Memes in Frame-Semantic Perspective

One cannot escape them, because they are everywhere. There is scarcely a day without one coming across them. They are a humorous picture, a witty message or a funny video you find on the internet. They are in our newsfeed, on our message boards or in personal messages from our friends. These sources of entertainment seem to be by now an important element of today’s web society and there is a huge number of image boards like 9gag.com, or reddit.com, which have no other purpose than satisfying our needs for these sources of entertainment. Even a growing number of newspapers have started to include this type of content in their online platforms. A term that is often used to describe this accumulation of different visual entities is the term “memes”, but this term is vague and ambiguous, and it it does not specifically say what kind of phenomena are included in it.

This bachelor thesis is an attempt to establish these phenomena labelled as memes as valuable objects for linguistic studies. It will glance at several linguistic theories and check their relevance for analysing image macros as representatives for memes in general. Finally, it will analyse image macros by using the frame semantic framework, thus integrating the former accomplished insights in one theoretic framework with only a few central terms. This will support the thesis that frame semantics is capable of describing the patterns of encyclopaedic knowledge needed in order to understand complex bimodal entities.