Verstehen auf den ersten Blick – oder doch nicht? Zur (vermeintlichen) Einfachheit kleiner Texte am Beispiel von Internet-Memes

Abstract

Small texts are not just short texts. Because of their shortness, they are often also understood as particularly simple texts. This view is further supported by the fact that they are multimodal units that integrate not only language but also images. For this reason alone, small texts represent an exciting object for research on questions of text complexity. This paper makes a usage-based linguistic contribution to that research. The study turns to the question of when and under what circumstances small, structurally short or abbreviated (multimodal) texts can be conceived and described as simple or complex. More clearly stated: this paper attempts to explain why a single small text can usually be conceived as both simple and complex. The research questions are unfolded in this paper on the basis of concrete examples. The theoretical considerations are based on a text corpus of current internet memes (specifically image macros) from the years 2020 and 2021.