A Memetic Study Of Chinese Advertising Language In Chinese Cultural Context

Much attention has been paid to the study of the advertising language by many linguists. Lots of research work has been done on the advertising language itself and on the role of culture in advertising. In view of the important function of culture in advertising, this thesis attempts to have a further study of this issue from the viewpoint of memetics based on the previous studies, so as to approach the study of advertising language from a new angle.Memetics, based on Darwinian evolutionism, is a new theory used to explain the cultural evolution. The word"meme"is coined by Richard Dawkins, the well-known zoologist in Oxford University. It is the basic unit of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation. Anything that can be passed on by imitation can be called a meme. It is like the virus of the mind and always transmits from host to host. The transmission nature of meme has a natural relationship with the propagation of advertising language.This thesis adopts the memetic approach, mainly composing of the following five chapters. Chapter one is an introductory part. First a brief introduction to memetics is presented, including the origin and definition of meme and the related terms. In the latter part of the introduction, motivation, significance, data collection and research methodology are presented. Chapter two is a comprehensive review of related researches. Chapter three focuses on the study of advertising language from the memetic viewpoint. Based on the previous analysis, Chapter four is devoted to exploring the creation of advertising language in the Chinese cultural context from the memetic viewpoint. In Chapter five, a conclusion is presented, which sums up limitations of the study and gives suggestions for further research.It is hoped that this thesis can offer some new insight to the Chinese advertisers during their creation process of advertisements. The author believes that any further research and whatever effort in this field will yield fruitful results.