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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Multimodal tropes in academic Tumblrs: the case of metaphor and hyperbole

subject

description

Posts which combine a verbal caption describing a situation of life (often starting with “when” or “me”, e.g., “When I present my poster” or “Me presenting my poster”) and a static or moving image mirroring the situation in question (e.g., a picture showing a raccoon standing next to a painting) have become a staple of internet social media such as Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr. This study is intended at analysing such posts, which rely on two different sign systems (verbal and visual), within the framework of multimodal studies and pragmatics. It proposes to focus more precisely on multimodal tropes in academic Tumblr posts combining a verbal caption and a GIF, with a special interest for metaphor and hyperbole (which has been less extensively researched than metaphor in the field of multimodal studies), and the combination of both. The data for the study mainly comes from three Tumblr pages that are very popular among PhD students and academics: PhD in Gifs!, When in Academia, and Ciel mon doctorat!, which all rely on the use of GIFs to share one’s experience of PhD and/or academic life.Drawing on previous investigations on multimodal tropes, specifically metaphor and hyperbole (Forceville 2008 and 2018, Sobrino 2017, Ferré 2014), the primary objective of the study is to explore the interaction between text and (moving) image in the creation and reception / interpretation of those tropes. In doing so, it also develops and tests the assumption that both tropes work by comparable mechanisms and enable to achieve their intended effect in the dataset, namely humour, thanks to complementary processes.