Grammar in Digital Environments: Reflections on the Different Linguistic Levels through a Meme
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56683/rs262230Keywords:
grammar, meme, humor, ambiguity, teachingAbstract
Linguistic humor often arises from assigning two distinct meanings to the same surface form, a possibility enabled by the ambiguity inherent to language. Although pragmatic perspectives have addressed this phenomenon (Yus, 2020; Ruiz Gurillo, 2014), the relationship between humor and grammar has received comparatively little attention. Consequently, the notion of “puns” is frequently used in Spanish as an umbrella term for a broad range of operations involving different grammatical levels and not only the lexical one. In digital environments, artificial intelligence tools capable of generating unreal images can increase the humorous potential of these mechanisms. This study analyzes how the creation and interpretation of certain memes rely on grammatical operations that manipulate units and rules across lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and phraseological levels. The resulting double interpretation, an expected one and an absurd one visually supported, is enabled by AI technologies, which allow the visualization of grammatical reanalyses and non-compositional meanings of particular constructions. The aim of this paper is to examine the usage and interpretation of memes from a grammatical perspective. The corpus consists of memes associated with the “genie in the lamp” trend, which is based onthe tension between desire and expectation. The analysis of this material allows the approaching to linguistic phenomena in authentic contexts of use as well as the reflection about their pedagogical potential.
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