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Article published In:
Humour in Spanish Context
Edited by Larissa Timofeeva-Timofeev
[Spanish in Context 18:1] 2021
► pp. 113–135

Pragmatics of humour in memes in Spanish

| University of Alicante

In this paper the discourse of a specific type of meme in Spanish, the image macro, is analysed, together with several ways in which memes generate humorous effects. Two main areas are addressed: (a) how humour arises from the processing of the text in the meme (decoding of the text plus further inferential enrichment); and (b) how humour relies on specific combinations of the text and the image in the meme. The pragmatic framework used in the analysis will be relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), which in previous research (especially Yus 2016) has proven to be a valid foundation for the analysis of humour.

Keywords: memes, internet humour, relevance theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Internet memes
  • 3.Memes and humour
  • 4.Sources of humour in memes in Spanish
    • 4.1Humour and meme text processing
      • 1.Logical form
      • 2.Concept adjustment
      • 3.Disambiguation
      • 4.Explicit versus implicated
    • 4.2Humour and text-image combinations in memes
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.00070.yus
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