Comparative Discourse Analysis of Meme Tv Headlines

Abstract

Linguistic creativity is realised in our everyday text and it allows formulation and expression of ideas. Online content creators (humourists) have created meme tags or headlines posited to done by Nation TV comparing them to other unspecified TV stations. These humourists utilise language. This paper does a comparative analysis of the meme TV headlines to comprehend how language has been utilised in this scenario by determining the structural differences in the process of formation, determining whether the grammar constructed would say practical and sensible things about the written text, identifying figures of speech, and determine the source of amusement in the meme. This paper was guided by functional grammar (Halliday, 1985), a theory that is oriented toward describing how language makes contextual meanings. It analyses the grammatical structure, the communicative situation, participants, and context of the discourse. This paper has identified that the online humourists or content creators have conveyed meaning artistically with creativity by use of figures of correlation such as metonymy, symbolism, figure of comparison, truncation, wordplay and paronyms. The data that was utilised in this paper was collected from Kenyan Facebook fun pages.