On Campus Buzzwords Variation From The Perspective Of Memetics

Campus buzzword as a standardized language phenomenon attracts more andmore people’s attention, for it not only reflects the innovation and disseminationcapabilities of college students, but also indirectly reflects the unique social andcultural mentality of this group. With the development of society, campus buzzwordis experiencing kinds of changes, and many campus buzzword variations appear.Since campus buzzword variation is an indispensable component in the process oflanguage development, the analysis of it is very meaningful.In this thesis, the author will analyze the phenomenon of campus buzzwordvariation from the perspective of memetics. The term “meme” was first introduced byRichard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, in which he believes that evolutioncannot only exist in biology, human culture also endures evolution and variation.Gene serves as the biological replicator, while meme can be considered as the carrierof culture. Therefore, meme is of great benefit to language development and toanalyze campus buzzword variation from the perspective of memetics will befacilitative to language learning and to the exploration of the evolutional law ofcampus buzzwords. Since college students are well-educated, they have strongcapacity in language creativeness and language transmission. Thus taking collegestudents as the object to study language variation is a good choice. In this thesis, theauthor made an investigation among200college students in the Radio and FilmCollege of Chengdu University of Technology through questionnaires. Theinvestigation is aiming at collecting the present campus buzzword data and finding thedevelopmental tendency of campus buzzword variation. Based on the qualitative analysis of the collected data, the paper discusses campus buzzword variation fromthe aspects of phonology, lexicology, semantics and grammar.Based on the research, this thesis tries to illustrate the characteristics of campusbuzzword memes: fashionability, briefness and sociality. After listing three factorsthat may affect the development of buzzwords, the author also attempts to forecast thefuture of campus buzzwords, although it is a really tough work for the development ofbuzzword is influenced by a variety of factors. In addition, this research offers peoplea correct attitude towards campus buzzword memes and provides people with anotherperspective to explore the campus buzzword variations.