This chapter introduces the study of emoji as a form of social media paralanguage. It delves into the semiotic versatility of emoji as ‘picture characters’ enabling users to express a wide range of meanings through their use with language in social media communication. The book approaches emoji as a form of paralanguage due to their close dependency on the meanings conveyed in their written co-text and their social context. The chapter highlights the significance of the social semiotic perspective to emoji-text relationships adopted in the book with its focus on understanding how they converge with the meanings made in other semiotic modes. It concludes by introducing the structure of the book and the focus of the upcoming chapters on both emoji-text relations and social affiliation.

This Introduction immediately poses the book’s underlying questions, which themselves lead into a distinction between the philosophy of translation, on the one hand, and the science and theory of translation, on the other. The methods and persuasions of the book are described, as is the structure of the argument, which is provided with further justifications. The Introduction ends with a brief note on the difficulties of representing rhythm.

Focusing on silence as means of expression, we first weed out other phenomena termed ‘silence’, some of which have nothing to do with language, while others form part of interaction but are not a means of expression. The primary measure serving this distinction is whether the referent so denoted is situated within interaction or external to it. Stillness, being external to interaction, includes numerous states external to the human body, such as the stillness of nature. The chapter includes an examination of silences referring to absence of speech and so falling in the realm of interaction in terms of their place and role within interaction, the matter of choice and the nature of the silence exposes diverse sorts of silences. Somatic and mental symptoms such as muteness are such that silence being its signifier is not the product of the speaker’s choice and does not serve interaction. Paralinguistic pauses constitute the temporal suspension of speech. Some such pauses serve interaction and some not. Moving to the content plane, the unsaid and empty speech are silences in terms of context, chosen by the speaker to conceal rather than communicate. Unlike the above, silencing is silence externally imposed on the potential speaker.