A Study On Pragmatic Effect Of Internet Catchwords From The Perspective Of Memetics

With the development of society and technology, network, as one of the communication tools among human beings, has penetrated into people’s daily work and life and is playing an important role. Network provides a platform by which people are able to communicate directly with people living in different places. This greatly shortens the distance among people. During communication over the network, people usually employ more succinct language forms to express rich content. Accordingly, a bourgeoning language variation, the internet catchword, is emerging.In recent years, the studies on the internet catchword mainly focus on the fields of communication, psychology, sociology, journalism and linguistics. However, most studies take such linguistic branches as pragmatics, semantics, lexicology, syntactic and ecolinguistics as their theoretical supports. This thesis takes a new linguistic theory, memetics, as its theoretical basis to study the internet catchword systematically and analyzes its pragmatic effects. Memetics is a relatively new theory which explains the rules of cultural evolution based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. It states that any entity that can be imitated, replicated and transmitted can be called memes. Like other words in language, the internet catchword is inherited and developed by being imitated, replicated and transmitted by the users. Hence, the imitation, replication and transmission of the internet catchword are typical meme phenomenon.Literature survey and inductive method are used in this study. By analyzing and studying these relevant literature materials, this thesis puts forward fresh research perspective which broadened research scope in this field. This thesis first systematically analyzed the meme phenomenon of internet catchwords including meme and related meme concepts, characteristics and categories of internet catchwords, linguistic features of internet catchword meme and its formation process. The "Bei+XX" structure of the internet catchword possesses the characteristics of novelty and difference in structure. The grammar has been expanded by shaking off shackles of traditional grammar during the process of transmission and the meaning also has a great change. This thesis taking "Bei+XX" as an example and its background as a hitting-point analyzes the word formation of the "Bei+XX" structure, the process of its replication and transmission and the internal and external reasons why this structure can become a strong meme. This thesis further explored its pragmatic effect and came to a conclusion that it can produce humorous effect, ironical effect and catchy effect. They accord with the pragmatic effects of the whole internet catchwords, which verified the pragmatic effects of the internet catchwords.