| News headline as a distinctive subject matter has always attracted people's attention and has been a research topic for scholars. Studies done on news headline have been fruitful. Based on studies done by previous researchers, this thesis analyzes news headlines from the perspective of memetics, a new rising theory of how information gets transmitted, how we think, and how it plays the part in culture evolution and social development as well.News headline, as proposed by the current thesis, is an important means of conveying the news information between the information initiator (Editors and Journalists) and the receivers (Readers), while in this whole mediation process memes play an indispensably important role. Speaking from memetics, news headline in mass communication is a manifestation of meme. Since the survival of memes depends on replication, news headline memes also follow certain transmission mode, In this thesis, the way of how news headline memes get replicated and transmitted is identified based on the transmission mode for language memes.In the world of mass communication, how does a certain news headline meme stand out of millions of others and get popularized among the meme-receptors? This thesis argues that for the news headlines memes, they possess their own device and get restricted by it. In this study, the author proposes novelty, simplicity, authority and publicity as the selection properties of news headline memes to get popularized. To justify the properties of news headline meme identified, this thesis proposes the notion of memetic adaptation by integrating memetics and adaptation theory into the conceptual framework, under which news headline language is discussed from the three worlds, i.e. mental world, social world and physical world. Finally this thesis concludes that successful news headline memes are restricted by these three worlds; and the popularity of the news headline memes is the result of adaptation to the three worlds.
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