The Application Of Memetics To The Analysis Of Advertising Language

In recent years, advertising becomes more important in marketing strategies of various enterprises in the world. Advertisements have different forms in the business world, and can be subdivided into different categories depending on their ways of distribution or their subjects. For any kind of advertisements, language use is the most important element. The concept "meme" was first brought up by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, imitating the formation of the word "gene". And meme is the core concept in the theory of memtics. In the language aspect, the Chinese scholar He Ziran believes that language is the major carrier of culture transmission, so language itself is a kind of meme. There are various ways for language memes to reproduce and transmit. This paper is an attempt to study advertising slogans by classifying them according to the ways of their reproduction and transmission.The advertising slogans are mainly collected through three channels: noting down in the daily life when comes across various slogans, extracting from the works and theses about advertising language, and gathering from the Internet. There are not only English slogans, but also Chinese ones, from which the author uses 32 pieces as the examples in the present thesis.The result shows that the advertising slogans abide by the rules of memes'reproduction and transmission, since they are a kind of language memes. Besides, idioms, set phrases and homophones are widely adopted in designing advertising slogans, which provide practical guidance to the advertising designers in their future work.