Semiotic analysis of hashtags on Instagram

This thesis aims to research hashtags on Instagram via the semiotics analysis. The research is based on Leoš Mareš's Instagram profile, which is one of the most successful accounts within the Czech environment, and uses specific types of hashtags. Therefore, it provides a quality data corpus for the research. At the beginning of the thesis the subject of semiotics is introduced, also other key terms, such as meaning, sign, semantics, pragmatics, and syntactic, denotation and connotation, and language tropes. Following there is an introduction of the new media, Instagram, and hashtags. Hashtags are described within the Twitter background, since most of the studies are focused on hashtags on Twitter. The practical part of this thesis is based on Morris's division of semiotics, which is syntactic, semantics, and pragmatics. It studies how hashtags follow and refer to each other, what is the relationship between the photograph and hashtags, and what are the assumptions for understanding the whole post. At the end of the thesis the findings are summarized, and the patterns of hashtags' occurrence are shown