A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Memes Used By College Students In Instant Communications

With the development of the Internet and the popularity of network mobile communication,more and more people use convenient network instant messaging software to communicate with others.At the same time,people’s need for self-expression is increasing and the ways of expression are diversifying.Unlike the former Internet instant messaging,where text was the only medium,nowadays,people can choose various medias,such as image,voice,and video to communicate.Meme,an emerging product in the Internet era,is a typical multimodal discourse that expresses meaning through a combination of images and texts and has been used extensively in online instant chat and social media.The massive use of memes has attracted wide attention of scholars at home and abroad.However,most studies are conducted from the perspectives of communication science,culture,and semiotics,without considering memes as a meaning carrier.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct an empirical study on the new multimodal discourse of memes to investigate its meaning construction mechanism.According to the 47 th China Statistical Report on Internet Development(https://cnnic.cn/NMedia File/old＿attach/P020210203334633480104.pdf)(The latest version of the report was updated in March 2023.Due to the change in the report’s focus,statistics on Internet users’ education are not included in the latest report and are therefore not updated for citation.),by December 2022,the size of cell phone Internet users in China reached 989 million,among which students accounted for the highest percentage of 21%.As the most active part of the student group,college students tend to use memes to achieve self-expression in instant chats.However,only a few studies have been conducted on the motivation of college students to use memes in instant chats.Therefore,this study selected the most commonly used memes in instant messaging by 10 college students as a corpus and constructed a theoretical framework based on Halliday’s(1978)Systemic Functional Grammar,Kress & van Leeuwen’s(1996)Visual Grammar,and D.L.Zhang’s(2009)Synthetic Theoretical Framework for Multimodal Discourse Analysis to examine the memes used by college students in instant communications.A questionnaire was used to obtain the motivations of 140 college students for using memes in instant chats.The exploration focused on the following three questions:(1)What are the types,use frequency,and features of memes that are most frequently used by Chinese college students in instant communications?(2)How do memes used by Chinese college students in instant communications construct meanings?(3)What are the motivations of Chinese college students to use memes in instant communications?In this thesis,500 memes are collected from the Internet instant chat records of the10 college students,of which 464 are valid research objects.NVivo 12 software is used to mark and summarize these 464 memes.They are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively according to the research needs;meanwhile,this thesis statistically analyzed the results of 140 questionnaires and found the answers to the three questions proposed in this thesis.The results of the study are as follows:(1)The 464 memes can be classified into five types: real people,animals,plants,items,and cartoon images.Among them are 290 cartoon images,92 animals,74 real humans,six plants,and two objects.The frequency of these memes used in college students’ daily chats was 30%,indicating that,on average,one of every three instant chat messages is a meme message.In addition,the characteristics of the studied memes are summarized in this thesis and explained in terms of images and words,respectively.In terms of images: real people and animals memes tend to use cute and human-like pictures as their image contents;the images of plants and items memes are primarily vegetables and solid objects;cartoon images memes tend to use cartoon human or humanoid animal images drawn by humans as their image components.In terms of text: the text of memes has three forms of composition,namely words,phrases,and sentences,and the length of the text content of memes is generally no more than two lines,which also gives the briefness of memes’ text expressions.According to the emotions expressed in the text content of memes,the memes can be divided into four categories,namely commendatory,derogatory,neutral and offensive;in which most of the text content of memes falls under the category of the first three emotions,while a small number of memes’ texts are significantly offensive.(2)In terms of language modality,material processes account for the most significant proportion of the total meme meaning construction,which can help meme users express their thoughts or inform meme receivers of their subsequent actions;text clauses are mostly declaratively accompanied by a small number of imperative and interrogative clauses,which aim to provide information and highlight the equal relationship between the meme users and the meme viewers;in addition,modal adjuncts rarely appear in the memes texts,signifying that the memes’ texts mainly express direct affirmative or negative mood.For the visual mode,the proliferation of action process and offer images reflect that the memes’ images are intended to provide information for viewers and seek less communication with them;the extensive use of frontal angles and close-up framing reveals that the authors expect to establish an intimate relationship with meme viewers and enhance their involvement;the use of a large number of center-margin structures helps to highlight the key messages and facilitate the decoding of the images by the viewers.In the interaction between verbal and visual modes to construct meaning,the two are complementary in all memes,as shown by the prominence and priority in the reinforced relationship and the coordination in the non-reinforced relationship,indicating that the overall construction of meaning in memes is not a simple sum of verbal mode and visual mode,but is achieved through complex interactions.(3)In this thesis,for college students’ motivation to use memes in instant communications,140 questionnaires were collected,of which 135 were valid,and five were invalid.After the statistical analysis of the 135 questionnaires,it was found that Chinese college students mainly use memes in instant chats for the following three reasons: using memes can adjust the chatting atmosphere and avoid awkwardness;using memes can help express their moods more vividly;using memes can make up for the lack of text expression in instant messaging.This result reflects that the self-expression of Chinese college students has changed significantly,and memes have become an essential medium for Chinese college students to realize self-expression and online communication.The emergence of memes has dramatically enriched the diversity of linguistic expressions.In addition,this thesis also found that Chinese college students use memes more often in instant chats with their friends or classmates.Overall,this thesis combines several multimodal discourse theories,establishes a comprehensive multimodal research framework,and investigates the meaningconstruction mechanism of memes from the perspective of empirical research.Besides,it incorporates memes into multimodal discourse research and broadens the scope of the application of multimodal discourse theory.The multimodal discourse analysis of memes can improve people’s multimodal information processing ability.In addition,this thesis explores the motivations of college students’ use of memes in instant chats,which can provide a guide for future related studies.