A Study Of Internet Popular Style Based On FG~+Model

The Internet popular style is a kind of newly born Internet language, which is notonly popular on the cyber world, but also applied increasingly on formal occasions,such as the college admission notice, publicity signs about highway safety,recruitment advertisements of government agency, and even the arrest warrant on theInternet. The Internet popular style is a kind of modern language phenomenon, whichexerts far-reaching influence and deserves the attention and discussion in linguisticscircle. Nowadays, the domestic scholars have done limited academic studies on theInternet popular style from the perspectives of Descriptive Linguistics, Pragmatics,Rhetoric, Functional linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, but still no intensiveanalysis of its generative and spreading mechanism from the perspective ofCognitive-Pragmatics can be found.This paper will carry out a quantitative and qualitative study on the Internetpopular style under the theoretical framework of “FG~+Model”, which is basedon the integration of Figure/Ground Theory in Cognitive Linguistics andMemetics in Pragmatics. The mode and type of meme transmission are various in different stages and change with the host’s behavior. In the four stages of memetransmission, namely assimilation, retention, expression and transmission, theprominent contents and forms of the meme are various, especially for the meme ofInternet popular style. Therefore, the figure and ground can be built into thespreading process of meme to describe and explain the prominent changes in thegenerative and spreading process of the Internet popular style, which makes theprocess and the detail vivid and concrete and also help people to master the creationand application rules of the Internet popular style.The definitions of the Internet popular style found in the earlier studies bydemestic scholars are often based on its features without comprehensively andparticularly considering other factors of the Internet popular style. Concerning thefactors of Internet popular style, such as its origin, transmission, popularity,development, reasons and features, etc., the author redefines it as follows: TheInternet popular style is a kind of popular style widely used by people to conveyideas or feelings on the platform of Internet, with self-amusement, pressure releaseand current affairs satirization as psychological pursuit, starting from the hot events,intentional words or key figures, and characterized by discourse parody, style imitation, keywords prominence, multimodal assembling, topic extension, sentenceregulation and phonetic metaphor.Additionally, this thesis collects302Internet popular styles from the Internetand all kinds of articles (up to the end of December2012) exhaustively to build aclosed corpus, and all the Internet popular styles are classified into7types withrelevant data and proportions:(1) Discourse Parody (60.60%);(2) Style Imitation(10.91%);(3) Keywords Prominence (7.62%);(4) Multimodal Assembling (7.62%);(5) Topic Extension (4.30%);(6) Sentence Regulation (6.96%);(7) PhoneticMetaphor (1.99%). Then one piece from each type is randomly selected to testify theFG~+Model. The results show that FG~+Model can give a reasonable explanation ofthe generative and spreading process of all Internet popular styles.