The Function of Metaphor Modality in Memes on Jordanian Facebook Pages

Abstract

This study aims to examine the function of metaphor modality (monomodal and multimodal) in a corpus of 250 memes collected from two Jordanian-based Facebook pages called “مطب – Bump” and “فيل زهري – Feel Zahri [pink elephant].” The 250 memes were shared on these Facebook pages between January 2019 and January 2020. The study adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) by Lakoff and Johnson and Forceville’s Multimodal Metaphor Theory (MMT) as its theoretical framework. The results showed that metaphors used in the target memes were conveyed through the use of common source domains, word-image incompatibility (to create irony and by extension humor), and intertextual links where the intertextual gap is minimized to facilitate understanding. The results also revealed that multimodal metaphors (containing both visual and verbal cues) are more frequent than monomodal metaphors (only visual cues or verbal cues) in the target memes, which could be ascribed to the fact that Jordanian creators of memes may want to achieve maximum contextual effects with minimum processing time. With regard to the nature of the metaphors found in terms of universality, the majority of the metaphors are potentially near universal (e.g., human behavior is animal behavior), yet it was argued that some of them pass through the cultural filter giving rise to specific mappings and, in turn, generating culture-specific metaphors.