JHASS

Article http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.01.006

From Words to Emojis: The Multimodal Realization of Textual Organizers in Social Media Texts

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Yuhan Jia

School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Nova University of Lisbon, Lisbon 1069-061, Portugal.

*Corresponding author: Yuhan Jia

Published: January 21,2026

Abstract

Textual organizers (TO) serve as indispensable macro-structural markers for discourse articulation. With the expansion of digital communication, online texts increasingly diverge from traditional written forms in their organizational patterns. This study aims to investigate the use of textual organizers (TOs) and to analyze their distribution and variants in social media discourse, focusing on the SCI Tweets corpus (1,261 Twitter messages) and four types of YouTube video comments, with 500 comments sampled for each video. Using a quantitative approach that combines automatic extraction with manual validation, the study examines both traditional and emerging multimodal forms of TOs across multiple discourse domains by different types of YouTube videos. The results show that, alongside conventional conjunction-based TOs, digital discourse incorporates novel organizing resources such as emojis, platform-specific symbols, and abbreviated forms. Statistical analyses reveal significant variation in TO usage frequencies across discourse domains, while also indicating that traditional TOs display greater cross-contextual robustness than emoji-based TOs, whose usage is more sensitive to content type and communicative setting. From a Socio-Discursive Interactionist (SDI) perspective, in which text production is understood as the product of human interaction adapted to specific communicative situations, the findings suggest that traditional TOs constitute a more entrenched layer of digital discourse organization, whereas emoji-based TOs function as context-responsive socio-pragmatic resources. This study contributes an empirically grounded framework for analyzing multimodal textual organization in social media discourse.

Keywords

Textual organizers; social media; frequency; multimodal; digital discourse; discourse analysis

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How to cite this paper

From Words to Emojis: The Multimodal Realization of Textual Organizers in Social Media Texts

How to cite this paper: Yuhan Jia. (2026) From Words to Emojis: The Multimodal Realization of Textual Organizers in Social Media Texts. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science10(1), 40-58.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.01.006