| Summary: | This thesis is concerned with exploring political Internet Memes within the discourse of the debate leading up to the Swiss referendum “For the Effective Expulsion of Foreign Criminals” (Durchsetzungsinitiative). During the campaign, an unprecedented amount of political agitation occurred online, which resulted in the distribution of a number of Internet Memes. A corpus of 25 Memes with content opposing the referendum was built and analyzed from a medialinguistic perspective with focus on their multimodal nature and their argumentation. As research on political Memes in the German language area has previously not been conducted, this study fills the need to apply German Bildlinguistik and multimodality theory on the investigation of a current online-phenomenon. To this purpose, the theoretical tools of multimodality theory, political communication studies and discourse analysis were applied. While the focus of this analysis lies on the collected data, the role of political memes within Web 2.0 in general were also investigated. The investigation of the corpus shows that images are just as important to the building of an argument as textual elements are and should be given equal investigative attention. Political Internet Memes are very well integrated into their medium, namely Web 2.0. They actively engage the readers in their argumentation with a number of semiotic resources, such as vernacular language or vectors pointing at the reader. This makes Memes very apt instruments within the online political discourse.
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