| Words in different period reflect different social views and developmental courses. People can see the features of the period and psychological characters from those words. Language psychology is connected with social lives and so it is of social characters. Social beings determine the social consciousness, and the society put huge influences on language psychology. So language psychology is also featured with characters of that age. Social changes bring about the psychological changes of people, and people's psychological changes will be represented by new words emerged and used at certain period.Mate-selection is an important social, cultural and psychological phenomenon. As one of the most important choices in one's life, criteria of choosing spouses definitely reflect the cultural values of that society. Marriage is never a personal thing, but a complex issue connected with family institution, social value and cultural custom, etc.As a most sensitive issue of social lives, marital views of people underwent huge changes along social development these years. This paper focuses on the marital views of a certain group——the post 80s generation, and studies the marital words of today from memetic angle. And the author aims to find out the social changes and the social values reflected by marital words.The essence of memeties is meme which was invented by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary Biologist and a celebrated zoologist from Oxford University. Dawkins first proposed his version of cultural evolutionary theory in his 1976 book, The selfish gene. And then he postulated the existence of a unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene, while he termed "meme". This paper uses memetics to analyze the popular marital words among the post 80s generation and study their constructing pattern, general characters and ways of spreading. Also the author makes a prediction on the future of these popular marital words.At last, the present author makes some conclusions as below. Firstly, the popular marital words of post 80s generation can be roughly divided into four categorizations. And these words reflect value orientation, people's standards of mate-selection and some social phenomena related to marriage and love in today's society from different angles. Secondly, it is predicated that some of these popular marital words collected by the present author will develop and evolve into more related words in diverse forms. While other words will gradually be forgotten by people or even disappear forever. |
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