@tanyakaroli well yes, 👍😂 seems to me anatomically impossible, in contrast to 😂👍
We have a lot of papers on the topic of whether emojis are interpreted (mostly) as pictures, as Emar Maier argues, or like lexical items. Anyway, many emojis are flipped horizonally between WhatsApp and iOS design - this may affect your results (but I'm not sure if Reddit tracks the source client like Twitter once did).
@tschfflr interesting, thank you! I have just put your 2024 article “Affective, semantic, frequency, and descriptive norms for 107 face emojis” on our reading list 😊
Any other of your papers you would recommend (specifically on emoji sequences)?
@tanyakaroli You can find the whole emoji bibliography we maintain here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2613859/linguistics_of_emojis/library
There's a new paper based on a student's thesis on emoji sequences: https://doi.org/10.36824/2024-graf-reis
@tschfflr Awesome, thanks! We need experimental studies like yours to better understand the motivation behind emoji usage (while also recognizing that people may not be able to explain their own use sufficiently, as has been shown for dialect features).