Vyvyan Evans

Since 2011, the use of emoji - deriving from the Japanese, meaning picture character - has become a global phenomenon. We send over 6 billion emoji every day and regularly send emoji-only messages, and, when Oxford Dictionaries named the 'Face with Tears of Joy' emoji as their 'Word of the Year 2015', it received an enormous amount of criticism.Whenever emoji are covered in the popular media the same burning questions come up: Can an emoji really be a word? How language-like is it? Will emoji make us dumber? Or more lazy? Will they make us less adept at communicating with our nearest and dearest? And does this signal the death knell for language as we know it? Drawing on findings from disciplines as diverse as linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, archaeology and anthropology, this groundbreaking book explores human capacity to communicate, and addresses these questions in the process. The Emoji Code sheds light on emoji's vital role in the expression of emotion in digital communication and more, pointing the way for the future of international communication in a provocative and entertaining way.

Vyvyan Evans covers all aspects of the relationship between language and mind, as well as applications and extensions of cognitive linguistics to the study of text, literature, discourse, and society. Bursting with new content and presented in a new 5-part structure, the book has been fully revised and extensively updated throughout to deliver the complete guide to the cognitive linguistic enterprise. Brand new additions include: an innovative new chapter exploring key topics in language science, a new chapter introducing the range of research methods and approaches for studying human language, mind and behaviour and new chapters exploring areas such as access semantics and meaning construction, conceptual structure, the nature of space, time, gesture and sign language.