The article is devoted to revealing the topic of a full-scale war against Ukraine during 2022–2024 and the socio-political changes associated with it through the prism of social media memes’ linguistic and visual expression. Online meme units, whose feature is instant formation as a reaction to events and spread across the Internet continuum, projecting content onto human consciousness, determine the relevance of our research. The work aims to analyze social network online memes in terms of their structural and semantic features. Therefore, it is necessary to solve the following tasks: to create a card index of online memes based on social space; to highlight and interpret the concepts of “meme”, “Internet meme” (“online meme”) in a linguistic aspect; to establish the structural specificity of Internet memes and classify them; to clarify the features of the semantics of the studied units. To achieve the goal, a set of methods was applied: the content analysis method together with the continuous sampling method, the descriptive method, the comparative method, and the method of quantitative calculations of actual material. The paper theoretically comprehends the essence of the concept of “memetics”, treats the definition of the term “meme”, establishes the semantic nodes of the meme, differentiates the concepts of “meme” and “internet meme” as the subject of memetics study, in particular, emphasizes the ability of the internet meme to be a means of virtual communication. Given the linguistic orientation of the investigation, a group of online memes as information units isolated from the social space (e.i., “X”, “Instagram”, “Instagram (Threads)”, and “Facebook”), namely complex (verbal-visual), or creolized Internet memes, was analyzed in the theoretical and practical aspect. The result of the work is typified online memes based on the verbal expression of the content: phrase, sentence, line (monological, dialogical, polylogical, comparative), and text. It was found that the studied units are representatives of five thematic microgroups (political topics, social topics, cultural topics, economic topics, military-military topic), within which subspecies are established. Prospects for exploration are seen in an in-depth approach to the typology of online memes, semantic analysis, the study of cognitive determinants, the interpretation of the humorous aspect and functional layering.
Kostryba et al. (Mon,) studied this question.