A Memetic Study On Parodying Utterances In Campus Discourse

Memetics is a relatively new and popular theory in pragmatics as well as a continuously developing theory in recent years. It is a theory put forward by Richards Dawkins to explain cultural evolution rules on the basis of the viewpoints of Darwin's theory of evolution. It tries to interpret the evolutionary rules of universal relation between things as well as the heredity of culture from diachronic and synchronic aspects. The publication of The Selfish Gene not only makes Dawkins famous but also arouses wide concern about his viewpoint. The Meme Machine written by his student Blackmore enriches and perfects his viewpoint to a great degree. It primarily confirms the theoretical framework of Memetics. Hereafter, the point of view that explains social and cultural phenomenon from Sociobiology raises concerns of some scholars. Meanwhile only a few scholars start to explain all kinds of phenomena in the fields of psychology, sociology, culturology, philosophy and the like. However, Memetics did not get enough concern in China until Jilin People's Publishing House translated and published above two books. In linguistic field in our country, memetic did not get much reaction until 2003. Nowadays, many scholars choose the theory of Memetics to conduct academic researches. However, more emphasis is laid on research of advertisement, object teaching and cultural communication than explanation of linguistic phenomenon which still stays on the level of metaphor research.Parody is a vigorously spreading linguistic phenomenon in recent days, the development of which reflects the unceasing development of language. Aiming at innovation and imagination, the campus discourse uses large amount of figure of speeches, among which parody is a classic one. In this thesis the author studies Parodying utterances in campus discourses by Memetic theory so as to understand better the generation and rapid transmission of Parody meanwhile to explain the feasibility and strong explanatory power to Parody under the framework of memetic theories.First of all, the author introduces meme and Memetics, depicts the transmission stages of memes, and explains in detail the relation between meme and language as well as the replication, transmission and generation mechanism of language memes. Under this framework, the author applies memetic theory to the structure, elements, generation and transmission mechanism of parodying utterances to verify whether memetic theory can explain parodying utterances and how parodying utterances generate and transmit. The author reaches the following conclusions:Meme is replicated by imitation and parodying utterance is also replicated by imitation. Meme contains two parts of meme and the results of meme replication and transmission while parody contains parodied target and parodying utterance. They have the same foundation. The replication process of parodying utterances is nearly the same with that of memes. The transmission of memes has two types of genotype and phonotype while parodying utterances can also transmit through these two ways. Therefore, Memetics is the perfect theory to explain parodying utterances and from memetic theories it can also deduce out the generation and transmission mechanism of parodying utterances.At last, the author summarizes the significance of the study on parodying utterances in campus discourses. This research not only broadens the research scope of Memetics but also offers a brand-new perspective to the explanation of parody.