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Memes as dialogic action

Structure and response in political communication

 | Transilvania University of Brașov
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Abstract
The present study re-evaluates internet memes as structured dialogic actions. Based on Weigand’s Mixed Game Model (MGM), it analyses a corpus of memes generated in response to a specific political episode involving the Romanian President in January 2026. Through the analytical lens of initiative and reactive acts, communicative games and subgames, and expectation structures, the study demonstrates how memes respond to prior discourse, exploit communicative silence, and perform evaluative claims within ongoing dialogic exchanges. The analysis indicates that memes function as second-order dialogue: simultaneously reacting to political discourse and generating new communicative interactions within the public sphere.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Defining the internet meme
    • 2.2Memes as dialogic and multimodal acts
    • 2.3Political memes and dialogic failure
  • 3.Theoretical framework
    • 3.1Communication as dialogic action
    • 3.2The dialogic principle
    • 3.3Coherence and shared knowledge
    • 3.4Regulative and executive principles
    • 3.5Minimal and complex dialogic games
    • 3.6Meme templates as expectation structures
    • 3.7Memes as dialogic actions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Corpus
    • 4.2Analytical procedure
    • 4.3Multimodal analysis
  • 5.The triggering event as initiative action
  • 6.First-Order reactions: Initiative memes
    • 6.1“The Barbecue Meme”
    • 6.2“The Folk Song Meme”
    • 6.3“The Buried Meme”
  • 7.Intertextual subgames
    • 7.1“The Jon Snow Meme”
    • 7.2“The Movie Memes”
  • 8.Complex subgames
  • 9.Visual irony and imagined address
    • 9.1“The Hat and the Shell Game”
    • 9.2“The Zelensky Meme”
  • 10.The meme chain as second-order dialogue
    • 10.1How the chain develops
    • 10.2The chain as distributed communicative action
  • 11.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (17)
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