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Article published In: Online Health Communication: Expert and Lay Dialogic Practices
Edited by Anna Tereszkiewicz and Magdalena Szczyrbak
[Language and Dialogue 14:2] 2024
► pp. 332–370

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Viral peer advice

Health memes used as the speech act of advising in English

 | University of Texas at Arlington
Published online: 11 June 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00174.stv
Abstract
By examining a collection of health-related memes, I propose ways to categorize the illocutionary force of memes functioning as the speech act of advice. 200 English-language memes were gathered in the period 2018–2023 through Google image searches. I found the affiliative and disaffiliative strategies that Placencia, María Elena. 2012. “Online Peer-to-peer Advice in Spanish Yahoo! Respuestas.” In Advice in Discourse, ed. by Holger Limberg and Miriam A. Locher, 281–305. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar described within Yahoo! Respuestas advice exchanges; meme multimodality, however, offered additional versions of these strategies: characters generated affiliation or disaffiliation and more humor appeared in affiliative and disaffiliative moves. I highlight four characteristics of advising in memes: the speech act is performed indirectly; both characters and wordplay can create humor; peer advisors must signal what authorizes them to give advice; and advice deploys mythbusting. Thus, memes align interlocutors within vernacular online conversations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Advice
    • 2.2Online advice
    • 2.3Memes as conversational exchanges
      • 2.3.1Their attributes
      • 2.3.2Their content
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Gathering the data
    • 3.2Sorting the data
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Advice vs non-advice
    • 4.2Speech act indirectness
    • 4.3Identification of dialogic moves of the advisor and advisee
      • 4.3.1Characters in the image
      • 4.3.2Wording in the text
    • 4.4Mythbusting
    • 4.5Authority to give advice
  • 5.Conclusions and future directions
  • Notes
  • References
References (40)
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