Procedural Meaning in Multimodal Pragmatics: How Emojis Modulate Epistemic Interpretation

This study investigates how emojis can influence the interpretation of epistemic modality in digital discourse. More specifically, it tests, in controlled settings, whether they can change how readers assess writers’ epistemic commitment and the truth of modalised and unmodalised statements in multimodal contexts. A pretest identified emojis that are reliably associated with either epistemic or stance meanings. These were embedded in short declarative sentences containing epistemic markers (must, might, I guess) and evaluated by 144 native speakers of British English. Unmodalised sentences and no-emoji conditions were used as controls. Participants rated each statement using 7-point Likert scales. The results show that both epistemic and stance emojis significantly modulate interpretation. Epistemic emojis tend to weaken writers’ perceived certainty and readers’ perceived plausibility, especially when mismatched with expressions of strong modality. Stance emojis influence higher-level pragmatic interpretation, particularly when epistemic force is ambiguous or contested. These findings were interpreted within a relevance-theoretic framework, drawing on Yus’s (2025) proposal that emojis can play a procedural role by guiding addressees’ interpretation of accompanying text and may give rise to what he terms visual explicatures and visual implicatures. From this perspective, emojis are seen as playing a key role in how epistemic stance is multimodally constructed and interpreted in written digital communication.