Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis of Memes with English and Arabic Humor Captions

This study aimed to examine memes from a linguistic and cultural perspective, focusing on humor expressed through English and Arabic captions in memes collected from Facebook and Instagram. Using a mixed-method approach that combined quantitative and qualitative methods, corpus linguistics was employed to collect 60 memes—30 Arabic and 30 English. The study sought to highlight the similarities and differences in the methods used to express humor through memes while examining the socio-semiotic aspects underlying their linguistic and cultural structure. Drawing on Halliday's socio-semiotic theory, the analysis was conducted at three levels: ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions, described in terms of the situational context through the variables of field, tenor, and mode. The findings revealed that mode was the most frequently used semiotic metafunction across the four sub-corpora, represented by ellipsis, exophoric and anaphoric references, conjunction, lexical collocation, and repetition. Linguistic features of mode were more prominent in Instagram English memes and Facebook Arabic memes. Tenor emerged as the second most used metafunction, particularly in Facebook Arabic memes and Instagram English memes, expressed through mood, polarity, modality, and dialogue. Conversely, field, encompassing themes such as social commentary, relationships, and politics, was the least used metafunction, with no significant differences among its sub-corpora. The study concludes that memes are a complex socio-semiotic phenomenon where linguistic and visual elements interact to communicate meaning. It recommends further research on cross-platform memes and longitudinal analyses to explore evolving linguistic and cultural dynamics.