Speaker
Description
TikTok’s affordance for reusing the audio track of an existing post enables a distinctive form of multimodal meta discourse where users communicate not only through what they say, but through how they re contextualise another creator’s discourse. This paper analyses the “I Have One Daughter” TikTok sound meme as a form of meta meme in which creators perform patterns of conversational breakdown, stereotype driven inference, and repeated pragmatic misunderstanding. Although the original audio was not produced as a meme template, its circulation through TikTok’s “Use sound” feature has generated a family of posts in which creators lip sync the original dialogue while overlaying incongruent captions that map the inferences associated with the original audio onto new discourse contexts. As performances of miscommunication, the memes offer meta-pragmatic commentary on social misunderstandings.
Through analysis of a corpus of meme tokens, including examples that explicitly break the fourth wall, I show how creators use a combination of audio, text, and non-verbal cues to guide the audience toward the intended interpretation. Drawing on assumptions from relevance theory, I argue that these meme variants function by deliberately manipulating layers of ostension and inference. To form a relevant interpretation of a meme token, viewers must access inferences that are highly accessible when listening to the audio and then attribute them to the discourse context represented via the sub-titles and other visual components.
The meme’s dual layer structure exemplifies a platform specific practice comparable to other social media native forms of meta discourse, such as quote tweeting or ironic alt text. The study contributes to emerging pragmatic research on meta memes and multimodal constructions, as well as to broader discussions of how discourse is used, recontextualized, and re performed in contemporary social media environments.