Analysis Of Strong Memes In English And Chinese Movie Lines

Memetics,a newly emerging science,catches the attention of many scholars since its birth.Many scholars try to get some enlightenment by combining memetics with their research field.In China,memetics develops relatively slowly,and there are only a small number of people who conduct the research of memetics.This paper attempts to analyze the strong memes in English and Chinese movie lines with memetics 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 words:fidelity,fecundity,and longevity.In this paper,the author collects a large number of strong memes in English and Chinese movie lines to make analysis. This paper constructs a framework employing Adaptation Theory proposed by Jef Verschueren and relevant theories about memes to analyze the process of creation of strong memes.In this paper,the author argues the reason why the strong memes in 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.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.Furthermore,the author attempts to study some methods of creating strong memes,namely,reiteration,parody and following the fashions."Reiteration" could make the information emphasized,arouse the attention of others,and make them become "strong memes".Parody is mainly used to make some slight change of the original "strong memes".These variants could give the audience a sense of freshness and help themselves become strong memes.As far as the writer knows,this paper is the first one to analyze the strong memes in movie lines from the perspective of memetics in China.There is no doubt that there are a lot of shortcomings and the author hopes that more people will conduct the research on the movie lines and find more effective ways to create strong memes.If possible,these methods could promote the development of film industry.