A Memetic Approach To Chinese Catchwords

Catchwords refer to words and expressions that are frequently employed by a specific group in a certain region at a certain period of history. As a special linguistic phenomenon, catchwords are the results of the development of language, culture, society, economy and so on. They can reflect the social and cultural phenomena at that time. Although Chinese catchword is deeply rooted in the traditional Chinese language and culture, it also has its own characteristics. Within the past few years, Chinese catchword has developed so well that it has penetrated into many aspects of people’s daily life. Based upon the findings achieved by the previous scholars and experts both at home and abroad, this dissertation, however, restricts the scope to Chinese catchword and carries out the research on Chinese catchwords in a memetic approach.The present thesis is a qualitative analysis on the basis of the data collected from Internet, newspapers, magazines, TV, radios, dictionaries, movies, books and so on. The theoretical foundation is memetics.As a newly emerging theory for interpreting cultural evolution, memetics is first put forward by the zoologist Richard Dawkins with meme as its core concept. To be more specific, memetics is a theoretical and empirical science that studies the selection, replication, transmission and variation of memes. With respect to the development of human language, memes play an important part and they enrich human language to some degree by the replication and transmission of language memes. As a replicator, a meme can be considered as an analogy with a gene in biology science. However, genes are handed down from one generation to next by heredity while memes are transmitted from one host to another by imitation. Any kind of information can be called a meme as long as it can be imitated and then passed on to other people, such as ideas, habits, skills, a way of doing things, stories, clothes fashions, catchwords and so on. In China, many scholars have been conducting researches on Chinese catchword. For instance, Memetics and Social Usage of Language co-worked by Professor He Ziran and He Xuelin in2003; The Static and Dynamic Exploration of Memes on Chinese Catchwords edited by Zhang Peng in the year2009. However, the author in this thesis will principally explore the inherent development mechanism of Chinese catchword memes to explain the phenomenon why some expressions win more popularity and are frequently used while others are not. The memetic study on Chinese catchwords in this dissertation will also deduce a proper attitude towards Chinese catchword memes.The present thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter one, the introduction, simplifies reasons for selecting the present research subject, research methodology and data collection together with the purpose and significance of the dissertation. Chapter two demonstrates the literature review related to catchwords and memetics. In this part, researches on memetics and catchwords both at home and abroad are presented thoroughly. The memetic study of Chinese catchword is introduced as well in the end of this chapter. Chapter three provides a theoretical foundation for the whole thesis, where some main terms related to memes and the classification of memes together with the life span of memes are presented in a great detail. As the core of the whole thesis, chapter four, based on the theoretical foundation constructed in chapter three, mainly examines the inherent development mechanism of the Chinese catchword memes with concrete examples chosen from the collected data in order to answer the questions proposed in chapter one. To be more specific, in the course of selection, words and expressions that satisfy the major criteria proposed by Heylighen or have the characteristics of novelty, simplicity, practicality and so on are high likely to be chosen by more potential hosts. The replication of Chinese catchwords memes involves knowledge on microlinguistics. It is discussed at phonetic, lexical, syntactical and semantic level separately. In the process of transmission, two situations are discussed:the same core content being transmitted in various forms and the identical pattern being followed by different contents. The last part in this chapter comes the variation of Chinese catchword memes, where a right attitude towards Chinese catchwords is advanced. Chapter five reaches a conclusion, where findings of the present research are summarized as well as the limitations. At the end of chapter five, some suggestions are made for the further memetic study on Chinese catchwords.