Memetic Analysis Of Internet Catchwords Transmission

Meme is one of the fundamental terms in memetics. It is also a cardinal unit ofinformation transmission in cultural evolutionary theory. Everything can be called a memeif it is copied and transmitted via imitation from person to person. In the perspective ofsociolinguistics, information transmission in language is always accompanied withvariation. Internet catchwords are featured as a newly developing language variation,which have appealing for creativity, originality and expressiveness. Therefore, Internetcatchword study becomes a pretty new and hot topic in sociolinguistics.Based on the framework of Susan Blackmore (1999)’s“selective imitation”viewand Francis Heylighen(2001)’s model of“meme selection criteria”, this thesis selects thehottest English and Chinese internet catchwords in high-frequency usage as research data.This study applies qualitative-quantitative methods and establishes a database of internetcatchwords with high frequency from famous portals such as NetEase and Sina, personalblogs and BBS, etc. simultaneously and large quantities of new internet catchwords aresupplied into the database from the published net-language dictionaries and the StateLanguage Resources Monitoring and Researching Center. Then, the detailed data analysishas been carried out with the help of calculating software.In this research the author classified internet catchwords into six types: emoticons,numbers, letters, mixed words, derivatives and story words. With the careful analysis ofthese data, we could find the following results: the use of internet catchwords is theprocess of meme transmission; the vitality of internet catchwords is originated from meme-driven competitiveness; internet catchwords not only make themselves moreattractive but also fitter themselves to the current environment so as to obtain a largechance of being selected, imitated, transmitted, preserved and finally lexicalized in ourlanguage system. Meanwhile, we could be aware that internet meme selection isinfluenced by netizen’s psychological cognition, emotive affinities and related closely tothe socio-cultural value systems; internet meme imitation embodies both the creativity inword-formation and the uniqueness of e-media; the horizontal and vertical mechanisms inthe process of meme transmission reflect the memes’longevity, fecundity and fidelity.Focusing on the perspective of memes, this research has made a thorough researchon internet catchwords, and proposed a basic mode of internet catchwords, which is“competitive selection---varied imitation---timely transmission”. Therefore, this researchcould have a high value both in theory and application. That is, the memetic theory iseffective to explain language variation, socio-cultural inheritance, and provide us with aunique perspective to observe the rules underlying language variation and culturaldevelopment.