The pragmatics of sharing memes on Twitter: The case of memetic responses to Russia's annexation of Ukrainian territories

Abstract

This paper explores the interactional pragmatic characteristics of multimodal memetic content facilitated by Twitter affordances, notably the functions of retweeting and quote tweeting. These Twitter affordances enable reposting a previous multimodal tweet (with or without a preceding commentary), which is conducive to nested memetic posts involving entextualised multimodal quotations and/or to memes interwoven into conversational exchanges. These retweeting practices also promote different forms of recontextualisation and user engagement with the original multimodal post, ranging from content co-construction (dubbed “pragmatic entrenchment”) to repurposing (referred to as “repragmatisation”). The theoretical proposals concerning Twitter memes are illustrated with examples taken from a manually compiled dataset of 893 (quote) tweeted memes collected between 25th and 30th November 2022 and originating from two viral memes that satirically announce the formation of NAFO's New Fella Land and Královec on Russian lands in response to Russia's illegitimate annexation of Ukrainian territories based on sham referenda held in late September 2022. The two memetic constructs are shown to have inspired pragmatic entrenchment (involving joint fantasising among other things), as well as repragmatisation through quote tweets which query or question the parent memes or their spin-offs and apply them for new communicative purposes.