The linguistic theories behind what we’re trying to say when we adapt and share internet memes

当适应和分享网络模因时,我们试图表达其背后的语言理论。

2020-09-26 03:00 Lingua Greca

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Good news! Recently, many curve-flattening countries began opening up their borders to certain international travelers—but not, alas, to citizens of the United States. … *cries in American* In a socially distant world, online life for many people has become normal life. How we express ourselves on the internet has become more important as we lose the social signals of body language and facial expressions. Without handshakes, hugs, and in-person social rituals, such as public gatherings and assemblies, how do we socialize and bond with each other? How can we convey emotionally what our lives have become in this pandemic era without having to explain it all through painstakingly literal language? For many internet users, one way to actively engage in a wider community is to play with words—through seizing the memes of production, as it were. If bonding through figurative language sounds similar to the work of idioms, it’s because good old idioms and memes are somewhat related, in the way we cognitively process their words to get from their literal meaning to their figurative one. Idioms are purportedly well-worn clichés that usually can’t be altered without losing their meaning, but the remarkable thing about internet memes is that without constant mutation through wordplay, they become, ahem, meme-ingless—less successful linguistic fads. Stagnant, unfashionable memes eventually go extinct. There are, of course, other ways of conveying simple emotions and accompanying gestures online. As Humphrey Bogart never said, we’ll always have emojis. True, emojis and emoticons let us express less complicated feelings, but they are just one type of affective communication—perhaps a more limited kind. (Even if people can get pretty creative, strings of emojis can be hard to process and decode.) But how can we better express deeper or more complex states of emotions online? Like emojis, the classic reaction gifs of split-second slices of life taken from popular culture have long been used as virtual gestures to signal other kinds of expressions—a kind of knowing, meta-emotional state that users can pass on just as they are or attach other, similar reactions to them. The more common reaction gifs can then later take on verbal forms that reference them without the need for the gif itself, such as “facepalm” and “side-eye.” While we’ve always had conventions for describing our actions and reactions online linguistically, such as *eats popcorn*, psychologist Sam Glucksberg suggests that we can process literal meanings in the words that are present while simultaneously conveying figurative meanings by alluding to words that are absent. From their literal meaning, the words “eats popcorn” can come to refer to observing drama or gossip. Since many already associate “eating popcorn” with entertainment, using the words in context can stand in for what might have been depicted wordlessly with images. The chaotic creativity of remixed internet memes and the new linguistic structures that rapidly evolve from them allow us to express certain states of mind and have others immediately get it and respond in kind. This has been called an “asynchronous, massively multi-person conversation.” Meme makers and sharers participate in this conversation to bond and maintain social cohesion through humor and wordplay—even shared with countless millions of complete strangers. Memes aren’t shared because people are forced to, or because humans are just by their nature passive “copying machines.” They’re shared, as James Willmore and Darryl Hocking argue, following the linguist Ronald Carter, because people actively engage and delight in “the creative, nonliteral, playful language of everyday conversation,” which “is not merely ornamental but socially determined.” We don’t play with language for pure pleasure alone, but to convey identity, to show belonging, to show we’re on the same page as others. This creativity in producing memes, playing off language as in ordinary conversation, is democratic, “the common property of all human beings.” While images are important to the origins of internet memes, they often enter the mainstream in linguistic form, from such wordplay as punning, morphological inventiveness, reformulating, or repeating patterns and figures of speech. For instance, take the emerging linguistic meme with the phrasal template “X in Y,” such as “cries in American,” “laughs in Canadian,” or, in its original form, “cries in Spanish.” This meme, which you can’t take literally in the same way as “eating popcorn,” has evolved as one kind of wry reaction to certain situations (such as the state of international travel during a pandemic). Somehow, through allusion, the meme can convey far more complex emotional information than its simple linguistic structure might suggest. In fact, “a central characteristic of much memetic humor is sociocritical commentary” that is not often literally spelled out. Internet memes are popularly image macros—often originating from weird or amusing snippets of pop culture, with accompanying humorous text or catchphrases riffing on the theme of the meme. Those textual elements can take on various forms, depending on the in-joke, such as initialisms or set catchphrases. But many of these memes set up phrasal templates that can be reformulated, such as the one that’s probably Sean Bean’s albatross, “One does not simply X into Y”: Linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term “snowclones” to refer to phrasal structures with slots that can be filled in, such as: “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z. In space, no one can hear you X. X is the new Y.” If snowclones have been more like mass-produced linguistic clichés, such as “If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy,” it’s the absurd context of ever-mutating memes, where almost anything goes as long as a familiar enough structure is maintained, that can really turn a cliché on its head. The original source meme has to have had something notable about it for it to have become popular in the first place. The “cries in Spanish” meme, for instance, began as a humorous observation on the nonsense of subtitles unnecessarily explaining a universally human act of emotion—crying—in terms of a particular language, nationality, or personal identity. Successful memes are virally shared and copied, but unlike your classic reaction gifs, they can often go on to take a life of their own. Most importantly, memes aren’t static; they can mutate as they’re copied, as meme sharers remix their elements, particularly riffing on the text to create new layers of referential humor while keeping the soul of the original intact. Earlier parodies of the meme, like “Dies in Spanish,” were straightforward, descriptive plays on subtitles, since dying is also a universal human condition that needs no linguistic qualification. As variations on the meme become more popular, the relevant phrasal structure is used and reused, without the images. For “Cries in Spanish” memes, the reference to a language or nationality is humorous and can’t really be taken literally, which means that the phrase evolved figuratively: not merely referring to parodies of subtitles, but becoming affective commentary on a person’s state or identity. In context, meme readers can understand and respond. One Reddit thread about extreme healthcare costs, for example, riffs on the same phrasal structure “cries in American” to refer to the abject state of medical insurance in the U.S. (“Cries in British in the future” responds with anxiety about expected cuts to universal healthcare the U.K.) Expressing yourself through the medium of the absurdist humor of internet memes can seem silly to many people—but it’s a silliness and playfulness that’s often surprisingly bundled together with astute observations about the human condition, or our assumptions about the world—perhaps as we laugh or cry ruefully in ongoing events of 2020.
最近好消息是,许多曲线趋平的国家开始向某些国际旅行者开放边境,但对美国公民却不开放。 …*美国公民的哭泣声* 在一个远离社会的世界中,许多人的在线生活已成为正常生活。 随着我们失去肢体语言和面部表情的社交信号,我们在互联网上表达自己的方式变得越来越重要。 没有握手,拥抱和亲身社交仪式(例如公共聚会和集会),我们如何进行社交和彼此联系? 我们如何在情感上传达这个大流行时代的生活,而不必通过刻苦的字面语言来解释一切? 对于许多互联网用户而言,积极参与更广泛社区的一种方法是通过抓住生产模因来玩弄文字。 如果通过比喻性语言进行的联结听起来与成语的作用相似,那是因为好的旧成语和模因在某种程度上是相关的,这是因为我们以认知方式处理他们的单词,使其从字面意义转变为比喻性含义。 习语据说是陈旧的陈词滥调,通常在不失去意义的情况下就无法改变,但互联网模因的非凡之处在于,如果不通过文字游戏不断进行变异,它们就会变得无语,无模因,不太成功。 停滞不前的模因最终灭绝了。 当然,网上还有其他一些简单情感的传递方式和伴随的手势。正如汉弗莱·鲍嘉从未说过的那样,我们永远都有表情符号。的确,表情符号可以让我们表达不那么复杂的情感,但它们只是情感交流的一种类型--也许是一种更有限的类型。(即使人们有很强的创造力,一串表情符号也很难处理和解码。) 但如何才能使我们在网上更好的表达深层或复杂的情绪状态呢? 像表情符号一样,经典反应gif是取自流行文化的瞬间生活片段,它长期以来一直被用作虚拟手势来发出其他形式的信号--这是一种已知的元情感状态,用户可以原样传递,也可以附加其他类似的反应。然后,更常见的反应gif随后可以采取引用他们的口头形式,而不需要gif本身,例如“facepalm”和“side-eye”。 虽然我们一直有习惯用语言在线上描述我们的行为和反应,比如*爆米花*,但心理学家山姆·格卢克斯伯格建议我们可以在处理存在的单词的字面意义,同时通过暗示传达隐含意义。从字面意思来看,“吃爆米花”可以指看戏剧或听八卦。由于许多人已经将“吃爆米花”与娱乐联系在一起,因此在上下文中使用这个词可以代替原本用图像描述的事物。 重新混合的互联网模因的混乱创造力,以及从中发展的新语言结构,使我们能够表达某种心理状态,并让其他人立即得到它并做出相同的回应。这被称为“异步,大规模多人对话”。模因制造者和分享者通过幽默和文字游戏参与到这种对话中来,从而维系社会凝聚力--甚至与无数陌生人共享。 模因之所以无法共享,是因为人们被迫这样做,或者因为人类天生就是被动的“复制机器”。 正如詹姆斯·威尔莫尔(James Willmore)和达里尔·霍金(Darryl Hocking)认为的那样,它们是在语言学家罗纳德·卡特(Ronald Carter)追随下分享的,因为人们积极地参与并享受“日常对话的创造性,非文字性,趣味性语言”,这种语言“不仅具有观赏性,而且具有社会意义。” 我们并不是仅仅为了纯粹的娱乐而使用语言,而是为了传达身份,表明归属感,表明我们与其他人处于同一页面上。 这种产生模因的创造力,像普通的对话一样,是一种语言,是民主的,是“全人类的共同财产”。 尽管图像对网络模因的起源很重要,但它们通常以语言形式进入主流,例如从字谜,形态创新,重新形成或重复模式和修辞格等文字游戏中。 例如,以“Y中的X”为模板的新语言模因为例,比如“美式哭”,“加拿大语笑”,或者“西班牙语哭”,这种模因的字面意义不能等同于“吃爆米花”,它已经演变成了对某些情况(比如大流行期间的国际旅行状态)的一种扭曲反应。通过暗示,模因可以传达比其更简单的语言结构和更复杂的情感信息。事实上,“许多幽默的模因的一个核心特征是社会批判式评论”,而这并不经常被字面上表达出来。 网络模因是流行的图像宏,通常来自流行文化的怪异片段或有趣片段,伴随着幽默的文字或标语,以模因为主题。 这些文字元素可以根据笑话采取各种形式,例如首字母缩写或固定的标语。 但是,这些模因中的许多模因设置了可以重新制定的短语模板,例如,可能是肖恩·宾的信天翁的短语,“一个并不仅仅是X变成Y”: 语言学家杰弗里·普鲁姆创造了“雪克隆”一词,指的是具有可以填充的缝隙的短语结构,例如: 如果爱斯基摩人又N个表示雪的词语,那肯定有表示Z的单词Y。 在太空中,没有人能听到你的声音。 X是新的Y.“ 如果说雪克隆更像是大量生产的语言陈词滥调,例如“如果爱斯基摩人有数十个关于积雪的单词,德国人有很多关于官僚主义的词汇,”这就是模因千变的荒谬背景,几乎任何事物只要 保持足够熟悉的结构,可以真正改变陈词滥调。 最初的源模因必须具有一定的显着性才能首先流行。 例如,“西班牙语中的哭泣”模因始于对无意义的字幕的幽默观察,不必要地解释了一种普遍的人类情感行为,即以一种特定的语言,国籍或个人身份来哭泣。 成功的模因被病毒共享和复制,但与经典的反应gif不同,它们通常可以继续自己的生活。 最重要的是,模因不是一成不变的。 当模因共享者重新混合它们的元素时,它们可以在复制时发生变异,尤其是对文本进行轻描淡写以创建新的参考幽默层,同时保持原著的灵魂不变。 模因的早期模仿,例如“ Dies in Spanish”,是字幕的直接描述性播放,因为死亡也是一种普遍的人类状况,不需要语言学上的限制。 随着模因的变体变得越来越流行,相关的短语结构被使用和重复使用,而没有图像。 对于“西班牙哭泣”模因,对语言或国籍的提及是幽默的,不能真正按字面理解,这意味着该短语具有比喻性的演变:不仅指对字幕的模仿,而且对一个人的状态进行情感评论。 或身份。 在这种情况下,模因读者可以理解和回应。 关于极端医疗费用的OneReddit主题,例如,在同一短语结构上的即兴“美式哭泣”指的是美国医疗保险的不景气状态(“未来英国人的哭泣”回应了对全民医保预期削减的担忧 英国医疗保健), 通过互联网模因的荒诞幽默表达自己,对许多人来说似乎很愚蠢,但正是这种愚蠢和嬉戏,常常令人惊讶地与对人类状况或我们对世界的假设的敏锐观察结合在一起,也许是我们笑或 在2020年发生的事件中深深地哭泣。

以上中文文本为机器翻译,存在不同程度偏差和错误,请理解并参考英文原文阅读。

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