A multimodal approach to the investigation of Covid-19 related memes on social media

<p class="Articletitle">Multimodality is the communication of verbal and visual elements in various discourse modes. Internet memes are forms of communication that enable internet users to communicate with one another on specific occasions, crises, pandemics, political concerns, and even wars by sharing funny images. This paper attempts to present how multimodality can be used in the visual and verbal analysis of Covid-19 memes in Social Media. Also, it examines a corpus of twelve memes extracted from social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google Images. For that purpose, the study applies Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) theoretical framework of visual grammar to analyze the narrative representations and interactive metafunction elements that exist in the selected memes and investigate how the visual and verbal elements orchestrated together in Covid-19 memes in social media to deliver the intended meanings. The analysis has revealed that multimodality has the capacity to decipher meme symbols using text, images, individuals who are represented, phenomena like the Covid-19 epidemic, and helps in making sense of different styles such as humor, sarcasm, regret, fear, happiness, and sadness. Also, the collaboration between text and visual elements in the memes was the only way to make the meaning comprehensible. <strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong>multimodality, visual grammar, internet memes, narrative representation <strong>Received: 14 August 2024 </strong> <strong>Accepted: 16 November 2024 </strong> <strong>Published: 21 November 2024</strong>