الفهرس 
Chapter I: IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The current study carries out a cognitive semiotic analysis of humorous image macro memes in American English and Egyptian Arabic. The data-under-examination consists of 100 image macros, divided evenly between Arabic and English. Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Integration Theory (2002) is used to examine the data cognitively. from a semiotic perspective, the researcher employs Berger’s notion of code violation (1989; 1998; 2018) and McCloud’s classification of image and text relations in multimodal combinations in comics (1994 & 2006) to examine the data semiotically. The study attempts to find answers to the following questions:
1. What is the relation between images and texts forming an image macro? How do they interact to produce meanings in terms of McCloud’s taxonomy of comics?
1. How could humorous image macros be explained semiotically? Can Berger’s notion of code violation explain the cause of laughter?
2. What are the unique defining textual and visual characteristics of American and Egyptian image macros?
3. How are input mental spaces compressed, projected, and blended to produce new structures?
Based on the analysis, it was found that images and texts interact to form image macros. This interaction can be classified into five types of relations. An interdependent relation is one in which both images and texts are crucial to meaning construction. An intersecting relation occurs when either texts or images convey the meaning fully while the other mode just elaborates on the basic meaning. Duo specific relation occurs when both modes carry the same meaning, they are redundant. Word specific relation occurs when texts carry all the meaning while images are complementary. Picture specific is when images carry all the meaning with no top and bottom texts. Berger’s notion of code violation explains the collected data in terms of unfulfilled reader’s expectations. Visual techniques are represented in the data by Redraw, Object Labelling, and Exploitables. Linguistic techniques are prevalent in the data such as wordplay and register humor. The Conceptual Integration Theory reveals how the human mind is extremely creative in constructing new structures out of already existing mental spaces and how the human mind, when faced with an unseen before structure, can deconstruct the structure in question to discover its basic input and generic spaces, and thus understand what meant to be communicated. Signs, either visual or verbal, are important in image macros. Being multi modal combinations, image macros depend on both images and texts. Both of them form input spaces that are blended to create new structures or image macros.