The Language of Memes: Patterns of meaning across image and text

The first book-length analysis of internet memes from the linguistic perspective, this book develops linguistic tools suitable for description and understanding of contemporary ‘image-plus-text’ communication, proposing the ‘grammar of memes’ as an example of a new approach to multimodal genres. What this book shows is how memes achieve meaning as multimodal artifacts, how they are governed by rules of composition and interpretation which are specific to memes, and how such processes are driven by stance networks. The approach demonstrates the emergence of constructions in which images become structural components, while making language forms adjust to the emergence of multimodal rules. Through analysis of a number of meme types, the approach defines the specificity of the memetic genre, describing types, but also accounting for creative forms. Of interest to linguists, discourse analysts, and media scholars, the book opens new questions about the role and nature of ‘image-plus-text’ discourse in contemporary communication.