Internet memes and other forms of social media discourse have attracted scholarly interest across a range of disciplines for their role in establishing and maintaining social relationships and in shaping public opinion (e.g. Shifman 2014, Milner 2016, Wiggins 2019). Linguistic approaches, studying how language and image combine in ways that resemble linguistic constructions, have also gained prominence (e.g. Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017, 2025b; Lou 2017; Zenner & Geeraerts 2018), as have studies of the humorous and emotional aspects involved (e.g. Piata 2020; Zappavigna & Logi 2024; Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2025a).
In this seminar, we want to address the use of English, often alongside images and emoji, in examples of various types of metadiscourse ‘in’ social media – self-reflexive forms of the discourse itself – but also ‘on’ or ‘about’ social media – i.e. discussions that emerge in society on social media usage. The former dimension covers so-called meta-memes or ‘memes about memes’, including deliberate blends of different, normally incongruent memes, or examples which break the ‘fourth wall’. It also covers various platform-specific practices which direct and regulate online readers’ attention (cf. Hyland 2005), including ‘quote-tweeting’ (which the ‘quoted’ may object to: ‘why don’t you just reply like a normal person’), ‘snitch tagging’ (explicitly tagging someone to alert them to the fact they are being discussed, typically unfavourably), and the use of ‘alt text’ to describe appended images verbally (potentially adding ironic commentary that goes beyond description). As to the second dimension – discussions, by commentators and lay people alike, of specific instances of social media usage – one need only think of cases such as US entrepreneur Elon Musk publicly proclaiming “I am become meme”, or the various responses to the recent craze for AI-generated memes in the style of the Japanese animation studio Ghibli. The seminar also welcomes analyses of these types of discourse.
The next subpage illustrates some of the examples briefly touched on in our seminar description, to help spark ideas for contributions.