Petya Yaneva
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”
E-mail: pyaneva@hotmail.com
Abstract: The modern technology allows researchers to follow the language changes in real time. The texts published online are particularly dynamic and more often than not offer the opportunity to monitor new processes and variations of the standard texts. These new text phenomena can be treated as modern versions of known types of text and means of text communication. This paper aims to analyse the modern variations of pictograms and ideograms and to track the changes that occur in them as a result of the sociocultural processes and their influence, as well as their mutation, when viral popularity is achieved, into memes. The assumption is that the texts and especially the political commentary do in fact change under the influence of the virtual environment. From this it can be concluded that the memes can be considered a modified version of popular ideograms and pictograms which have been redefined. The longitudinal analysis that is used aims to research meme structure and its main components. The following conclusion has been reached: the process of the development of pictograms, ideograms and memes can be followed, observed and analysed in real time and in the virtual environment.
Keywords: e-text, Meme, political commentary, pictogram, ideogram.
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 36, September 2018, rhetoric.bg/, journal.rhetoric.bg, ISSN 1314-4464