Les mots dièse (hashtag): figement lexical et figement cognitif

The development of social networks, specifically Twitter, has modified our way of communicating, promoting the search for semantically condensed, striking and attractive formulas that are easily recognizable and retweetable. Among the multimodal elements that compose a tweet, the potential of the hashtag stands out in this respect, both in terms of its functionality which greatly exceeds the technical function of indexation and in its formulaic nature. Even if the latter is in principle reserved for polylexical sequences, the agglutination of monolexical hashtags seems to point to a certain mode of fixation, not lexical, but cognitive. We will try to verify this hypothesis by the study of a corpus of tweets about anti-immigration discourse.