A Memetic Study Of Parody In Netspeak

Netspeak, which is a special social dialect used in context of the Internet now is getting popular among netizens and extending to our daily life. It has become a hot topic. Linguistically, parody is a rhetorical device which modifies the existing language forms to generate novel expressions. It meets people's requirements for simple and convenient life, it caters for people's pursuing of novelty and uniqueness, and dramatically promotes the development of pop culture; it is the major means of language variation and innovation. This creative rhetorical device is broadly applied in netspeak.Based on the Darwinism, the memetics is a new theory to explain the laws of cultural evolution. Meme is the basic unit of cultural transmission and a unit of imitation. Those languages, cultural customs, ideas and behaviors are memes so long as they are imitated and transmitted by people. The aim of the study of language from the perspective of memetics is to supply an explanation to some language phenomena from a new perspective.The thesis conducts a research on the generation process of parody and the characteristics of successful parodies from perspective of memetics in the hope that it would provide some hints in this field. First, Parody is a language phenomenon, which imitates and modifies the existing language forms to generate novel expressions according to speakers'purpose. Dawkins and Blackmore define the meme as an evolutionary replicator, which is the information copied from person to person through imitation. Parody is a language phenomenon which is generated and transmitted by means of imitation; meanwhile, it satisfies three requisites of being a replicator: variation, selection and heredity. Therefore, the parody can be viewed as meme which establishes an interactive relationship between the two concepts and paves the way for further research. Second, according to Heylighen's life cycle of memes, we think that under the work of language memes, the generation process of parody in netspeak comes through four stages: the assimilation of parody sources, the retention of parody sources, the expression of parodies and the transmission of parodies to other hosts via the Internet. In parody's expression stage, the informative intention and communicative intention are the motivations of parody's expression; the similarity between parody and its source is the mechanism of parody's expression and imitation is the means by which the parody is realized. Then the author analyzes some characteristics of the successful parody according to memetic selection criteria, they are novelty, coherence, utility and jocosity. Because of these characteristics the parody is widely transmitted online. This thesis supplies a new perspective to researches on parody; which is helpful for a better understanding and appreciation of parody in netspeak, and also helpful for a further study on parody and netspeak.