his assignment is designed to give you the opportunity to think in detailabout the emotional valences communicated through your personal use of emoji.Assignment length: 1000-1200 words, plus illustrations (either by hand or pasted, asyou prefer) and examples as described in the prompt.BACKGROUNDYour reading for this unit includes excerpts from linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s BecauseInternet. McCulloch is a linguist by training – although her professional work is outsideof academia, writing on language for Wired and other public forums. Most linguists aredescriptivist in their approach; this means that they describe what they observe aboutlanguage rather than prescribing ways they think people “should” use language (whichis called the prescriptivistapproach).McCulloch’s particular concern is pushing back against the standard doomsdayprediction that the Internet is Destroying Language As We Know It. Moral panics aboutlanguage go back as far as language itself; McCulloch simply advocates for an embraceof Internet-related change rather than resistance to a force against which resistanceisn’t meaningfully possible.McCulloch considers emoji particularly interesting because they are meaningful withoutthe presence of words. She notes that, like emblems (nameable gestures), emoji havestable meanings and are culturally specific. She also points out that we can use emoji inways that go beyond gestures; for example; eggplants can refer to literal eggplants, togenitalia, or to something else entirely, depending on who is using the emoji and whattheir shared cultural understanding of the emoji is.Structural linguists – linguists whose interest lies in the underlying structure of language– often work to create grammars. A grammar is an analysis of the structure of a specificlanguage. Grammars always include syntax (the order of words) and some combinationof semantics (the meaning of words), morphology (the shape of words, including tensesand cases), and phonetics/phonology (the sounds of words). A full grammar of acomplex language may run in the thousands of pages.PROMPTFor this assignment, you’ll be writing up a mini-grammar describing the use of emoji insome community with whom you regularly participate in online conversations (phone orotherwise). Please draft your assignment in prose form except where otherwiseindicated.1. Choose an emoji linguistic community to work with. Feel free to think broadly interms of community; it may be helpful to think of “community” in the same terms thatyou’d think of a subculture. For example, if you regularly text the same tiny group ofBFFs, that is a perfectly appropriate subculture to analyze. You can also go broader,e.g., fan subcultures, ethnic or political subcultures, etc.2. Search back in your texts (or, if you prefer, through sites like Twitter or Instagram ifyou feel part of specific emoji-using communities there). Make a list of the top 10-15emoji that you found among the people that you text with, comment on, or generallyinteract with online most frequently.3. Jot down some notes about the context in which you use your chosen emoji. Foreach emoji, consider the following questions: What name would you give the emoji if you were asked to label it? (For example,McCulloch uses the term “tears of joy” to describe the emoji that I call the “laughingwhile crying” emoji.) Do you think other people would use the same descriptions? Does your linguistic community use it literally (i.e., using a facial expression toconvey what would be present on one’s actual face if you were together IRL),sardonically, metaphorically, or symbolically? What does the emoji symbolize emotionally? Can it symbolize more than one thing?Is the symbolism obvious outside of your linguistic community or it is specific to yourcommunity? How does the emoji shore up the emotional communication information that ismissing as a result of a conversation happening over the Internet? How couldemotional communications be misinterpreted in its absence? How does the emojihelp you conform to IRL emotional display rules? How has your use of the emoji shifted over time? Did it previously have onemeaning and then gradually transition to another meaning? How did you come tounderstand this shift? What role does repetition play (see McCulloch on “strings of related objects” and“beat gestures” in Chapter 5) in forming the meaning of the emoji? In what way could the use of that emoji go terribly, terribly wrong? When is it *not*appropriate to use it? You can speak from actual experience or you can speculate. If you didn’t have that emoji available but still wanted to convey the affective(emotional) message that it carries, how would you do so in words? In other words,how would you literally translate the emotions it represents (these translations maysound awkward, and that’s fine – indeed, that’s the point).4. Start your paper: write an introductory paragraph in which you identify and describethe linguistic community you’ll be working with and state your intent to write agrammar of emoji as utilized by that community.5. Choose the 4-5 emoji from your original list that most interest you. Write 1-2paragraphs of analysis for each emoji. As a writing guide, use some or all of thethought exercises listed above. For each one, please reproduce a shortconversation (2-4 back-and-forths) in which the emoji is used to illustrate your claimsabout its use in context.6. No conclusion or list of works cited is needed for this assignment.7. Please include a visual glossary. You can incorporate this into your text if you want,or you can make it a separate document at the end. If you draw by hand, pleasephotograph or scan your glossary and upload it as an additional document if youdon’t know how to combine two documents into a single PDF. If you use cut-and-paste emoji from online, please paste them directly into your paper.
