A Memetic Study Of Language Memes In Chinese New Year Movie Lines

This thesis attempts to study the phenomenon of language memes in Chinese New Year Movie lines from the perspective of memetics. Meme is a unit of intellectual or cultural information that can be transmitted in a non-genetic way. As one kind of meme, language meme is a transmission unit of language information that replicates and transmits by non-genetic means and consequently language develops and evolves in this way. Any language entity or style of use can be a unit of language meme. Generally speaking, natural language memes get imitated and transmitted through three ways:educating and passing on knowledge, language applying, information-communicating and information-exchanging.This thesis aims to analyze the lines of Chinese New Year Movies from the perspective of memetics. It focuses on working mechanism, features, and transmission and selection criteria of language memes in the CNYM lines. They always come out during New Year and Spring Festival and in particular to meet the general psychological need of audience. Therefore, most of them are action movies and comedies with the subject and theme related to Chinese traditional customs, festival day and blessing during the celebration. The style of CNYM tends to be funny, relaxing and humorous. With the popularity of CNYM among Chinese people, audience increasingly expects new Chinese New Year Movies before the advent of New Year and Spring Festival because they can add jubilation and happy atmosphere to the special occasions. In the CNYM lines, language memes replicate by a way of memetic genotype and memetic phenotype. The replication is characteristic of leaping through time and space, and being influenced by foreign film works and catchwords. Meanwhile, the new language memes produced in CNYM lines are transmitted widely in different areas such as newspapers, academic journals, TV programs, the Internet and daily communication. The selection criteria of language memes in CNYM lines consist of objective criteria, subjective criteria and inter-subjective criteria.Language memes in CNYM lines are an interesting phenomenon in language use. A systematic research can provide both theoretical and practical values. Firstly, the initial tentative research of language memes in CNYM lines from the perspective of memetics extends the research range of memes in the Chinese language. Secondly, the study sheds new light on movie lines, giving enlightenment to audience and movie producers of how to appreciate movie lines and produce better movie lines.