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Article published In: Beyond Words: Pragmatic approaches to visual discourses in digital interactions
Edited by Agnese Sampietro and Carmen Pérez-Sabater
[Internet Pragmatics 8:2] 2025
► pp. 152–185

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“Emojis are grown-up stuff”

Analysing graphical elements in digital relational contexts

 | Universitat Politècnica de València
Published online: 11 July 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00125.per
Abstract
This study delves into the use of graphicons, their frequency and their pragmatic functions in a corpus formed of 353,128 words/69,646 private texts on WhatsApp exchanged by adult users and teenagers. The messages were first examined to investigate graphicon usage. A second pragmatic analysis focused on the functions of emojis. The results show that, in utterances exchanged by adults in groups, emojis work as relational elements. Conversely, in adults’ dyadic exchanges and teenagers’ texting, conventional emojis are not so pervasive; other strategies are used for signalling mutual affinity. Interestingly, young texters base their dyadic interactions on messages formed nearly exclusively by text (72% of their messages) and some personalized GIFs, stickers, and multimedia content (13% of the messages). The novelty of this article lies in (i) the exploration of a large private corpus and (ii) the comparison of pragmatic functions of emojis and other graphicons across different age groups.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review: Emojis in relational contexts
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Procedure
      • 3.2.1Quantitative study
      • 3.2.2Pragmatic analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Adults’ interactions
    • 4.2Teenagers’ interactions
    • 4.3Comparison of adults’ and teenagers’ exchanges
    • 4.4Pragmatic analysis: Usage and functions of emojis
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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