O processo de referenciação na (re)construção do sentido no gênero meme sobre a pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

The new coronavirus pandemic has brought invaluable impacts to the lives of individuals and to deal with current circumstances, uncertainties and changes, users of digital social networks have created and/or shared a large number of memes in order to represent and recreate reality in a comical way. As a result, this article aims to analyze the processes of reference in the (re)construction of the meaning of the meme genre, on the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying how the object of discourse [pandemic] and its associated referents are (re) elaborated, modified, deactivated or reactivated. The research is of a qualitative nature, whose corpus was collected in a Facebook group, called “Memes do Covid-19”, from April to July 2021. To explain how certain conventions of the organization of the image and text collaborate for the construction of referents by the interlocutors, we resort to the theoretical contribution based on Bakhtin (1999; 2003); Cavalcante (2000, 2001, 2014); Dawkins (2001); Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001; 2006); Marcuschi (2006, 2007, 2008, 2017); among others. The analysis shows that the referential strategies: referential introduction, anaphora and deixis are fundamental for readers to be able to establish logical connections between the text and their previous knowledge, as well as, in the case of verb-image texts, the reader's gaze can go through several interpretive paths, therefore, we found gaps to be filled by future research.