Literalmente na web: evidências da ativação da metaforicidade em mídias sociais

Abstract

Within the fields of cognitive linguistics (recently, EVANS, 2019) and, more specifically, the study of metaphor in discourse (SEMINO, 2008), this paper addresses a particular aspect related to our metaphorical competence (LITTLEMORE; LOW, 2006), namely metaphoricity. Based on the definition of metaphoricity as the possibility of a metaphor being recognized as such (AUTOR, 2017), our major objective is to investigate the activation of metaphoricity of metaphorical expressions on social media platforms. To do so, we look at a corpus of over 1.500 memes ‒ collected via the social monitoring tool CrowdTangle (Meta Platforms, Inc.) ‒, which contain uses of the adverb “literally” (as a key activation device of metaphoricity), posted by verified profiles on the social media platform Instagram (Meta Platforms, Inc.), from January 1st to August 31st, 2022. By referring to the concepts of conceptual metaphor (LAKOFF, 1993), metaphoricity (AUTOR, 2017), and deautomatization (KYRATZIS, 2003), we then carry out the identification of metaphorical expressions (STEEN et al., 2010), as well as occasional devices of explicitation of respective cross-domain mappings (STEEN, 2004) in the corpus. Results show that “literally” is often used alongside non-metaphorical expressions; in some cases, this adverb is used to primarily reinforce the instantiation of basic meanings of expressions whose metaphorical meanings tend to be highly conventional. The co-occurrence of "literally" alongside metaphorical expressions, on the other hand, tend to entice comments that suggest some conscious processing of the cross-domain mapping underlying those expressions. These comments either evoke elements related to the respective source domains, or highlight a probable mistake regarding the very use of "literally". In any case, these circumstances allow us to account the adverb “literally”, when it occurs alongside metaphorical expressions, as a strong candidate for activation device of metaphoricity.