From Meme to Meaning: Integrating Memes into a General Theory of Meaning

In contemporary culture, memes are often treated as fleeting curiosities—humorous images or phrases that ricochet through social media. But beneath this surface lies a deeper semiotic structure. If we adopt the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), where meaning is understood as a stratified and instantiated phenomenon, then memes offer an important case study for how meaning is individuated, instantiated, and realised across social contexts. To place memes within a general model of meaning, we must first move beyond the popular usage and develop a more systemic understanding of what memes are.

Memes as Meaning Instances

In our general model, meaning is not substance but potential, structured as a system and actualised as instances. This is the foundation of SFL’s cline of instantiation, which relates meaning potential (system) to meaning instance (text). Memes, in their most visible form, are clearly meaning instances. They are semiotic artefacts—configurations of wording, imagery, and logic—that function within social discourse. Like all meaning instances, they are:

• Semiotically stratified: They have a semantic value, realised through lexicogrammar and other strata like visual imagery.

• Contextually situated: Their interpretation depends on field, tenor, and mode.

• Instantial: They draw selectively on meaning potential in order to be actualised.

Yet memes differ from many other kinds of meaning instances in their reproducibility and intertextuality. Each new instantiation is recognisable as a member of a meme-type—an identifiable pattern of semiotic features that remains relatively stable across different texts.

Meme-Types: Constrained Patterns of Instantiation

We propose the term meme-type to capture the semiotic space between the instance and the full system. A meme-type is a recurrent, recognisable pattern of meaning-making that allows multiple instantiations while constraining what counts as a valid variation. Meme-types operate like small-scale meaning potentials, often tightly individuated within communities or discourses. They are:

• Culturally shared: Their semiotic constraints are learned and recognised collectively.

• Structurally constrained: They have internal expectations (e.g., a particular image paired with a two-part caption).

• Flexible but bounded: Variation is possible, but the meme breaks down if the constraint space is violated.

A meme-type, then, is not an instance, nor is it a system in the SFL sense. It is a subsystem within the social semiotic, positioned between instance and system along the cline of instantiation. As such, meme-types can be understood as proto-systems of meaning that emerge through collective memory and practice.

Individuation and the Meme-User

In SFL, individuation refers to the relationship between the collective meaning potential and the meaning potential of individual language users. Memes offer a vivid example of how individuation plays out semiotically. Each meme-user accesses a meme-type from the collective semiotic pool and produces a new instantiation—an individuated meaning instance.

This process is inherently dialogic: the meme-type provides affordances, while the user introduces variation. Through repeated instantiation, meme-users both reproduce and evolve the meme-type, subtly shifting its system of values, references, and implications.

• Memes are thus a site of semiotic negotiation: They balance reproducibility and individuation.

• Memes instantiate memory: Each new meme recalls previous instantiations and updates the collective sense of what the meme-type means.

The Role of Memory in Meme Evolution

Here, Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) offers insight into the material substrate of this semiotic process. Memory, in Edelman’s model, is not the retrieval of stored content, but the selective reactivation of neural circuits. Memory is a property of the system, expressed in the ability to repeat a performance, not to recover a record.

When applied to culture, this suggests that collective memory functions as a selection pressure on the evolution of memes. Just as neural groups are selected for their adaptive value, meme-types are selected and stabilised through social memory:

• Memes persist because they are remembered in usable forms.

• New instantiations reinforce or modify the structure of the meme-type.

• Cultural memory acts as a kind of semiotic fitness landscape.

Thus, the cultural evolution of meme-types parallels the neural evolution of repertoires in the brain. Both are shaped by selection histories that privilege certain patterns of activation over others.

Toward a General Model of Memes in Meaning

By situating memes within the cline of instantiation, and distinguishing between meme-types and meme instances, we can develop a systemic-functional account of memetics. This model is not about the replication of units, as in Dawkins’ original metaphor, but about the activation of constrained semiotic potentials within social systems. Memes are:

• Instantiations of semiotic meaning.

• Selections from collective meaning potential.

• Realisations of cultural memory in context.

And meme-types are:

• Provisional proto-systems of meaning.

• Sites of individuation within a shared culture.

• Cultural attractors that stabilise certain values and orientations.

In this way, we not only align memes with the SFL model of meaning, but we also show how memetics and semiotics can be integrated within a relational ontology. This opens the way for future explorations—of individuation, instantiation, and evolution—as we continue mapping the dynamic semiotic systems that shape our shared realities.