The Use of the 'Face with Tears of Joy' Emoji on WhatsApp: A Conversation-Analytical Approach

Abstract

‘Face with tears of joy’ (1F602), a face laughing so hard that it cries, is one of the most popular emojis on many platforms. This paper analyzes the use of this pictograph in a corpus of dyadic WhatsApp chats using digital conversation analysis. In particular, it compares the use of this emoji on WhatsApp with the sequence organization of laughter in face-to-face interaction. Two patterns of use are found: when placed at the end of the utterance, the emoji ‘face with tears of joy’ usually signals the ‘laughable’ and indexes an invitation to laugh, while the acceptance of the invitation is usually performed by repeated ‘face with tears of joy’ emojis standing alone. Besides contributing to literature on the interactional functions of emojis, these findings have implications in training automatic emoji classifiers or in improving social media marketing and chatbot systems.