One of the most popular forms of humour on the Internet is memes. Given the identity construction motif that is associated with memes, agents of memes select targets outside the in-group and criticise the targets' behaviour for ideological purposes. This study examines the patterns of humour evidenced in the deployment of Internet memes (both verbal and visual) in the online campaign discourse of the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria. Data for the study consist of Internet memes produced and disseminated during the presidential election campaign between December 2014 and March 2015. Considering Archakis and Tsakona's view that humour can be a very efficient means of identity construction, the study applies Van Dijk's socio-cognitive model with particular reference to the theoretical concept of the 'ideological square', which encapsulates the twin strategies of positive 'in-group' description and negative 'out-group' description. This theoretical approach is complemented with Neuendorf et al.'s taxonomy of theoretical perspectives on humour. The study reveals that the memes deployed in the presidential election online campaign discourse largely serve subversive purposes to detract greatly from the electoral value of the targets. In terms of the reinforcing function of humour, however, serious socio-political issues were raised to express the public's worries and desires in a bottom-up communication flow.

This article explores the communicative acts employed in the creation of HIV/AIDS posters which focus on people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and their relatives/friends and investigates the generic structure of these posters. Van Leeuwen’s multimodal communicative acts and Yuen’s Generic Structure Potential of printed advertisements serve as the theoretical framework for the study. The data include six purposively selected HIV/AIDS posters which focus on educating and counselling PLWHA, obtained from two state hospitals in south-western Nigeria. The multimodal communicative acts include those of instructing, advising, beckoning, encouraging, warning and informing. Lead, Emblem, Announcement and Enhancer are obligatory elements while Display, Tag and Call-and-Visit Information are optional elements. The study shows that there is heavy reliance on semiotic resources which signal the intended meaning of the producers of the posters.

This paper examines political protest in 40 purposively sampled internet memes circulated among Nigerian WhatsApp users during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to exploring the thematic preoccupation, ideology, and the representation of participants and processes in the memes. The data, which were subjected to qualitative analysis, are examined from a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach. The analysis reveals that the memes are used to protest corruption, perceived government deceit, insecurity, hunger, and inadequate health facilities and other social amenities. These are done in order to project and resist an anti-welfarist ideology and emphasise the negative representation of the government.

This paper explores the deployment of multimodal elements as appraisal resources in #Endsars civil unrest-related memes in Nigerian social media space (WhatsApp and Twitter) to express affective meanings and intersubjective positioning. The study investigates how both verbal and non-verbal elements are deployed as appraisal resources to evaluate the trajectory of the protest. The data, which comprise thirty purposively selected Internet memes, collected between October and December, 2020, were analysed qualitatively. The study shows that the meme producers, through the use of multimodal concepts such as symbolic, analytical, action, reactional processes, offer and salience, among others, project various expressions of affect, judgement and appreciation of things to create important narratives in the memes. Thus, the verbal elements are graded/upscaled through the non-verbal elements in the memes to evoke specific reactions, positive/negative, which signal intersubjective positioning about the protest and relevant social actors. The study concludes that meme producers effectively utilize multimodal elements to interrogate various expressions of attitude and intersubjective opinions that Nigerians made about the protest and its management by the Nigerian government.

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