A Memetic-adaptation Approach To Relationship Analysis Of Advertising Language And Culture

Meme has got widely attention since its first proposition. Memetic theory is a theory concerning culture transmission and the core of it is "imitation". As biologic genes' survival depends upon biological environment, memes' propagation requires a cultural environment. The best "carrier" of culture - language is considered to be the best mode for meme spreading and surviving. Therefore, an advertising language, as a meme, exerts to stay in a brain and spread into other brains. In the process of advertising language meme propagation, being accepted or not is restricted by cultural factors.The Linguistic Adaptation Theory is another basic ingredient for the thesis. Verschueren regards language use to be continuous making linguistic choices with different degree of salience for the purpose of adaptation. Choices are made for language-internal and/or language-external reasons. External reasons tend to focus on complex factors, such as the social, cultural and psychological contexts. Cultural elements absolutely are the important factors influence language choices.The present thesis tries to probe into the relationship between advertising language and culture from the perspective of Memetic-adaptation. Besides making an overview on the related researches, the paper combines Memetic theory and Adaptation theory into Memetic-adaptation which is the theoretical framework of present thesis. Then, through analyzing the selection of advertising language from memetic viewpoint, four criteria of the memetic selection are proposed. With the help of the four criteria and Memetic-adaptation in advertising language, the elaboration of the influence of cultural elements is reasonable. In the last stage, in order to explain the cultural influence on advertising language clearly, advertising language is considered as a certain number of memes, which are chosen the memes with the adaptation theory under the culture dimension, and accepted them with the memetic selection criteria under the memetic dimension.