A Memetic Analysis Of Advertising Language And Its Culture

With the progress of the times and the prosperity of the society, advertising waves seem to spread to every part of our social life. Wherever you go, you have been permeated and surrounded by advertising. Nowadays, in this information society, advertising have evolved into a medium of transmission, and they exert a large and indispensable influence on the people's life. The ultimate purpose of advertisings is to initially create an impressive image in the consumer and then to persuade them to make a purchase of the goods. From the above consideration, it is of great value to give a detailed analysis of the advertisings. Any advertising relies on the transmission of language and therefore our analysis focuses on the advertising language. Lots of linguists have conducted researches on the advertising language itself, on its structure and also on the relationships between advertising and culture. In my thesis, I make a tentative attempt to deal with the issue from the angle of Memetics with the intention that I could approach it from a distinct perspective.Meme, first coined by Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford in 1976 in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene, is a new theory explaining the cultural evolution. The core of it is meme, and a meme is a unit of cultural information, mutating and inheriting like a gene and it spreads like a virus from one person to another (Dawkins 192-193). The Oxford English Dictionary defines a meme as"an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation"(Blackemore160).Meme has characteristics of self-contagion and self-reproduction, thus it bears a natural similarity with advertising in view of its propagating nature. This is another reason why I employ Memetics to analyze the phenomenon of advertisings in my papers.The thesis first makes a tentative exploration of the application of memetics in the field of advertising language with the intention of finding more interior factors that lead to the successful creation of advertisings. And then in the end, the thesis goes further to analyze the application of meme cross-culturally. On the basis the model of Memetics put forward by Heylighen(418-423) and the communication model proposed by Schramm, the author put forward a conceptual framework that cross-cultural communication can be regarded as the memetic transmission across different meme pools, and advertising language in the context of cross-culture can be seen as the products of memetic transmission in the form of language memes.My thesis is intended to present some enlightenment to the advertising creators in the procedure of advertising creation, and serve the purpose of inspiring more memetic studies on the advertising research.