The Emoji Workshop

Date: 29-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Oslo, Norway
Contact: Patrick Georg Grosz
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/research/groups/super-linguistics/events/the-emoji-workshop.html

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 16-May-2025

Event Description:
The project "Semantics and Pragmatics of Emojis in Digital Communication (EmDiCom)" (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG) and the Super Linguistics research group are hosting a one-day workshop on the linguistics of emojis at the University of Oslo, on 29th August 2025.

Invited Plenary Speakers:
Barbara Hemforth (Université Paris Cité)
Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California)

Special Panel Session: "Emoji meaning: stability and variation"
The workshop will be accompanied by a special panel discussion. The aim of this special session is to engage in a general discussion on possible research directions that emerge from investigating the linguistics of emojis.

Panelists
Patrick Georg Grosz, Lea Fricke and Tatjana Scheffler (EmDiCom team)
Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo)
Unn Røyneland (University of Oslo)

Commentators on the panel presentations:
Ingrid Lossius Falkum (University of Oslo)
Kjell Johan Sæbø (University of Oslo)
Toril Opsahl (University of Oslo)

Call for Papers
We invite submissions that address emojis from a linguistic angle, with an additional goal of furthering an interdisciplinary discourse. Submissions on related research areas, such as gestures, facial expressions, expressivity in human language, and emotion expression, are also welcome, but they should highlight the connection to the analysis of emojis. Moreover, we encourage submissions that approach the scientific analysis of emojis from within other fields, such as psychology or cognitive science, as long as a connection to linguistics is evident.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) the following and combinations thereof:
– different aspects of the semantics and pragmatics of emojis and emoji use;
– emojis and the iconic-symbolic meaning continuum;
– linguistic analyses of emoji-text combinations;
– comparing speech-accompanying gestures or facial expressions to text-accompanying emojis;
– decomposition of emojis into their visual component parts (e.g., decomposition of face emojis into eye shapes and mouth shapes);
– the role of emojis in speech act encoding;
– analyzing emoji semantics from the perspective of language change;
– syntactic or morphological properties of emojis;
– cross-linguistic or age-based differences in emoji interpretations;
– corpus based or experimental studies on the linguistic properties of emojis.

We invite submissions for 20-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion. Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5cm. Please submit abstracts by email to the following email address no later than 16th May 2025.

Email address for abstract submissions: [email protected]

Abstract submission deadline: 16th May 2025
Notification of acceptance: 30th May 2025
Workshop date: 29th August 2025

Organizers:
Patrick Georg Grosz, Lea Fricke and Tatjana Scheffler (EmDiCom team)