A Study On Network Catchwords From The Perspective Of Language Deviation

With the development and constant changes of society, internet, as “the forth media”following broadcast, TV and newspaper, has stepped into people’s daily life imperceptibly.As an important derivative of this dynamic environment, network catchwords have become anessential tool for communication among netizens and have developed into a special socialdialect and a new nonstandardized language variant with its spreading. Network catchwordswhich exemplify the characteristics of innovation, entertainment, simplicity, fashion,barbarism and so on are of great diversity, thus presenting the writing style often contrary totraditional norms of Chinese characters, whose types are mainly reflected on the formation ofnumbers, characters, alphabets, semiotics and code-mixings.In view of this phenomenon, the thesis explores the classification of network catchwordsfrom the perspective of language deviation, whose core theory is orderly heterogeneoustheory, proposed by Labov. Connected with the extensive corpus collection, the forms ofnetwork catchwords deviation can be categorizes into five types: phonological deviation,lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, semantic deviation and graphological deviation. Theemergence of these deviation forms has both its internal and external factors, the former ofwhich involves the attribute of language itself and the pragmatic purpose of communicatorswhile the latter mainly relates to the social and cultural elements. Owing to the characteristicsof barbarism and entertainment, a great number of informal expressions keep “invading”people’s language habits from on line to off line, arousing heat discussions on this newlanguage phenomenon. On the basis of network catchwords deviation study, a survey on thepragmatic value, prospect and attitude towards network catchwords is carried out in the thesiswhich includes random test, on-line questionnaire and off-line questionnaire. Based ondetailed data collection, analysis and contrast between on-line and off-line questionnaires, arelatively objective evaluation and prediction are concluded to provide a reference for theresearch on this emerging language phenomenon.