A Study On The Memetic Phenomenon Of Chinese Comic Sketch Language

Chinese comic sketch, a kind of important contemporary art form, has always been enjoying high popularity among the audiences from all walks of life. As one of special forms of language communication, comic sketches are plain, humorous, vivid and impressive in language. As a result, comic sketch has always been a hot topic in the academic field recently. Based on the previous study, this thesis attempts to apply a new rising theory, memetics, to the study on the comic sketch language.Memetics is a newly rising theory aiming to explicate the evolutionary law of culture based on Darwin Evolutionism. From the memetic perspective, language memes reveal the law of language transmission and the comic sketch language transmitted by the public is actually a manifestation of memes. Meme plays a significant role in the wide propagation process of information which is carried by comic sketch language. As a factor of transmitting information, memes depend on replication to survive and get transmitted in some certain way. In this thesis, the language memes of comic sketches are classified and analyzed in order to explore the way of how these memes get replicated and transmitted.Among large number of words in comic sketches, some have advantage over others to become memes through getting noticed and assimilated by the public. For language memes, they have certain selecting mechanism. The author identifies four selection criteria for language memes of comic sketches, namely, colloquialism, novelty, contemporaneity and publicity. In order to justify these proposed criteria, the author constructs a memetic-adaptation theoretical framework by integrating memetics and adaptation theory. Under this established framework, the author conducts a full analysis of the memetic phenomenon of comic sketch language and arrives at the conclusion that a linguistically adapted meme depends on the communicative context. In other words, the choice of an adapted meme is actually the process of the linguistic adaptation of a meme to the communicative context.