Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
The language of internet memes
- Date
- Friday 14 November 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
It’s difficult to imagine the internet today – and social media platforms especially – without internet memes. Building on humorous forms of indirectness or incongruity, they parcel up often emotional messages in more impactful ways than just words, and allow communicators to bring across viewpoints and elicit responses quickly.
Using tools and inspirations from cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, this talk shows ways in which English itself is changed, its grammar extended, by internet meme usage. Images used in memes are not illustrations of text, but become structural components, making the forms of English adjust to the emerging multimodal rules of meme grammar. In terms of the meanings expressed, memes function as shortcuts to stance, making sometimes complex configurations of stance accessible to online interlocutors.
The talk also extends the discussion from memes proper to a wider class of memetically inspired discourse forms. Examples from persuasive discourse types such as advertising suggest that multimodal genres ‘leak’ into each other, and invite broader study of multimodal means of emotional expression.