Memes como propulsores de inovação semântico-lexical: uma abordagem sistêmico-funcional

Abstract

Memes, verbal-visual messages, are a recent phenomenon which became popular with the event of the internet and social networks. This new form of communication, created and consumed by thousands of people on the world wide web, provokes discussions about innovations in terms of how we communicate and consequently about the world of linguistics. With the active participation of thousands of Internet users around the world, who interact with the language in the online environment, this social moment, through memes, as mass media, raises peculiarities, such as the creation of a new field of study, the online linguistics or internet linguistics. Every living language is in a constant evolutionary process, words appear all the time, and virtual environments are today vehicles for the propulsion of these words. Linguistic changes that could take decades to be established, today, with the internet, can be carried out in a matter of hours, that is, technology has in a way accelerated language changes. Therefore, the objective of this dissertation is to investigate the lexical choices contained in internet memes, examining the multimodal texts (verbal-visual) and the humorous-critical characteristic contained in them as a persuasion tool for the propulsion and popularization of lexical innovations in the online environment in a contemporary process of enrichment and updating of the English lexicon. This manipulation of words in the online environment and the construction of new meanings through memes (semantic-lexical variation), in specific contexts on the internet, may be of interest, for example, in additional language teaching, since memes are commonly used in foreign language classes to expand the knowledge of learners because it is a new digital genre, which is part of the reality of students. Therefore, the investigation does not approach the meme from a strictly structuralist point of view, but analyzes it as an instrument of social interaction, since this type of media genre depends on a discursive context and cognitive aspects shared by its interlocutors. To analyze the lexical items present in memes: turn up; snowflake; lit; thicc; flexing and slick, the investigation relies on the Theory of Gender and Registration (TGR) of the meme (field, relations and mode), which is within Systemic-Functional Linguistics (LSF), a multifunctional theory, indicated by language critics. as being the most suitable for the analysis of discourse and its extension. The research also turns to the sociosemiotic approach of Multimodality and Visual Design Grammar (VDG), which serves as an analysis methodology for the imagery aspect of the meme. In addition, the research relies on the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy for the study of metonymic constructions which support the existing metaphors in memes and in lexical studies to understand the possible neologisms present in memetic texts. The investigation sought to be guided by the following research questions: (a) how is persuasion carried out via humor and irony in internet memes? (b) how do imagery systems, according to the principles of the cognitive approach and Visual Design Grammar, structure neologisms in internet memes? The results show that memes perform persuasion through humor and irony and meme authors' lexical choices are not isolated, and multimodal and conceptual metaphor characteristics corroborate the propulsion of lexical innovations from the digital environment.