An Analysis On The Internet Language Vocabulary With Memetics

The Internet has brought great influence on people from various aspects. With the development of the Internet, a new language the Internet language comes into being. Influence of the Internet language has already entered into the real life of human beings, the study of which is of great value and importance. It has attracted the interests of various people.Most researches done in the linguistic field are about definition, classification, collection and features of the Internet language. Few people have done researches on the Internet language from the pragmatic perspective. Based on previous researches, this study is a tentative study which intends to analyze the Internet language with a new pragmatic theory the theory of Memetics. This study relies mainly on the qualitative analysis with the basis of the theory of Memetics and data. All data for the present study were collected from chat-rooms, Bulletin Board System (BBS), and Blogs on the Internet.Vocabulary memes refer to that language memes replicate and transmit in the form of vocabulary. The formation process of vocabulary memes includes selection, replication, transmission and variation. Selection happens at the first stage of the whole process, which is mainly influenced by two factors: cognitive factor and emotive factor. There are two main forms of replication of vocabulary memes in the Internet language, which are speech sound replication and structural replication. For the transmission, there are two categories which are vertical transmission and horizontal transmission. This thesis will mainly discuss horizontal transmission of vocabulary memes. There are several types of transmission of vocabulary memes in the Internet language. The most representative ones are spreading the same information in different forms and the same structure with different meaning spreading . Actually, replication and transmission don t have clear borderline.This study suggests that the Internet language as a kind of language meme has its own survival rules. As an interesting phenomenon in language use, language meme deserves our further study, which can supply both theoretical and practical values in linguistic field. Though this study is just a tentative research which is conducted by observing and analyzing collected data, it is helpful for the later study of the Internet language and language meme.