Image and verbal text interfaces of internet memes: a cognitive analysis

Abstract

The article focuses on image-text interface types of Internet memes mocking the same viral event – Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican Party convention. The future first lady’s address contained borrowings from Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic Party convention. The relevance of the study is accounted for both by the social significance of visual-verbal Internet memes as a tool influencing the formation of the Internet users’ views and by the need to elucidate the principles of interaction between the verbal and visual modes of memes in creating a humorous effect, which is the aim of the study. The application of cognitive linguistics methods, in particular, the tools of the theory of conceptual integration for multimodal analysis of communication, made it possible to establish four types of visual and verbal text interfaces. It has been concluded that simple visual-verbal metonymy underlies memes, in which the humorous effect is achieved through the interaction of an image that provides access to a viral event mocked by the meme and a verbal text that activates a certain metonymic association highlighting a feature of the event that is incompatible with the expectations provided by the generic space of the viral event. In memes built on the basis of visual metonymy and verbal allusion, incompatible conceptual structures are activated with the help of allusive connection. Radial visual-verbal metonymy occurs when an image engages a series of metonymic features linked by a radial semantic link, whereas the verbal text highlights the incompatibility of these features with the actual features of the viral event. The interaction of allusion and diffuse visual-verbal metonymy is the cognitive basis of memes, in which access to a viral event is provided by verbal allusion, while the image contains signs of absurdity and triggers metonymic associations that are not based on expected connections.