| The Internet, the fourth media after the newspaper, broadcasting and Television, is one of the greatest scientific inventions in 20th century. In recent years, the Internet and net media have developed at lightening speed and influenced or even changed people's life style greatly, in other words, the Internet is not only the biggest scientific revolution, but also brings a brand new Internet culture. Netspeak is emerging in the context of the Internet culture. This distinctive linguistic variant rooting the standard language has been used and transmitted widely on the Internet. Meanwhile, netspeak is permeating into people's everyday language increasingly, which has draw great attention of linguistic field both at home and aboard. However, the research on netspeak is still a new area of linguistics, and lots of researches mainly focus on the description and features of netspeak, but rarely study the replication and transmission of netspeak further. Nevertheless, it is quite helpful to reveal the causes and predict the development of netspeak through the research on the transmission mechanisms of this special linguistic variant. Therefore, it is necessary to study the replication and transmission of netspeak.Memetics, based on Darwin's theory of evolution, is mainly used to interpret the cultural evolution. Its essence lies in meme, which is a unit of cultural transmission passed on by imitation. Not only can meme refer to the ideas in the mind, but also it can be music, languages, pictures and even the gestures and facial expressions. Namely, everything can be called meme if it is transmitted by imitation. After the appearance of memetics, it is widely applied to various fields such as psychology, criminology, architecture, anthropology, linguistics and so on. Although the research of memetics in linguistic field is just starting and little research has been conducted, yet, memetics can still provide the theoretical support to certain degree. Netspeak has close relationship with meme as a new linguistic variant and the netspeak memes can only survive through intense competition among numerous memes on the Internet so that they can be used and transmitted widely.This thesis adopts memetics and picks up the qualitative and quantitive methods together on the basis of the netspeak corpus to make a research on the netspeak replication and transmission. The research subjects are Chinese young netizens and the research object is Chinese Internet netspeak widely used by netizens. The construction of netspeak corpus is the key part of the present research. At first, the author divided netspeak into ten groups after browsing a large number of netspeak in various contexts according to different contents and they are emotional symbols, homonyms, abbreviation, the language-code mixing, invention, semantic shift, social phenomena of the time, Internet grammar, borrowing vocabulary and others. Soon after, the author began to collect the language materials from lexical, sentences and discourses and there are mainly two resources: the first is from certain official websites, portal websites, the net communities, online dictionary, BBS and various chatting rooms. The second resource is from offline and the language materials are from a series of newspaper, magazines, netspeak dictionaries and Television programs and movies. After collecting the language materials, the frequency of netspeak in ten groups in the netspeak corpus is counted. The author then made the qualitative research based on the language materials and quantitative research to analyze the frequency of each group of netspeak respectively. At last, it proves that the replication and transmission of netspeak is a dynamic process, which is not only selected by memetic selection criteria, but also influenced by artificial control of memetic subjects greatly.The thesis is composed of seven chapters. Chapter one is the introduction, which states the purpose and significance of selecting the topic. Chapter two is the part of literature review in which the development of the Internet, the research on memetics and netspeak at home and broad and the research on netspeak in the perspective of memetics are reviewed thoroughly. Furthermore, the creativity of the present research is also indicated. Chapter three is the theoretic framework of the whole thesis, and the author presents the memetics and some related issues in details. In addition, conformity that is used to interpret the social psychology is introduced as well. Finally, the relationship between these theories and the present research is mentioned. Chapter four is the research design, which consists of the research subjects, research object, research questions, research methodology and the research procedure respectively. Chapter five and six are the core parts of the present research, and they are the answers to the research questions. The author makes research on the replication and transmission of netspeak with memetics using the language materials in the corpus step by step. Meanwhile, the emotional symbol netspeak and abbreviation netspeak are strong netspeak memes in current Internet situation according to the investigation of the frequency of netspeak and the reasons are also discussed at the theoretical level. Chapter seven reaches a conclusion. After the whole research, the results of the present research show that netspeak is the meme and the process of replication and transmission of netspeak is dynamic, which is carrying on with the advantages of netspeak itself, network and the control of intending self who hosts memes to fulfill his or her specific goal together. Meanwhile, the strong netspeak meme and weak one are also found after analyzing the frequency of netspeak in the corpus. However, it is hard to predict the future of netspeak because they will change with the time. Therefore, the boundary between the strong memes and weak memes is relative and they two may be interchangeable at certain condition. At the end of the thesis, the author proposes some suggestions for the future research on such issues. |
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