Abstract
Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) is a model that illustrates the assumptions and processes that addressees employ to interpret verbal communication. Placing Relevance Theory at the core of human communication, Forceville (2020) extends the model’s applicability to multimodal texts, specifically to combinations of written and visual media. Forceville’s contribution has not only opened a new avenue of research for scholars interested in multimodal communication, it has also brought a new challenge to Relevance Theory studies: to describe creative uses of language within the framework for multimodal texts. One such use is irony. Drawing upon the notions of collapsed contexts (Scott, 2022), genre and mass audience (Forceville, 2020), the echoic account of irony (Wilson & Sperber, 2012), and the use of alternating capital letters (e.g. the title) in written texts, this paper argues that Internet Memes (IMs) can be used to convey a sense of irony in multimodal communication. By doing so, this paper introduces both a Relevance Theoretical description of irony in multimodal communication and the use of alternating capital letters to mark a specific attitude in written medium. Additionally, a typology of the IM template named Mocking Spongebob is presented.
Keywords: Multimodal Communication, Relevance Theory, Internet Memes, Irony
References Cited
Forceville, C. (2020). Visual and multimodal communication: Applying the relevance principle. Oxford University Press.
Scott, K. (2022). Pragmatics Online (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/b22750
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition, 2nd ed. (pp. viii, 326). Blackwell Publishing.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2012). Meaning and Relevance: Explaining irony.
Relevance Researchers' Network 