1In the past few years, internet memes have become a regular subject of French-language research as can be seen by various single-author publications (Wagener, 2020; Wagener, 2022), and co-authored publications (Lippert & Wagener, 2024; Girard, Bédard et al., 2021). Such research often focuses on the analysis of morphological, multimodal, communicational or argumentative modalities of these multimodal objects. Other research also seeks to understand the informational and cultural dimensions of memes (Bonenfant, 2014), allowing for a wider understanding of the way in which messages circulate and communities form on the internet, sometimes even influencing political issues (Simon & Wagener, 2024).
2Do such interpretations converge with those of the wide gamut of recipients of memes, likely to have many different levels of reading? The aim of this research paper is to examine the reception of memes from a cognitive, cultural and linguistic lens. Using the analytical grid conceptualised by Wagener (2022), we wanted to understand how memes are interpreted by a wider audience, and the emotions and imaginaries they elicit. More specifically, we wanted to know whether recipients identify the cultural references of an image as well as its subject, and then how memes are emotionally and discursively processed.
3The article uses a mixed approach that allies discourse analysis with lexicographic study, both applied to the perception of climate change and its effects. We briefly present the study’s theoretical framework and methodology, followed by the presentation and discussion of our results.
4Our research aligns with other memology studies which interrogate memes (Shifman, 2013; Girard & Bédard et al., 2021) from an interdisciplinary perspective and by examining digital frontiers and internet culture in which memes are immersed as semiotic objects.
5Seeing as emotions, in our view, are an integral part of meme reception processes, we thought it useful to recall Catherine Kerbrat-Orechionni’s affirmation that: “emotions pose a real problem for linguists, presenting a real challenge because of their eminently ’slippery’nature; fleeting and indefinable, they slip between their fingers” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2000, p. 56-57). Emotions seem to traverse all utterances, from deictic to modalising utterances, from verbs to metaphors. This affirmation applies even more strongly to memes which constitute discourses formed through an interweaving image and text.
6Two works from the field of language science propose solutions to the theoretical and methodological challenge of capturing emotions in linguistics. Micheli (2014) proposes to distinguish between labelled emotion (explicitly verbalised), displayed emotion (semiotised and/or implicit) and suggested emotion (the sharing of a value judgement, thereby creating complicity with recipients). Galati and Sini (2000) provide an emotion lexicon which can be expanded to include antonyms, synonyms, etc.
7According to Wagener’s research (2022), memes are formed from a “refereme,” that is a visual reference (generally cultural and popular, or linked to current events or internet culture) and a topeme (the subject, which is generally made explicit in the text). Wagener and Lippert (2024) then went on to show that emotions traverse the semiotic and verbal aspects of memes: we are dealing with emotionemes “which link the expression of an emotion, refereme and topeme” (§ 36). We assumed that emotionemes could occupy a key place in studies on the reception of memes. We were thus able to verify that emotionemes tend to actualise more through text than through image, in other words meme creators appear to choose referemes depending on the topemes being tackled. Thus, one of our semiotic and semantic hypotheses is that, if memes are mechanisms which encourage interpersonal communication of opinions and emotions, the refereme acts as a visual support that is potentially interchangeable while it is the topeme that embodies the bulk of the pragmatic intention.
8The originality of this article lies in the fact that it links memology, discourse analysis applied to emotions, and reception studies. The latter studies have borrowed primarily from a significant body of work in the fields of literature (Machor & Goldstein, 2001; Bigey, 2014), of sociology of reception applied to cultural and humoristic products (Charpentier, 2006 ; Lahire, 2009 ; Balland et al., 2015), and of social semiotics (Saemmer et al., 2022), as well as from works addressing climate change (Rudiak-Gould, 2011; De Wit & Haines, 2021). These numerous works notably seek to understand the way in which individuals and communities perceive discourses and narratives. To the extent that memes are regularly used to comment on a large variety of subjects and produce numerous links between those same subjects (Zanette et al., 2019), it seemed particularly relevant to examine the issue of reception through memological analysis—all the more so as, at the time of writing, meme reception studies were still relatively rare.
- 1 Verlan slang inverts syllables to form new words: “neurchi” is the word “chineur,” meaning bargain (...)
9In order to study memes that address climate change, we chose to design a questionnaire which we distributed to targeted digital communities and shared on our professional and personal (social) media between 8 and 15 December 2023. The questionnaire notably reached an audience particularly attuned to memes as it was disseminated to “neurchis,”1 a French verlan slang term for Facebook communities of producers and consumers of memes.
10Given this context, our approach must assume several biases. The first is that we have reached out primarily to audiences who can be assumed to be capable of deciphering the meaning of memes; the second bias comes from addressing a young and not very diversified age group—the common perception being that the individuals who participate in neurchi groups are generally aged between 18 and 35. Given this hypothesis of a relatively homogenous target audience, we did not ask for information on age, professional status or sex—all the more so as considering the spirit of neurchi group members, such data would likely have been falsified and would not necessarily have provided additional information related to the question at hand. Moreover, neurchi profiles allow for relative anonymity and therefore do not always give access to sociological data.
- 2 According to the reference site Knowyourmeme.org, Wojak memes date back to 2009. They have a distin (...)
- 3 Tradwife, meaning traditional wife, represents a current of conservative counter-culture, particula (...)
11Because of all this, a similar questionnaire distributed to an audience of novices and with data on the respondents, would likely produce quite different results. In this sense, our study is resolutely exploratory. Nonetheless, and despite these pitfalls, it must be noted that to adopt a pragmatic and discursive approach for meme reception, therefore an approach dedicated to practices, to us, is to above all interrogate the cultural and digital practices of recipients. The questionnaire starts with questions about the use, sharing and creation of memes. Departing from a corpus of two hundred memes published on environmental Instagram accounts and collected in late 2022, we selected four memes (from Greenpeace France and All Sapiens Are Bastards) based on their referemes. The aim of the operation was to propose three referemes that were anchored in film cultural references assumed to be “easily” identifiable by meme-culture enthusiasts (to the extent that these were regularly used templates within these communities, particularly because they were based on pop culture products)—Finding Neverland [tab. 1, fig. 1], Don’t Look Up [tab. 1, fig. 2] and Star Wars [tab. 1, fig. 3]—and a fourth refereme from meme culture, a version of the Wojak2 character named Tradwife3 [tab. 1, fig. 4]. We undertook a discursive analysis for each one of these four memes and formulated the following four questions:
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Did recipients recognise the refereme?
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What topeme was identified?
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What emotions were felt at reception of the meme? The latter was a multiple-choice question, using the seven emotions conceptualised by Hwang & Matsumoto (2016): happiness, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, and contempt. This choice of seven emotions was made in full awareness of the relative complexity of base emotions in psychology scholarship and the ongoing lively scientific debate on their presumed number.
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How did recipients interpret the meme?
12We obtained responses from 397 people and these were analysed with Iramuteq software. We opted for this software notably because analysis of the respondents’ discourse, especially given the size of the corpus, can allow us to obtain interesting information on the categorisation of themes addressed and the arguments underpinning them.
13To start with, the table below summarises the discursive analysis for each meme:
Table 1
- 4 Finding Neverland, 2004, directed by Marc Forster.
- 5 Don’t Look Up, 2021, directed by Adam McKay.
- 6 Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, 2002, directed by George Lucas.
Figure/meme
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Reference and figurative analysis
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Topeme
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Emotioneme
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Figure 1
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Film Finding Neverland.4 A child in tears is consoled by an adult.
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The desire to access a world founded on sustainable paradigms.
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Sadness and eco-anxiety: worrying about the future viability of planet Earth. Suggested emotion: Topic of environmental destruction. Displayed emotion: sadness
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Figure 2
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Film Don’t Look Up.5 Two TV journalists presenting the news.
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Critique of how the media covers the climate crisis.
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Disgust with and anger towards the media. Suggested emotion: topic of climate-scepticism
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Figure 3
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Film Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones.6 Dialogue resulting in disappointment.
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Critique of government climate inaction.
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Disgust with and anger towards government. Displayed emotion: disappointment. Suggested emotion: deadlines and ambitions not respected, political inaction.
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Figure 4
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Wojak Tradwife.
A woman talks to her partner who represents planet Earth.
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Frequence of wildfires on a global scale.
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Sadness and fear at the possibility of repeat wildfires. Suggested emotion: topic of wildfires.
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Summary of the meme discursive analysis, based on the authors’ analysis (and not the analysis by the respondents).
14Memes have become a part of internet users’ habits and they undoubtedly possess a social function as the sociologist Jurgenson (2019) has shown through his concept of social photography. In effect, some images (among which we include memes) on social media and the internet no longer have just documentary, journalistic or artistic functions, but a function that is above all social. Internet users use these images to communicate experiences, emotions and opinions. Memes exonerate the experiential dimension to focus instead on the transmission of emotions and opinions. In the responses to our questionnaire, 97% of respondents declared they look at memes, only 2.5% said they don’t, and 0.5% had no opinion on the matter. Meme creators, on the other hand, were in minority, with only 43.7% of positive responses (173 responses), even though the target audience was for the very large part composed of neurchi regulars on Facebook; this would imply therefore that such communities draw not just creators, but also and above all consumers of memes. Moreover, creating memes requires handling sites or applications which requires IT skills, time and a recognized legitimacy within sharing communities—in any case, as far as neurchi members, who make up the majority of the respondents, are concerned.
15For each meme, respondents could select several emotions, thus allowing for a complexity of feelings at reception. We noted that of the four memes presented, for two a clearcut consensus seemed to emerge on the emotions they elicited, while the other two produced a wide diversity of emotional responses.
16Using Iramuteq, the open questions asked about the four memes allowed us to cross the respondents’ discourses concerning their understanding of the memes with their own memetic practices. As a reminder, for each meme, we asked the following three open questions:
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Can you identify the source of the image used?
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What is the subject of this meme?
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What does this meme evoke for you?
17What interested us in the analysis of responses was the way in which respondents would not only respond to the questions regarding the different memes, but above all how they spoke of memes and put them in context with a) their lived experience, b) their feelings, and c) their situated knowledge (Maigret, 2013; Mélard & Gramaglia, 2022) which could enable them to identify both the refereme and the topeme, and thus adopt an interpretative filter corresponding to the memetic grammar. The similarity analysis that can be undertaken with Iramuteq produces a visualisation [fig. 5] which indicates that the general topeme is identified well by the respondents—given as, we recall, the entire corpus deals with climate change. We find the following groupings:
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On the left, the main topeme of the four memes, with a set of related keywords, accompanied by four subsets regarding: the use of templates, the figure of Pascal Praud (a celebrity anchor at the French news station CNews), wildfires (as a consequence of climate change) and the fact of not being able to “do much.”
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At the bottom right, a list of three film references on which the four memes are based: the films Don’t Look Up, Neverland and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
Figure 5
Analysis of similarities in the responses.
Source: Wagener & Lippert, 2025.
18These two sets highlight the dissociation between the referemes (that is the cultural items on which the memes are based) and the topemes and comments made by other people, and this also is in line with the structure of the questionnaire (responses are independent of each other, and can thus be analysed as such by the software, unless specific themes are used to cross-reference the data).
19In addition to dynamic modelling of lexical co-occurrences, Iramuteq also makes it possible to delimit broad categories of themes brought up by respondents [fig. 6]. Here we find six categories, each with its frequency expressed as a percentage:
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category 1 (20.4%, red): political inaction on climate change, showing that respondents make a link between political action and climate
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category 2 (18.6%, grey): the link between climate scepticism and media, notably induced by meme n° 2 [fig. 2], and which proposes a critical vision of sceptical discourses about global warming in certain media
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category 3 (14.7%, green): the humoristic dimension of memes (whether the humour is sarcastic, ironic or other, or whether aimed at criticism or at a more light-hearted distancing), which highlights the main function of these productions and how they allow one to address subjects
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category 4 (19%, light blue): eco-anxiety and uncertainty about the future and the liveability of the planet for generations to come
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category 5 (15.5%, blue): wildfires, and more widely climate change impacts on the summer season
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category 6 (11.9%, pink): here we find the whole set of meme referemes, whether it is the three cited films or characters such as Wojack, typical of internet culture
Figure 6
Classification of themes using dendrograms.
Source: Wagener & Lippert, 2025.
20We can note here the respondent’s relative finesse in their analysis of the memes, which attests precisely to memes’ capacity to transmit complex arguments despite their apparent simplicity. One also must note the humoristic function of memes, which through laughter allow people to distance themselves from difficult subjects.
21A new analysis [fig. 7] allows for an understanding of the relations between the six thematic categories identified. Several points appear significant:
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Category 6 (in pink) which covers referemes is isolated from the others, situated to the far right of the visualisation: this shows a disconnect between referemes and the topemes and induced emotionemes (aligned to the structure of the questionnaire) and could indicate that it is not necessary to have gotten the cultural reference of an image to understand the subject that is addressed by the meme.
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Categories 3 and 4 (respectively covering humour and eco-anxiety, in green and then in light blue) lie at the intersection of lines, thus at the centre of the graph. This observation attests to the capacity of respondents to identify the humoristic function of memes when faced with situations that can generate anxiety—an essential distinctive feature of the memetic role.
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To the bottom left, we find categories 1 and 2 (in red and then grey), that is, respectively political inaction on global warming and the climate scepticism of certain media, which underscore the critical dimension of memes.
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Lastly, to the top left, category 5 (in blue) which covers the effects of climate change, shows significant links with eco-anxiety and humour in the centre; it is thus distanced from political inaction, for example.
Figure 7
Correspondence factor analysis.
Source: Wagener & Lippert, 2025.
22A final correspondence factor analysis [fig. 8], focused on the representativity of the thematic categories in function of the corpus variables (that is the four memes and three questions), allow us to discern the following:
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Category 6, covering referemes, is logically more present in the question about identifying the source of the image.
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The question of the subject of the meme is slightly overrepresented within category 5, covering harmful effects of global warming.
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As for the question on what the memes evoke for respondents, it is slightly overrepresented in category 3, linked to humour, which precisely validates the hypothesis that respondents identify mainly the humoristic dimension of memes. Moreover, despite the fact that not all respondents are capable of identifying the refereme of a meme, the meme format is nonetheless relevant from the perspective of its humoristic function.
Figure 8
Correspondence factor analysis of corpus variables.
Source: Wagener & Lippert, 2025.
23Moreover, we also find a distribution of certain thematic categories according to meme: political inaction for the meme inspired by Star Wars, climate scepticism in the media for the meme linked to Don’t Look Up, eco-anxiety for the meme based on the film Neverland, and the effects of climate change for the Wojack character meme. It is important to specify moreover that the film Don’t Look Up, which significantly accounts for 20% of occurrences of the corpus by targeting media climate scepticism, is the only cultural product which, through the metaphor of a meteorite crashing into planet Earth, directly addresses climate denial—which amplifies its use as a template.
24Let us now summarise our main results. Firstly, failure to identify referemes impedes neither comprehension of the message nor of the emotioneme. In effect, while we had several “nos” indicating that referemes were not recognised—for Neverland, 155 respondents (39%) did not recognise the film; for Don’t Look Up, 44 respondents (11%); for Star Wars, 40 respondents (10%); and for Wojack, 263 (66%)—respondents still identified the topemes. It appears that respondents are not familiar with the meme culture (or internet culture) from where the figure of Wojack comes, and that the refereme only partially guides the perceived meaning, the emotioneme felt and the topeme identified—which may seem surprising, given that the majority of respondents are neurchi group regulars, groups where Wojack formats apparently circulate widely. In other terms, there is no need to understand a visual or cultural reference to be able to construct the semiotic operation which requires understanding of the message, of the underlying discourse and its innuendos and insinuations.
25Secondly, memes work effectively to transmit emotions and opinions through humour, and through this, help to dedramatize messages and emotions. In effect, topemes and emotionemes were clearly identified, and accomplished the pragmatic and argumentative objectives in line with those that our analysis showed: political inaction, anxiety about the planet’s future and wildfires, and media coverage were recognised by respondents and provoked negative emotions in them. However, the results show that humour and the satirical dimension of utterances are systematically intermingled—and that respondents understood the humoristic dimension of the memes, which enabled them to take some distance from the topics addressed, or to comment on them with irony.
26While analysis of the responses articulated to each one of the memes merits being expanded upon specifically in a way that goes beyond the scope of this article, this research nonetheless opens up several avenues of reflection: 1) Can referemes conflict semantically with topemes and interfere in the comprehension and emotion that a meme can provoke? 2) Do internet users consider that memes as adequate platforms for transmitting political messages, even though their humour dedramatizes the content? 3) Would comparison between the negative content of emotions in a traditional text/article and in an environmental meme allow us to understand which of the two mechanisms has pathemic, and therefore argumentative, impact?