SEMANTICS OF EMOJI AS AN ELEMENT OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION
The article presents a comprehensive linguistic interpretation of emoji semantics as a significant element of contemporary digital
communication. The relevance of the study is determined by the intensive visualization of written interaction and by the need for
a scholarly description of the mechanisms through which pictographic signs acquire meaning. The aim of the work is to identify
the semantic, pragmatic and semiotic characteristics of emoji that determine their functioning in computer mediated discourse. The
methodological framework combines semiotic, contextual interpretative and comparative methods together with elements of
discourse analysis of digital texts. The material includes fragments of communication in messengers and social networks as well
as data from international empirical studies of emoji interpretation. The article substantiates the claim that emoji constitute
polyfunctional signs with flexible semantics whose meaning emerges from the interaction of the iconic image, conventional coding
and the communicative context. It is shown that emoji perform emotive, illocutionary, phatic and metacommunicative functions,
compensating for the absence of nonverbal means in written speech. It is established that emoji semantics is characterized by
polysemy, cultural variability and dependence on platform rendering, which creates risks of communicative failure. The results are of applied value for linguistic pragmatics, intercultural communication, language pedagogy and automatic sentiment analysis of
digital texts
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