Emoji-Based Reactions to the Said Construction in Spanish and English

Abstract

The said construction (SC), a relatively common but understudied standard English construction, is usually characterized by the use of said in place of a determiner, followed by a noun (N2), typically given (in some sense) and licensed by an antecedent noun (N1). (e.g. “I made coffee… said coffee was bitter.”) I present the results of a social media based experiment, focusing on the way participants react to SC-containing sentences using the “reactions” buttons provided on many social media sites. Participants were presented with stimuli that looked like a Facebook profile; each item in the experiment had a “profile photo”, a sentence that contained either a standard determiner like the or that, or SC, as well as an emoji-based reactions schema with the reaction options provided on Facebook. Participants were told to read each sentence and react to it using the provided emoji buttons. Results showed that SC-containing sentences were more likely to receive the “