Analysis of the marker “type” in memes: towards the concept of marker-meme in WhatsApp of youth interactions

Abstract

The objective of this article is to describe and analyze, from the guidelines of the multimodal approach (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Scollon and Scollon, 2004; Norris, 2004; Kress, 2005, 2009; Jewitt, 2009), of semantic pragmatics (Martín Zorraquino and Portolés, 1999) and from concepts of cyberpragmatics (Yus, 2010), how the technological mediation of online exchanges causes various relationships between discourse markers and memes (Blommaert and Varis, 2015; Knobel and Lankshear, 2003; Yus, 2018, 2019). In this sense, we will try to demonstrate, from a selection of memes that were shared in WhatsApp groups of students from two secondary schools in Buenos Aires, how a marker of the particular speech "Type" (of great frequency in Buenos Aires youth speech) is not considered only in an isolated way as a verbal mode but, mainly, they are configured, in some contexts, autonomously as a marker-meme. This novel category will show how an “oral” marker can become a meme and, simultaneously, how a meme can function as a marker in online exchanges. Finally, we will discuss the results around the concept of modal continuum (Tannen, 1982) and that of marker-meme in digital discourses insofar as this is inscribed as a resource within the linguistic repertoire of students who emerge from certain communicative needs and who are directly influenced by the characteristics of the environment (Cantamutto and Vela Delfa, 2020).