Animal personas, ambivalent judgements, and affective effects in social media reels

Abstract This paper discusses humorous internet reels featuring cute animals voicing critical opinions about human behaviours and lifestyles. The reels are characterised by incongruity between the images of animals and the content of their messages. An analysis of lexical items and pragmatic implications of these messages indicates that a distinct idiolect has been created for the animal personas and that it is not possible to tease out the source of the views expressed in their utterances; the views can be attributed either to groups of people or to the animals themselves, as they are anthropomorphised. This makes for pragmatic indeterminacy which leaves the viewer with the impression of ambivalence at the level of propositional meaning while also giving rise to non-propositional affective effects.