GIFs as Social Media Paralanguage

The central aim of this article is to explore how GIFs interact with language to make meaning in social media posts, comparing their intermodal semiosis to that of emoji and other graphiconic resources in terms of their meaning potential and the typical patterning of their convergence with linguistic meanings. To achieve this, a dataset of 100 posts containing GIFs sourced from the X (formerly Twitter) social media platform was analysed using social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis. The results indicate that GIFs can realise most, but not all, of the intermodal semiotic dynamics described for emoji-language semiosis, and that further to these, GIFs realise meaning via references to shared cultural knowledge, paralleling discourse semantic meaning in written co- text, and forging inter- and intratextual references.