The Semiotics of a Slap: Metafunctional and Visual Grammar Analyses of Meaning-Making in Selected Macron Memes (opens in new tab)

This study examines eleven “Macron Slap” memes circulating on X (formerly Twitter) between May 26 and May 31, 2025, to analyze how humor, irony, humiliation, gendered power inversion, and ideological commentary are produced through complex processes of multimodal semiosis. Grounded in Halliday’s ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions, and supported by Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and Barthes’s concept of anchorage, the analysis demonstrates how the memes transform a si...