Abstract This paper examines how affect, creativity, and multimodality intersect in the meaning making dynamics of online discourse. Empirically drawing on a Modern Greek (MG) meme ( as éstelne (‘s/he should have texted’)) and adopting a constructionist approach, the study makes a case for the mutually cross-fertilising relationship between affect and creativity by proposing that affective stance serves as a semiotic driver in the creation of memes as visuo-textual, multimodal constructions. Memes are thus viewed in Construction Grammar (CxG) terms as semiotically parsimonious templates for language use, while their visuals are seen as constructional slots, much in the spirit of what applies in purely linguistic (monomodal) constructions. Against this background, the notion of creativity, operationalised as ranging from F(ixed) to E(nlarging/xtending), is further explored both at the level of language patterning and at the level of expanding the repertoire of the visual pairing options originally available in a meme.
Geka et al. (Tue,) studied this question.