Exploring emojis through corpus linguistic approaches: A cross-industry comparison of webcare communication

Lutzky, Ursula and Kehoe, Andrew and Gee, Matt (2026) Exploring emojis through corpus linguistic approaches: A cross-industry comparison of webcare communication. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. ISSN 1384-6655

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Abstract

Businesses increasingly interact with stakeholders through various digital media channels: a process known as webcare. Although emojis are widely used in webcare, they have not been explored extensively in this context and, as most corpus software cannot process visual modes of expression, their use has not been studied at scale using a corpus linguistic methodology. In this article, we present the results of a large-scale data-driven analysis of emoji use in the US Corporate Twitter Corpus (UCTC), comprising 4.4 million tweets posted by and addressed to US companies across three industries. Through frequency and collocational analyses, we explore the different functions of emojis in the UCTC, with a focus on disambiguating their use in tweets serving different webcare goals. While our study thus offers new insights into the use of emojis in webcare communication, it also demonstrates how they can be studied by adapting well established corpus linguistic methods.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1075/ijcl.25206.lut
Dates:	Date Event 17 July 2026 Accepted 29 October 2026 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	business communication, webcare, emojis, social media, Twitter
Subjects:	CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-01 - English studies (non-specific) CAH24 - media, journalism and communications > CAH24-01 - media, journalism and communications > CAH24-01-05 - media studies
Divisions:	Arts > English and Media > English Arts > English and Media > Media
Depositing User:	Gemma Tonks
Date Deposited:	10 Nov 2026 14:07
Last Modified:	10 Nov 2026 14:07
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/17304

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