Emojis as Pictures

Abstract

I argue that emojis are essentially little pictures, rather than words, gestures, expres-sives, or diagrams. means that the world looks like that, from some viewpoint. I flesh out a pictorial semantics in terms of geometric projection with abstraction and stylization. Since such a semantics delivers only very minimal contents I add an account of pragmatic enrichment, driven by coherence and non-literal interpretation. The apparent semantic distinction between emojis depicting entities (like) and those depicting facial expressions (like) I analyze as a difference between truth-conditional and use-conditional pictorial content: depicts what the world of eval-uation looks like, while depicts what the utterance context looks like.