A Study On Word-formation Mechanism And Evolution Of Netspeak From The Perspective Of Memetics

Internet, "the fourth mass media" following newspaper, broadcast and television has become the most influential one. As the crucial means of information communication and spreading by humans, it creates many kinds of new methods for information transmission and exchange, and updates the communication environment and idea. Internet transmits web culture and is itself an element of web culture. Internet communication takes language mainly as its carrier, under this circumstance, netspeak emerges as a new kind of language variant. Netspeak now has attracted extensive attention from scholars worldwide, but they mainly focus on collecting corpus, interpreting semantic meaning, and analyzing pragmatic function of netspeak. The researches for the generation, development and transmission are rare. This thesis tries to analyze the generation, development and transmission of the netspeak based on the research achievements abroad and at home.Memetics which appeared in the later 20th century explains the process of development and inheritance of human culture as well as regards the replication, transmission and variation as analogous to the particulate gene. Dawkins as the pioneer of memetics points out that meme is "a unit of cultural information". Language, as the carrier of cultural information, is itself the element of culture. In other words that language is meme, and meme is language. So, memetics is powerful to explain the development, replication, transmission and variation of language.The present study, with the qualitative research methodology, classifies the word-formation mechanism of netspeak into two:genotype and phenotype. What's more the features of netspeak are analyzed and the conclusion is drawn from the memetic perspective that the survival of netspeak as language variation is determined by "memetic selection" while the "memetic selection" depends on three principal factors:the content of meme itself, physical environment and the psychological environment. Only if netspeak attracts and retains the attention from users and fits in with the physical and host's psychological environment, can netspeak get more opportunities to be used, spread and replicated in turn constitutes a unique language system as the result of survivals.