Inter- and crossmodal resemiotization in AI-generated political memes: The case of Amelia
Abstract
The present paper is a study of metaphorical resemiotization in AI-generated memes responding to the Pathways: Navigating Gaming, The Internet & Extremism UK government-funded online game. The memes were posted on X (formerly Twitter) in January and February 2026. Resting on the theoretical premises of conceptual (multimodal) metaphor and metonymy, the author proposes an integrated framework for inter- and cross-modal resemiotization in (AI-generated) political memes. This framework consists of three stepwise levels: (1) the visual-grammatical; (2) the intersemiotic-metaphorical, and (3) the multimodal discourse-analytical. The findings suggest that on the visual-grammatical level Amelia-associated memes under analysis are predominantly symbolic-attributive, mildly authoritative, and are constructed mostly around the GIVEN/NEW informational values. Clustered around the superordinate contextual metaphor, BRITAIN IS A COZY HOME, the memes instantiate several distinct metaphorical and, metonymic scenarios. These are BRITAIN IS A NOSTALGIC HOME, BRITAIN IS A CIVIC HOMELAND, BRITAIN IS A FORTRESS UNDER SIEGE, and BRITAIN IS A POLITICAL PROGRAM, and Parliament for heritage, Parliament for the nation, person for the nation, etc. The shared presupposition across all sub-metaphors is that BRITAIN HAS BEEN LOST/DAMAGED AND MUST BE RESTORED/DEFENDED. Evidenced from the meme corpus, metaphorical resemiotization occurred when attributes with chiefly negative connotations in educational discourse (Pathways) were transferred to and AI-modified in social media discourse (X), having been assigned positive meanings.
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