The gif, a tool for iconising the discourse on Twitter

Abstract

This article focuses on the iconisation of discourse in a native digital context, based on the use of gif on the French Twitter platform. It defends the hypothesis of a syntactic and enunciative integration of the gif in tweets, which thus have the status of technographisms, in which the verbal order and the iconic order are no longer distinct but articulated in a composite element. Using a series of examples of tweets with fixed or animated gifs, I show that the gif is at the heart of an iconisation of enunciation that has theoretical and methodological implications in the work of discourse analysis.