The Semantics of Emojis

LECTURER: PATRICK GEORG GROSZ
August 12-16, 16.00-17.30, Room 3.105

Emojis are an emerging tool of visual communication; they are a human-made artifact, which entails that their nature is shaped by human cognition and communicative needs. This course provides an introduction to the formal semantic and pragmatic analysis of emojis: several topics will be addressed, including the distinction between activity emojis and face emojis, pictorial vs. lexicalist approaches (as well as experimental ones) to emoji semantics, how to model expressive emoji meanings, and text-emoji interactions. The course will also touch on more traditional topics of linguistic inquiry, such as presuppositions, implicatures, the semantics-pragmatics interface, and formal linguistic approaches to iconicity. This course presupposes no prior knowledge of emoji meaning; however, an introductory knowledge in semantics and pragmatics is presupposed.