| With the development of the society and technology, new words and expressions are mass-produced incessantly. Memetics, which is proposed by Dawkins in1976, enlightens the study of language evolution. Memetics treats language as a kind of meme, and attaches great importance to imitation and reproduction of information.“Meme” is firstly defined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene as the unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation such as tunes, ideas, style of dress, way of building, etc.Buzz expressions are studied in memetics as linguistic memes. As language memes, new expressions, together with the originalities and modes of such expressions, are being copied, imitated and popularized. According to memetics, the meme who has a relatively fixed mode, enjoys frequency of occurrences in media, and gains a high degree of awareness by a wide range of audients is called strong meme. With the integration of mass media and web media in recent years, it takes very little time for a meme to come into being, reproduce and gain prevalence to become a strong meme. These fast-spreading strong memes and their profound impacts on society arouse public concerns and draw attentions from many scholars.As a newly-developed pragmatic theory, memetics has a relatively incomplete development. Not until1999has the initial theoretical framework of memetics been constructed by Susan Blackmore in England. In the21st century, linguists such as Levinson, Millikan, Distin, Chilton and Johansson begin to apply memetics to explain the evolution of culture and language. Memetics was introduced to China in1998. Then Professor He Ziran devotes himself to the study of memetics and applies it to various social phenomena in daily life. Previous researches on memes are confined to the types and characteristics of memes in some specific linguistic fields. Studies concerning strong memes are limited to summarizing their features and pragmatic functions. The generating mechanism of successful strong memes and the causes of their popularization have not been studied yet. What is more, even memetic theory itself leaves blanks in explaining the creation of strong memes. Therefore, it is necessary to summarize the generating mechanism of strong memes to fill the theoretical gap in memetics.Dawkins summarized three features of a strong meme:longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity. In this paper, the author uses the above mentioned three features as criteria, and collects a large number of newly-produced strong memes used in English media to make analysis. To avoid subjectivity, all the data are checked by a scientific internet search engine: memetracker to ensure the objectivity and scientificalness. From the perspective of Adaptation Theory proposed by Jef Verschueren, the author combines the dynamic life circle of meme and advantages of media to construct a comprehensive framework to make a qualitative study on the generating mechanism of strong memes and tries to answer the following three questions:1. Among several expressions with almost identical meanings, why do people choose a specific meme to communicate and let it transmit and assimilate more people?2. How do mass media and web media contribute to the transmission process of a specific meme?3. What are the reasons and the generating mechanism of a strong meme?The study has three findings after analysis. Firstly, after a meme’s retention in the host’s memory, the host chooses a specific meme to communicate. Under different degrees of consciousness, the host chooses a specific meme to adapt to contextual correlates, which includes the mental world, social world and physical world of the audience, in order to realize his communicative purposes. The meme stands out other expressions with identical meanings for its outstanding adaptive ability to contextual correlates. Secondly, after the meme’s expression from the host, it transmits via media. After the integration of mass media and web media, the media mix gains enormous strength and promotes such a meme to assimilate more hosts. And finally, more and more hosts are involved in the life circle of the meme to copy, express and transmit, and the media mix transmits and publicizes such a meme to an increasingly wider range of audience with swiftness. After several circles of such transmission, a strong meme is formed ultimately.This research has some theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it constructs a comprehensive framework to illustrate the reasons and process of strong meme creation, which fills the theoretical gap of memetics in its explanation of the generating mechanism of strong memes. Practically, the research enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of the reasons why nowadays numerous new expressions are transmitted and popularized in media so quickly in the era of information explosion and media integration, and contributes to the development of language and mass communication. |
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