36.3043, Confs: Workshop at ESSE 2026: Metadiscourse in and on Social Media (Spain)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3043. Thu Oct 09 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3043, Confs: Workshop at ESSE 2026: Metadiscourse in and on Social Media (Spain)

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Date: 08-Oct-2025
From: Lieven Vandelanotte [lieven.vandelanotte at unamur.be]
Subject: Workshop at ESSE 2026: Metadiscourse in and on Social Media


Workshop at ESSE 2026: Metadiscourse in and on Social Media

Date: 31-Aug-2026 - 04-Sep-2026
Location: Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Contact: Lieven Vandelanotte
Contact Email: lieven.vandelanotte at unamur.be
Meeting URL: https://metasocial.unamur.be/

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Ling & Literature;
Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Submission Deadline: 31-Jan-2026

We invite applications for a 'seminar' (i.e. a theme session or
workshop, in ESSE parlance) at the next conference of the European
Society for the Study of English (ESSE), to be held in Santiago de
Compostela, Spain. The general conference website is at
https://www.esse2026.com. The website with further information
(including illustrations of the theme) and submission platform for
this seminar is at https://metasocial.unamur.be. The convenors are
Lieven Vandelanotte (University of Namur & KU Leuven) and Anna Piata
(National and Kapodistrian University of Athens).
Short seminar description:
Internet memes and other forms of social media discourse have
attracted scholarly interest across a range of disciplines for their
role in establishing and maintaining social relationships and in
shaping public opinion (e.g. Shifman 2014, Milner 2016, Wiggins 2019).
Linguistic approaches, studying how language and image combine in ways
that resemble linguistic constructions, have also gained prominence
(e.g. Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2017, 2025b; Lou 2017; Zenner &
Geeraerts 2018), as have studies of the humorous and emotional aspects
involved (e.g. Piata 2020; Zappavigna & Logi 2024; Dancygier &
Vandelanotte 2025a).
In this seminar, we want to address the use of English, often
alongside images and emoji, in examples of various types of
metadiscourse ‘in’ social media – self-reflexive forms of the
discourse itself – but also ‘on’ or ‘about’ social media – i.e.
discussions that emerge in society on social media usage. The former
dimension covers so-called meta-memes or ‘memes about memes’,
including deliberate blends of different, normally incongruent memes,
or examples which break the ‘fourth wall’. It also covers various
platform-specific practices which direct and regulate online readers’
attention (cf. Hyland 2005), including ‘quote-tweeting’ (which the
‘quoted’ may object to: ‘why don’t you just reply like a normal
person’), ‘snitch tagging’ (explicitly tagging someone to alert them
to the fact they are being discussed, typically unfavourably), and the
use of ‘alt text’ to describe appended images verbally (potentially
adding ironic commentary that goes beyond description). As to the
second dimension – discussions, by commentators and lay people alike,
of specific instances of social media usage – one need only think of
cases such as US entrepreneur Elon Musk publicly proclaiming “I am
become meme”, or the various responses to the recent craze for
AI-generated memes in the style of the Japanese animation studio
Ghibli. The seminar also welcomes analyses of these types of
discourse.
References, illustrations and submissions: please see
https://metasocial.unamur.be



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