Abstract

Meaning Construction in Iraqi Memes on Social Media

Salam Ishmael Armish

Volume: 16 Issue: 2 2026

Abstract:

Meanings expressed in social media memes are usually featured with unexpectedness, exceptional novelty and even oddity; however, they have an increasing impact on social, political, and cultural spheres. This paper aimed at exploring meaning construction in Iraqi memes on Facebook. Following the conceptual integration model, the study tried to reveal how far understanding Iraqi memes depends essentially on the selective projection from the two input spaces, without any particular reference to extra world knowledge/experiences. Twenty Iraqi professors and students were recruited in this study — precisely speaking, ten professors and ten students. They were shown and interviewed about meaning potential in five selected popular memes. To this end, the study used a qualitative method research design associated with a non-experimental observational methodology. The study concluded that memetic art is a soft attention-getting process that Iraqi creators use when they want to criticize or speak the unspeakable, especially when it comes to politics and religion. In addition, the study showed that understanding meanings indulged in social media memes depends on multi (rather than two) input spaces through a dynamic process of analogies. In fact, the findings provided that the participants who lacked the necessary contextual related meanings frequently failed to grasp the intended meaning — a fact which indicates that literal meanings provided by input mental spaces are in need of related pragmatic enrichments in order to be fully grasped.

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