ABSTRACT
Social-sharing platforms such as Instagram generate two types of image-centricity: central and dominant images of all kinds, and frequent emoji-use mainly in comments to posted images. This chapter presents a corpus-based exploration of emoji-text relations and of the functions emoji fulfil in so-called iconographetic communication. First, emoji are shown to be capable of standing in for all kinds of syntactic and semantic elements of the text – ranging from nouns and adjectives to prepositional phrases and entire propositions or semantic frames. Second, emoji can be seen to function as grapho-stylistic, cohesive, and illocution-structuring/-enhancing devices. They can perform these functions by serving as allographs, semantic specifiers, cohesive devices, deictic elements, structuring cues, and hashtags. The chapter also surveys the state of Instagram-related social media research.
