[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-133253-en":3,"doc-seo-133253-105":31,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":92},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":21,"is_downloadable":21,"audit_status":21,"page_count":22,"language":23,"language_code":24,"site_id":25,"html_lang":24,"table_of_contents":26,"faqs":27,"seo_title":28,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":29,"read_time":30},133253,1099523882182,"Alex Sinclair","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_6f874abed73319feea01a86fa6f0fab8",8,"Research & Report","Inferring the Target of Self-defeating Humour in Internet Memes - A Pragmatic Analysis","Digital memes have become a popular way for people to exchange jokes and references on social media. Humour typically aims to entertain, yet self-mockery is often used to reduce potential harm. This research examines how internet users interpret the target of self-defeating humour, especially the “poor me” stance, using a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach. Guided by Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, it analyzes decoding, inferential enrichment, and lexical pragmatic adjustment from 100 inferences drawn from five memes.","Inferring the Target of Self-defeating Humour in Internet Memes: A Pragmatic Analysis  \nSuhair Safwat Mohammed and Awaz Othman Majeed  \nDepartment of English, College of Languages, University of Sulaimani, Sulaimani, Kurdistan Region – F.R. Iraq  \nAbstract—Nowadays, people spend hours on social media conversing and sharing information through jokes and references made online. Digital memes are one of the most favourable means of internet communication, which thrives on humour. The main purpose of humour is to entertain and make people laugh. So, to avoid hurting others by joking at the expense of others, many people turn to self-mockery. One type of self-mockery is selfdefeating humour in which the speaker targets himself/herself ina “poor me” fashion. By using a mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative analysis, this research investigated how internet users interpret the target of self-defeating humour in memes. This analysis used the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson (1995). On this account, this research addressed the process of decoding and inferential enrichment, and lexical pragmatic adjustment. It is said that making oneself the target of a joke is safer and less sensitive than targeting other people. After analysing the inferences of 100 netizens that were drawn from five selfdefeating memes, it has been concluded that targeting oneself could be as sensitive as targeting others.  \nIndex Terms—Internet Memes, Humour, Targets of humour, Social media, Ad hoc concept.  \nI. INTRODUCTION  \nIn the digital era, social media has a key role in facilitating new forms of humour, such as internet memes. The Internet has provided netizens with services such as producing, bookmarking, posting, sharing, tagging, commenting, reviewing, ranking and evaluating digital contents. This eased the way for such digital content to be able to spread like wildfire on the Internet. Besides, the digital culture’s “relatively low barriers to artistic expression” (Jenkins, 2009, p.xi) made it possible for internet users to express whatever they want by whatever means they want. This smoothed the path for introducing a new medium of communication to the users, known as memes. Internet memes are spreading contagiouslyon the Internet and are generated by human creativity. Most importantly, they have been used as a medium to channel humour. Therefore, they are referred to as jokes (Davison , 2012; Dynel, 2016). Memes, like any other jokes, have a target which is either the author himself/herself or another person or something worthy to be made fun of. Targeting oneself, which  \nis done through using the objective personal pronoun “me”, is prevalent in internet memes. The unique nature of memes, which is multimodality (using more than one mode in expressing a message), made the audience look for the target of the humour not only in the texts but also in the other modes which accompany the texts. This study deals with image macros (a type of meme which is a combination of texts and images), in which the targets could be inferred through both the texts and images from which the memes are made. This paper hypothesizes that the coded concept “me”, which is used to target oneself, could be inferred beyond its conventional sense (which is the speaker) into a broader sense. Besides, it aims to find how internet users interpret the clues in both modes, and how their different interpretations of these clues result indifferent interpretations for the scope of the target.  \nII. HUMOUR IN MEMES  \nUnquestionably, the vast majority of internet memes exist by virtue of their humorous nature. It is said that humour is a key feature that assists internet memes in getting popularity among the participants (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007; Shifman, 2014; Taecharungroj & Nueangjamnong, 2015) . According to Shifman (2014), humorous memes have become the most dominant category of online memes because of the tendency that internet users have for circulating comical and laug","cbCaip02AMUsyruf","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaip02AMUsyruf","pdf",1039895,4,1,9,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n# Humour in Memes","[{\"question\":\"What is the main focus of the study on self-defeating humour in internet memes?\",\"answer\":\"The study investigates how internet users interpret the target of self-defeating humour in memes, particularly the “poor me” self-mocking stance.\"},{\"question\":\"Which theoretical framework is used to analyze the interpretation process?\",\"answer\":\"The analysis applies Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory to explain decoding, inferential enrichment, and lexical pragmatic adjustment.\"},{\"question\":\"Does targeting oneself make humour less sensitive than targeting others?\",\"answer\":\"After analyzing inferences from 100 netizens across five memes, the research concludes that targeting oneself can be as sensitive as targeting others.\"}]","Inferring the Target of Self-defeating Humour in Internet Memes - A Pragmatic Analysis | PDF",1787216410,23,{"code":4,"msg":32,"data":33},"ok",{"site_id":25,"language":24,"slug":34,"title":13,"keywords":35,"description":14,"schema_data":36,"social_meta":87,"head_meta":89,"extra_data":91,"updated_unix":29},"inferring-the-target-of-self-defeating-humour-in-internet-memes-a-pragmatic-analysis","",{"@graph":37,"@context":86},[38,54,69],{"@type":39,"itemListElement":40},"BreadcrumbList",[41,45,49,52],{"item":42,"name":43,"@type":44,"position":21},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":46,"name":47,"@type":44,"position":48},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":50,"name":12,"@type":44,"position":51},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":53,"name":13,"@type":44,"position":20},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/inferring-the-target-of-self-defeating-humour-in-internet-memes-a-pragmatic-analysis/133253/",{"url":53,"name":13,"@type":55,"author":56,"headline":13,"publisher":58,"fileFormat":61,"inLanguage":24,"description":14,"dateModified":62,"datePublished":63,"encodingFormat":61,"isAccessibleForFree":64,"interactionStatistic":65},"DigitalDocument",{"name":9,"@type":57},"Person",{"url":42,"name":59,"@type":60},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-08-25","2026-08-20",true,{"@type":66,"interactionType":67,"userInteractionCount":20},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":68},"ViewAction",{"@type":70,"mainEntity":71},"FAQPage",[72,78,82],{"name":73,"@type":74,"acceptedAnswer":75},"What is the main focus of the study on self-defeating humour in internet memes?","Question",{"text":76,"@type":77},"The study investigates how internet users interpret the target of self-defeating humour in memes, particularly the “poor me” self-mocking stance.","Answer",{"name":79,"@type":74,"acceptedAnswer":80},"Which theoretical framework is used to analyze the interpretation process?",{"text":81,"@type":77},"The analysis applies Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory to explain decoding, inferential enrichment, and lexical pragmatic adjustment.",{"name":83,"@type":74,"acceptedAnswer":84},"Does targeting oneself make humour less sensitive than targeting others?",{"text":85,"@type":77},"After analyzing inferences from 100 netizens across five memes, the research concludes that targeting oneself can be as sensitive as targeting others.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":53,"og:type":88,"og:title":13,"og:site_name":59,"og:description":14},"article",{"robots":90,"canonical":53},"index,follow",{"doc_id":7,"site_id":25},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":93},[94,98,102,106,111,116,121,124,128,131,135],{"id":21,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":95,"show_sort_weight":96,"slug":97},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":48,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":99,"show_sort_weight":100,"slug":101},"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":20,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":103,"show_sort_weight":104,"slug":105},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":107,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":108,"show_sort_weight":109,"slug":110},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":112,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":113,"show_sort_weight":114,"slug":115},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":117,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":118,"show_sort_weight":119,"slug":120},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":11,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":12,"show_sort_weight":122,"slug":123},30,"research-report",{"id":22,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":125,"show_sort_weight":126,"slug":127},"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":126,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":129,"show_sort_weight":126,"slug":130},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":132,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":133,"show_sort_weight":132,"slug":134},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":136,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":137,"show_sort_weight":107,"slug":138},19,"General","general"]