The Emoji Error

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 145):

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of spiriting, the authors introduce a category that purports to “shift the tone” of a message — for instance, through vocatives or emoji that make a post appear more positive or negative in tenor. Their example reads:

@User That's a hard thing to remember these days, the #momguilt is real! Thx for saying so! ❤️😘

They argue that the heart and kiss-face emoji “colour the position overall in positive feelings,” while emphasising that, unlike rendering, these do not target anything in particular. 

The problem is that spiriting is situated in the wrong stratum. The authors treat it as a system of tenor — and thus of context — when it is clearly a resource of semantics. If something modulates tone, feeling, or interpersonal alignment, it operates within the interpersonal semantic system, not above it. To locate spiriting in tenor is to confuse the semiotic realisation of feeling with the contextual variable that construes social relations. This is a classic instance of the stratification error: mistaking the patterns of meaning within language for the conditions around it.

Compounding this confusion is a semiotic misstep: the authors treat emoji as if they were linguistic. Yet emoji are not language; they are pictorial accompaniments that co-deploy with language to evoke or supplement its meaning. The heart emoji, for instance, represents an image of positive affect, while the kiss-face represents body language. Both are cross-modal signs, drawing on the visual and affective resources of image and gesture rather than the grammatical and semantic resources of language. To treat them as linguistic realisations of “tone” is to blur the semiotic boundary between language and its paralinguistic co-instantiations.

In short, the emoji error is twofold: the stratification error (misplacing a semantic system in context) and the semiotic error (treating a multimodal accompaniment as linguistic realisation). The result is an ontological flattening — language, image, and gesture are conflated; semantics and context are collapsed. The “spirit” of discourse is lost not in tone but in translation — between modes, strata, and the very orders of meaning themselves.