UM ESTUDO DO GÊNERO DISCURSIVO MEME

Abstract

The present work had as general objective to describe the textual genre meme and as specific objectives to characterize themes, communicative purposes, compositional structure and styles and to analyze dialogism in the process of construction of the meme. To achieve the established objectives, we used documentary research (CELLARD, 2008) with a qualitative approach (BORTONI-RICARDO, 2008) in the analysis of 22 memes, which were collected in the digital sphere. Based on Bakhtin's Theory of Enunciation (BAKHTIN, 2003, 2010), we obtained the following results: the meme addresses any thematic content; it has discursive purposes that go beyond generating humor, such as carrying out social criticism or (re)affirming political positions; it has three compositional construction bases, which are verbal, non-verbal, verbal and non-verbal; presents varied linguistic styles characterized by an internet language, with abbreviations, loanwords and neologisms, as they reflect the linguistic practices of “social bubbles” or specific groups, as they present both formal and informal language. We also found that explicit dialogism was recurrent in memes, however the marked presence of other voices did not consist in repetition, but in the (re)signification of the base utterance. From this investigation, we confirmed that the notions of discourse genre and dialogism were fruitful in the description of the meme.