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Part of
The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts
Edited by Esther Linares Bernabéu
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 335] 2023
► pp. 6–31

Interpreting Covid-related memes

The role of inferential strategies
and context accessibility

| University of Alicante
| Complutense University, Madrid

One of the sources of relief, entertainment and socialisation during the Covid pandemic lockdown was the massive exchange of memes on social media and messaging applications. The objective of this chapter is to analyse and categorise 150 Peninsular Spanish memes collected from different interactive channels online (mainly social media and the messaging app WhatsApp) during the strict 2020 Covid lockdown in Spain (March-May 2020). The sample was then analysed under “incongruity-resolution theory” and categorized with the following research questions in mind: (a) what inferential strategies the internet user is expected to perform to interpret these Covid memes correctly; (b) what role text and image play in the eventual derivation of humorous effects from these memes; and (c) what kind of contextual information the internet user is expected to have access to for successful comprehension. Answering these research questions will eventually allow for a differentiation between Covid memes and non-Covid ones, as already intuitively felt by most users.

Keywords: memes, Covid memes, internet humour, multimodality, incongruity-resolution
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The incongruity-resolution humorous strategy (IR)
  • 3.Incongruity-resolution in general-topic memes
    • 3.1Frame-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy
    • 3.2Frame-based incongruity where the image aids in the IR strategy
    • 3.3Frame-based incongruity where the image is essential in the IR strategy
    • 3.4Discourse-image based incongruity (the image is essential)
    • 3.5Discourse-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy
    • 3.6Discourse-based incongruity where the image aids in the IR strategy
    • 3.7Discourse-based incongruity where the image is essential in the IR strategy
  • 4.IR in Covid memes: Methodology of analysis
  • 5.IR in Covid memes: Categories
    • 5.1Frame-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy
    • 5.2Frame-based incongruity where the image is essential in the IR strategy
    • 5.3Discourse-image based incongruity (the image is essential)
    • 5.4Discourse-based incongruity where the image plays no role in the IR strategy
  • 6.Just like any other humorous meme?
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.335.01yus
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