The Memetic Perspective On Language Variation

Since language variation becomes an important topic, many linguistic schools have done the studies of language variation phenomena, but few of them have successfully found the ultimate drive for language variation. Therefore, the author of this thesis takes memetics as the guide knowledge for the analysis of language variation phenomenon. In this thesis, the author predicts that there must be some principles which guide the language variation during the process of variation. The author classifies the language variation principles as imitation, omission, extension and alteration. Imitation refers to the phenomena that people imitate other speakers'expressions which results in the language variation phenomenon. Omission refers to the ignorance of the weak-functional part of an expression. Extension means that the function of a word meaning is extended which leads to the language variation phenomenon. Alteration refers to that the function of a word meaning has been changed with the time going which results in the language variation phenomenon.In this thesis, the author will analyze the phenomenon of language variation from a new research approach----memetic perspective. Thus the theories that will be used in this paper are mainly memetics. The word'meme'was first coined by Richard Dawkins the in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene in 1976. At the end of the book, he radically proposes that biology is not the only field where evolution is at work; human culture also evolves and changes. Gene is the biological replicator, so by analogy,"meme"is the cultural replicator which drives the culture evolution. Meme has its own transmission characteristics, namely, novelty, simplicity, expressivity and coherence. In this thesis, the author creates an innovative (memetic) way of explaining language variation, and endeavors to interpret it in terms of its four approaches and its characteristics, that is, imitation, omission, extension, alteration, which are also the meta-mechanism of language variation.In the process of the research, both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used. Other scientific procedures are also adopted such as data collection, introspection, questionnaire and data analysis, etc. All the materials come from daily conversations or written works from books, magazines or newspapers.During the research of this dissertation, the author finds that language variation must be the surface representation of the process which happens in a deeper level, i.e. language variation should be triggered by the changes in Mental Models directly, and the changes in Mental Models are manifested by language in the surface level. So in this thesis, the author also presents that the Mental Models Variation is the direct and ultimate trigger of language variation.