The Affordances of Satirical, Multi-coded Texts with a Political Orientation in Discourse Analysis

The subject of this study is the mechanism by which the affordance of satirical political polycode texts in the digital environment is formed. The object of the study comprises 312 satirical political polycode texts sourced from social media and online news outlets. The author examines the interaction of three basic semiotic parameters: precedent phenomena, the recontextualised inttext, and the visualisation of linguistic images. It is argued that the affordance of such texts constitutes a structured semiotic system rather than a random feature. Precedent phenomena are present in all corpus items, triggering readers’ cultural associations; the inttext creates hidden referential links, whilst visualisation translates abstract political ideas into vivid images with an emotional and evaluative effect. Three main combinations of these tools are analysed, the combined effect of which is aimed at shaping public opinion and criticising political opponents. This study draws on V.K. Bhatia’s critical genre analysis, supplemented by a multimodal and quantitative analysis of a corpus of political satirical polycode texts collected from the media and social media. The main findings of the study are the confirmation of the universal presence of precedent phenomena in the analysed texts, as well as the identification of the frequency of combinations of semiotic parameters; the dominant communicative strategy is the combination of ‘precedent phenomena + visualisation’, whilst the combination of all three semiotic devices occurs rarely but exhibits heightened virality when disseminated online. The novelty of this study lies in its comprehensive quantitative examination of the interaction between precedent phenomena, inttext and visualisation as the basis for the formation of affordance in political satirical polycode texts. The author’s particular contribution to the study of this topic lies in the adaptation of V.K. Bhatia’s methodology of critical genre analysis for the analysis of multimodal texts and the description of the mechanisms of the hidden regulatory influence of such polycode formations on the cognitive perception of recipients. The findings provide a deeper understanding of the principles underlying the construction of contemporary political online communication.