The Analysis Of Popular Movie Lines From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. Many scholars try to get inspiration from the study of Memetics. In China, memetics develops relatively slowly, and there are still some room waited to be explored. This paper attempts to analyze the strong memes from English and Chinese movie lines with adaptation theory and tries to find out the comprehensive methods of creating strong memes.According to Dawkins (1976), the features of a strong meme can be summarized into three kinds: fidelity, fecundity and longevity. In the paper, the author collects a large number of strong memes from English and Chinese movie lines to make analysis. This paper constructs a framework employing Adaptation Theory which is proposed by Jef Verschueren and relevant theories about memes to analyze the process of creation of strong memes. In this paper, the author argues that the reason why the strong memes from English and Chinese movie lines are popular is that they have adapted to the mental world, social world and physical world of the audience.The mental world includes the cognitive and emotive factors. The social world includes social settings, social institutions and community-specific communicative norms. Temporal reference, spatial reference, body position, gesture and the physical features of the communicators are mainly studied in the field of physical world. The author tries to explore some methods of creating strong memes, namely, reiteration, parody."Reiteration"could emphasize the information, attract the attention of others, and make them become"strong memes"."Parody"is mainly used to modify the original"strong memes". These variants could give the audience a sense of freshness and help themselves become strong memes.The paper analyzes the strong memes in movie lines from the perspective of adaptation theory in China. But there are a lot of shortcomings in the study and the author hopes that more people will construct research on the movie lines and find out more effective ways to create strong memes. We also hope to make some contribution to the study of memetics.