The use of emojis in X/Twitter for research recontextualization

Abstract

Along with their websites, international research groups use social media for their dissemination and communication activities, among which is X/Twitter. In an attempt to reach diversified audiences, the information researchers include in their websites and messages necessarily undergoes recontextualization processes. In their X/Twitter accounts, emojis are often included in the tweets, performing different functions (Scott, 2022, Yus, 2022). Taking a step forward with respect to previous research, this paper constitutes a corpus study based on the theory of Relevance. I examine a subset of the EUROPROtweets database comprising 10 accounts associated with H2020 project websites (Pascual et al. 2020), in order to explain how emojis contribute to building the messages, as clues for utterance interpretation. I draw from the notion of perceptual resemblance as used by Sasamoto (2023) and take into account Scott’s (2022) and Yus’s (2022) explanations of some of the uses of the emojis, together with some new insights from previous accounts of reformulation processes in verbal language (Blakemore, 1996, Murillo, 2012). Emojis can substitute for words, or they can follow or precede text in a process resembling verbal reformulations. Non-facial, reformulative emojis seem to be particularly frequent in the tweets of the research projects, and these items are used to enhance the content of the messages and their engagement, thus contributing in original ways to the recontextualization of the knowledge generated by the projects.