Intertextuality in contemporary Internet communication. Intertextual references in memes (within the genre)

Abstract

Intertextual references as a game suggested by the author and played by the Internet user, contribute to the process of creating and receiving online memes. In their case this intertextual game is more complicated than in traditional literary texts as it refers to different sign systems: iconic and verbal. Frequently on top of referring to online memes the process of discovering intertextual relations necessitates uncovering textual references from outside the Internet. The author focuses on the mechanisms of this intertextual game within specific types of memes. The mechanisms are presented on the basis of a study of one meme series. For intertextual reception of a meme, the clues for the receiver are both on the iconic level (by repeating the iconic element or a part of it) as well as on the level of the verbal text (by repeating the syntactic structures), e.g. questions, parallel structures, an innovative use of the language which involves new morphological and inflectional formations (the use of neologisms and inflectional forms which are not used by native speakers), distortions of the phonetics and spelling which lead to a noticeable formal similarity between the newly created text and the text (or its fragments) to which the intertextual reference is made.