Emoji as resources for negotiating affiliation and taste in TikTok comments

Abstract This paper examines how emoji operate as pragmatic resources for negotiating affiliation in TikTok comment threads. Adopting a social semiotic perspective and the emoji–text convergence model ( Zappavigna and Logi 2024a ), the study analyses how emoji interact with their co-text to frame stance, modulate affect, and index shared or contested values. Combining concordance-based and interactional analyses, we show how emoji guide interpretation and shape alignment in participatory comment cultures. Emoji such as the Skull 💀 and Face With Rolling Eyes 🙄 are used to intensify mockery and disalignment, while Hot Beverage ☕ and Red Heart ❤ foster conviviality and in-group solidarity. These findings highlight that emoji meanings are inherently contextual and multimodal, emerging through their coordination with linguistic resources. By foregrounding pragmatic functions such as irony, mock politeness, and affective intensification, the study demonstrates how emoji not only manage alignment but also enact classed orientations to taste and civility. These are socially stratified preferences and norms in digital discourse around what counts as legitimate or refined behaviour regarding, for example, social practices such as coffee consumption. In doing so, the study extends prior typologies of emoji function (e.g., Herring, Dainas and Tang 2021 ) and models of emoji–text relations ( Zappavigna and Logi 2024a ) by showing how emoji perform ideological work in participatory discourse about everyday commodities.