I memi cinesi, inglesi e italiani sul lavoro: un’analisi linguistica a metodo misto

A meme is a unit of cultural transmission and imitation, first defined by a British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1976). Nowadays, in the digital era, memes primarily refer to internet memes, which are multimodal digital units that spread rapidly via social platforms. Their functions range from providing entertainment, through expressing thoughts and emotions, to serving as tools for political influence or religious persuasion. While memes relevant to topics such as religion, politics, and Covid-19 have been widely analyzed from the perspectives of psychology, sociology, and semiotics, a linguistic analysis of work-related memes still remains limited. The present research examined 150 work-related memes in Chinese, English and Italian, adopting a mixed-method qualitative and quantitative approach. It considered a number of linguistic features (e.g. number of content words and function words, sentence structures) and discursive features (e.g. logical structures). Several findings emerged: the Italian memes and the Chinese memes have the longest and the shortest text length, respectively; the Chinese memes have the highest value for lexical density, while the English and the Italian memes have a lower and similar lexical density value; complete sentences are more prominent in the Chinese memes than in the other 2 datasets, while incomplete sentences are widespread in all 3 groups of memes; punctuation marks occur infrequently in the 3 datasets; speakership of the texts is to be plausibly attributed to the meme authors in a large majority of the memes in the 3 datasets; most of the Chinese memes can be understood solely through their text, while most of the English and the Italian memes require processing both their text and their picture; the most prominent logico-semantic notions expressed in the textual component of memes are the comparison-contrast in the Chinese and the English memes, and temporal sequencing in the Italian memes. Finally, the most common communicative goal across the 3 datasets appears to be entertainment-relaxation. Overall, the English and the Italian datasets have more traits in common with each other than with the Chinese memes. Given the shared communicative goal and contextual options and constraints of the 3 datasets, the differences reported with regard to the Chinese dataset may be attributed to its typological features.