Análise funcional-textual da referência do pronome você com função de sujeito em memes do Instagram

This article aims to examine the referential behavior of the pronoun você when it functions syntactically as a subject in memes posted on the social network Instagram, within the framework of a functional-textual approach. This theoretical perspective encompasses the interface between North American Functionalism (Givón, 1995; Oliveira, 2022) and Text Linguistics (Bernárdez, 2003; Elias; Capistrano Júnior, 2021), as proposed and systematized by Castanheira (2022), which investigates language in use from a contextualized perspective and in relation to the discursive effects produced by grammatical elements. Methodologically, the study adopts both qualitative and quantitative approaches, analyzing a corpus of 300 meme instances according to three factors: type of reference (Scherre et al., 2015), type of meme, and type of utterance (Paredes Silva, 1998). The study is guided by the following hypotheses,based on the literature review and the pilot observation of the uses: (i) memes containing the pronoun você tend to present more cases of specific reference in interrogative utterances and more cases of generic reference in affirmative utterances; and (ii) occurrences of você with specific reference are more frequent in dialogue-based memes, whereas occurrences with generic reference are more frequent in other types of memes. The results indicate that both hypotheses were confirmed.