“Doing Me an Educate: An Overview of Meme Linguistics”
Seniors Cameron Sojak and Carolyn Olmsted received the Linguistics Undergraduate Award for the paper, “Doing Me an Educate: An Overview of Meme Linguistics,” that they co-created in Professor Jared Desjardins Linguistics class in Spring 2018. The class, LING 4420: Morphology and Syntax, involved studying the ways words change to create more meaning. Sojak and Olmsted sat down with the Honors Student Advisory Board to tell us more about their project.
Tell us more about yourselves.
Carolyn Olmsted: I’m a senior from San Diego, California studying linguistics and German. Apart from studying language, I love playing piccolo as part of CU’s Golden Buffalo Marching Band and Buff Basketball Band. After graduating, I hope to pursue a graduate degree in Library and Information Science.
Cameron Sojak: I’m a senior who was raised overseas. I’m graduating in May 2020 with degrees in Communications and Linguistics. Aside from linguistics, I’m a lover of sci-fi and fantasy and an avid cyclist. After graduating, I’m hoping to teach English overseas or go into the creative field.
Can you describe the project you created on memes?
CO: Our project was for LING 4420: Morphology and Syntax in Spring 2018. The professor was Jared Desjardins, who was an absolutely amazing teacher, and actually nominated us for the Linguistics Undergraduate Research Award that we received for the paper! Morphology and Syntax is one of the core classes required for a linguistics degree, and the class is about the “building blocks” that make up words (morphology) and sentences (syntax). In the class we talk about differences between the morphology and syntax of various languages as well as how they function in English. The paper was the term project that we worked on for most of the last half of the semester.
CS: Morphology is about the ways that words change to create more meaning (think: morph+ology, change+study) and Syntax is about the order you put words in to make sentences (compare: The dog bit the man vs. The man bit the dog). So, we thought it would be fun if we looked at the particular ways that words and phrases change in the context of memes.
What inspired you to take on this project? Why did you see it as important?
CO: What inspired us to take on the project was the differences we saw between the language people speak in everyday life and the language we saw people using on the internet. That is, the version of English people speak in the classroom or with their friends is often very different from the language people use online and in memes. It seemed very important to us because the internet is only getting more and more important in our daily lives. Additionally, people will often talk about language on the internet as being “incorrect” and “less than” what could be called “proper English”. This is contrary to what many linguists believe: that no dialect or language is inherently better than another. Because of this, we wanted to make it clear through our research that the language that is being used on the internet is an equally valid and complex form of language as any other variation of English.
CS: Carolyn and I (along with most college students today, we’d reckon) invest a lot of time into digitally mediated communication. Academics are just now coming around to describing the formalities of texting and tweeting. But, fortunately for us, there still has yet to be a lot of academic focus on the informal side of digitially mediated communication. We see the informal side of DMC (like the making and sharing of memes) as equally important an area of study as formal communication because it can help us better understand people’s behaviors online and how we mediate meaning in online spaces. This is actually a focus of Carolyn’s honors thesis, which is really exciting.
How did you conduct your research?
CO: We honestly mostly conducted the research by doing what we were doing anyway: wasting time on the internet. We collected memes that we thought would fit our research while going about our usual browsing, as well as purposefully seeking out memes of a certain type by searching on Google and websites such as Know Your Meme. One of our examples used in the project was actually a meme created by ourselves about our professor’s adorable little dog, Nero.
CS: As I mentioned, college students today spend a lot of time online. A particular benefit of critically observing things like memes and jokes on the internet is that they are incredibly prevalent. So our research process was really just a matter of taking notes and screenshots of different memes that we encountered that we felt would yield interesting analyses. We also took some data from sites that particularly aggregate memes, like Know Your Meme and Meme Base.
Show us!
CO: In our paper, we looked at the dative “do” construction is most seen in pictures of animals, usually dogs, expressing an emotion. A common example is “you are doing me a frighten” overlaid on a picture of a frightened dog, as seen below:
This construction represents a valence-changing nominalization of the phrase “you are frightening me”. In the normal sentence, ‘me’ is a direct object, the receiver of a frightening. In “doing me a frighten”, ‘me’ is upgraded to an indirect object, the receiver of ‘a frighten’ which the ‘you’ in the sentence is doing. Commonly, we see this construction used in languages like German or Russian, and while this new English version is not traditionally “grammatically correct”, it certainly has precedence in languages around the world.
CS: One example of a meme we analyzed for the project was the ‘doge’ meme, which takes a popular photo of a confused looking shiba inu dog and places many different colored snippets of words and adjectives that have mismatching modifiers.
Here, in one of the original forms of the meme, we see things like ‘much morning’, ‘such awake’, and ‘very alarms’. These pairings may seem off because, in English, different classes of words (like adjectives, adverbs, and nouns) require particular modifiers of scale. Briefly: very and so are for adjectives, much is for non-count nouns and adverbs, such is usually for nouns and adverbs but never for adjectives. These mismatched quantifiers lend to the ‘animal who doesn’t quite understand English’ character which is pretty ubiquitous in memes because people find it charming.
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