what we take that speaker to having committed to. this has recently been explored with respect to inferences, such as presuppositions, implicatures, and explicatures. the link established from this research thus far ties together the notions of commitment, expression directness, and meaning: a more direct expression yields greater commitment and stronger meaning (e.g., @xcite @xcite @xcite . an implicature, for example, communicates content less directly than saying that content literally; the speaker is thus less committed to the implicated content than the directly-said content. there is no universal definition for commitment, but it can be explored by testing whether speakers are taken as committed to certain propositions. another lens with which to view this is deniability (e.g., @xcite : an indirect (i.e., implicated) expression of content theoretically leaves the speaker room to deny that what the hearer understood is not what they emoji semantics/pragmatics: investigating commitment and lying benjamin weissman rensselaer polytechnic institute -department of cognitive science weissb2@rpi.edu intended to mean with their utterance, while a direct expression of that content leaves the speaker no such room. a recent proposal claims that an utterance can only be a lie if the speaker is committed to the relevant content @xcite . if a speaker implies something false, but is not committed to that implicated content, the speaker is not taken to have lied. this is consistent with theoretical proposals (e.g., @xcite and experimental evidence @xcite claiming that delivering false content through implicature is "merely misleading" rather than outright lying. recent approaches have also provided support for the idea of lying in different modalities, like @xcite investigation of lying with pictures -the present study tests extending this claim to emoji, a conventionalized and (to varying extents) lexicalized set of pictures. the present research weaves together these threads of research to assess the link between emoji and speaker meaning via commitment and lyingare speakers committed to what they "say" if what they "say" is an emoji? is it possible to lie via emoji? as emoji continue to grow in popularity (and, correspondingly, conventionality), perceptions of emoji constituting commitment and lying may change over time as well, consistent with the finding that emoji meaning changes over time @xcite . an important nuance to acknowledge in an emoji investigation like this is that not all emoji are the same; we should not necessarily expect all emoji to constitute speaker commitment in the same way. at the very least, there appear to be two broad categories of emoji: those that realistically depict real-world objects, animals, foods, etc. and those that more symbolically represent concepts like facial expressions, gestures, and other expressive meanings (see @xcite for a semantic analysis demonstrating group differences between what they call "face" emoji and "activity" emoji or @xcite for a different analysis between "entity" emoji and "facial expression" emoji). just as there are different implicature types that do not all contribute to meaning in exactly the same way with exactly the same strength (e.g. @xcite @xcite , we may, too, expect similar nuance in emoji meaning-making. another level of nuance comes from emoji meaning agreement -not all emoji are equally unambiguous in their links to meaning. 🍓 seems fairly clear and unambiguous in its representation of a strawberry, but an emoji like 😒 may mean different things to different people and in different contexts. to get an appropriately nuanced picture of the link between emoji and meaning, these experiments will test two sets of emoji: one set of high-meaning-agreement non-expressive emoji (objects, foods, and animals) and another set of expressive emoji (facial expressions and bodily gestures) that demonstrate a wide range of meaning agreement. this paper presents the results of two experiments aimed at assessing the relationship between emoji and meaning commitment. the first experiment asks directly about commitment and deniability (partially following the approach used by @xcite ); the second experiment probes lie ratings. if emoji are found to yield uniformly less commitment and lower lie ratings than words, that would suggest that emoji are less direct in their meaning than words and as such contribute less strongly to speaker meaning. if emoji are found to yield uniformly as much commitment as words (with equal lie ratings), that would suggest that emoji are as direct in their meaning as words. a third possibility is that different emoji yield a range of attributions of commitment and lie ratings, which would suggest that emoji are capable of delivering speaker meaning but not all emoji do so in exactly the same way -we would thus end up with a more nuanced account of how emoji contribute to meaning, potentially related to emoji meaning agreement and consistency. ## pretest two meaning agreement surveys were carried out to hone in on the set of emoji to be used in the experiments, one for the non-expressive group and one for the expressive group. in both cases, participants were presented with a list of emoji and instructed to type in the meaning for each. results were manually categorized by two raters into bins for each emoji and these bins were then ordered according to frequency. these results thus yield an agreement proportion for every emoji tested; if 92% of participants write that 🍅 means "tomato," that emoji has an agreement of 0.92. synonyms (e.g., "happy" and "glad") were binned together but similar non-synonyms (e.g., "happy" and "smiling") were binned separately. data for the non-expressive group was collected on 80 emoji from 49 participants (average @xmath1.29 (@xmath2.5), 41 female, 8 male) as part of another experiment; participants were compensated with course credit. was chosen manually. the 80 emoji chosen included foods, objects, and animals that were expected to have reasonably high agreement across participants. a set of 20 emoji all with agreement over 0.75 (average @xmath3.88 (@xmath4.05)) were selected for use in the experiment. data for the expressive group was collected from a new set of 28 participants (average @xmath5.6), 22 female, 6 male). these participants were compensated @xmath012.90/hr. 75 emoji, primarily gesture and facial expression emoji, were tested; from this group, a set of 20 emoji were selected for use in the experiment (average @xmath6.62 (@xmath7.23)). importantly, this set covered a range of agreement from 0.25 to 0.96. ## experiment 1 experiment 1 investigated the extent to which emoji messages yield commitment and deniability. ## experiment 2 experiment 2 investigates the extent to which it is possible to lie via emoji. ## discussion these two experiments have provided evidence that emoji can constitute speaker commitment and it is possible to lie via emoji, but the extent to which they contribute to speaker meaning is not the same for all emoji. emoji that have high meaning agreement in the first place (from another perspective, emoji that are farther along in the lexicalization or conventionalization process) contribute more directly to speaker meaning; the correlative relationships between agreement, commitment, and lie ratings highlight this finding. a fully lexicalized emoji with high meaning agreement and consistency does not leave much room for varying interpretation and accordingly yield the speaker less deniability. though the focus of this paper is on emoji themselves, further study in this direction can work towards establishing a taxonomy of semantic/pragmatic commitment across modalities. in these results, there is a distinction between expressive emoji (e.g., facial expressions) and nonexpressive emoji (e.g., objects) with respect to commitment and lying, but this is mediated by their meaning agreement in the first place. in other words, non-expressive emoji do not inherently contribute more to commitment than expressive emoji, but this difference surfaces because nonexpressive emoji are more likely to be direct and unambiguous representations of their assigned meanings. on the other hand, expressive emoji are likely to contain more ambiguity and potential polysemy, yielding less agreement over their meanings in the first place. this finding is highlighted by the significant correlation between agreement and commitment among the expressive emoji tested. further research can explore the contextsensitivity of these relationships. since context significantly affects both lie ratings (weissman, 2019a) and emoji interpretations (e.g., @xcite , a more nuanced look at this complex relationship is likely warranted. as recent work has begun exploring multi-emoji sequences and the extent to which those are (un)natural forms of expressing content (e.g., @xcite @xcite , this endeavor could benefit from a commitment-based analysis as well. discussions of emoji interpretation challenges in the courtroom has already begun (e.g., @xcite . in today's age, it does not seem far-fetched to imagine a public figure mired in an emoji-related scandalsuch an occasion would certainly provide a fascinating case study for the deniability and commitment of emoji.