The Spirited Misstep: When Emojis and GIFs Stand in for Context

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 145):

ChatGPT Comments:

In their discussion of spiriting, the authors continue to treat emoji, GIFs, exclamation marks, and hashtags as resources of tenor, implying they primarily function as contextual markers of social stance. 

The GIF, high-five emoji, and middle-finger emoji are semantically and semiotically active, contributing affective and attitudinal meaning. They are not linguistic realisations of tenor; they are visual, gestural, and multimodal resources that accompany text. Similarly, hashtags encode evaluation, political alignment, and social positioning simultaneously — they are not “pure context,” but meaning-bearing devices that shape the interpretation of the post.

By framing these semiotic resources as tenor, the authors repeat the stratification error: conflating the semantic system of interpersonal meaning with the contextual stratum. They also commit a semiotic error, treating cross-modal signs — visual, gestural, or pictorial — as if they were linguistic. The result is a flattening of the meaning-making process, where tone, evaluation, and alignment are reduced to a single, ill-defined dimension. In short, the “spirited” post is not social context; it is a multimodal semantic performance, one that cannot be shoehorned neatly into tenor without collapsing the distinctions that make stratal analysis meaningful.

More precisely:

This excerpt continues the pattern we identified in the previous discussion of spiriting, and there are some points worth noting from a critical perspective, though the issues are subtler here.

1. Stratification confusion persists. The authors continue to present emoji, exclamation marks, vocatives, and hashtags as if they instantiate a system of tenor (“spiriting”), implying that these resources exist in the contextual stratum rather than in the semantic stratum. Yet, these items are clearly meaning-bearing resources within the post. For instance, the high-five GIF, the exclamation marks, and the middle-finger emoji are semantically expressive — they contribute affective and attitudinal meaning, not just social positioning. The authors’ framework again risks collapsing semantics into context, flattening the stratal hierarchy.

2. Emoji as cross-modal semiotic resources. Just as with the heart and kiss-face emoji earlier, the GIF, high-five emoji, and middle-finger emoji are pictorial or gestural signs that co-deploy with text. They do not have grammatical or semantic properties of language itself; they are visual/affective accompaniments. Treating them as linguistic realisations of “spiriting” once more blurs the boundary between language and non-language semiotics.

3. Hashtags as hybrid resources. The hashtags #momknowsbest and #VoteBlueToSaveAmerica are doing multiple things simultaneously: they contribute to scoping, position the speaker, and provide affective alignment. They are not contextual; they are semantically active, encoding evaluative, social, and political meaning. The authors’ framing risks treating multifunctional semantic resources as simple markers of tenor, which is theoretically misleading.

4. Polarity of spiriting and scope. While the excerpt acknowledges positive and negative spiriting (e.g., supportive high-five vs. middle-finger warning), the same critique applies: these resources are semantic and semiotic, not contextual. The political and evaluative hashtags suggest a broader social scope, but the meaning is still realised within the post — meaning is not “context,” it is instantiated via semiotic resources.

Summary:

This excerpt reinforces the dual error noted earlier: the stratification error (misplacing semantic meaning in context) and the semiotic error (treating multimodal signs as linguistic). The GIFs, emojis, exclamations, and hashtags are not purely contextual markers but semantically potent, cross-modal resources. Conceptually, the authors conflate scope, evaluation, and affect with social positioning. The analytical consequence is a flattening of meaning, where tone, alignment, and social stance are reduced to a single “tenor” dimension rather than being recognised as emergent from the interplay of semantic and semiotic strata.