Emojis and conditionals: exploring the super linguistic interplay of pictorial modifiers and conditional meaning

Abstract

In recent years, formal linguistic analysis has expanded its scope to include objects of study beyond natural language, under the umbrella of Super Linguistics (where the intended meaning of super is its Latinate meaning ‘beyond’); see (Patel-Grosz et al. 2022. Super linguistics: An introduction. Unpublished manuscript, April 2022 version. Available at: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005242). One super linguistic object of study is emojis, which can be analyzed as digital counterparts of gestures and facial expressions, but which also share properties with natural language expressions such as alas and unfortunately (Grosz, Patrick Georg, Gabriel Greenberg, Christian De Leon & Elsi Kaiser. 2021b. A semantics of face emoji in discourse. Manuscript, December 2021 version. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005981 (Accepted with minor revisions for publication in Linguistics and Philosophy)). In this paper, I use conditionals as a case study to argue that natural language semantics can benefit from investigating the semantics of emojis. I start by arguing that face emojis (disk-shaped pictographs with stylized facial expressions) operate on contextually salient propositions. I show that they can comment on the presuppositions of wh-questions and definite descriptions, but not on conversational implicatures. I then show that face emojis can also comment on the counterfactual inferences of subjunctive conditionals (or, more broadly, subjunctive if-clauses). This suggests that these counterfactual inferences may be presupposition-like and not, as widely assumed, an instance of implicature (see Zakkou, Julia. 2019. Presupposing counterfactuality. Semantics and Pragmatics 12(21). 1–20, for recent discussion). The study of emojis, a nonstandard object for linguistic inquiry, can thus directly inform more traditional linguistic exploration.