| Memetics is a new theory to explain the law of cultural evolution on the basis of Darwin’s view on biological evolution. Firstly it is originated from “mimeme” in Greek referring to the things being imitated, meme mainly transmits in the ways of being imitated or copied. Therefore imitation is the core concept of meme. To some extent, all the things that can be copied or transmitted by imitation can be called meme. Since the heritage and evolution of culture shares some similarity with the duplication and inheritance of genes in forms, things produced with one single meme refer to the cultural transmission process. Being the transmit unit of culture, meme is also the ordinary method for cultural transmission.Language can be learned and imitated as an important carrier of culture,which endows that language is the basic attributes of meme.With the explosive development of the automobile manufacturing industry, automobile ownership has seen geometric growth. As a special language upstart, BSL(Bumper Sticker Language) comes up more and more into our vision and life, maintaining the momentum of prairie fire.BSL is a brand-new language variant in profound connection with meme.It transmits like virus and it inherits and develops like gene as well.Meanwhile, there exists competition among the memes of BSL trying to be copied and transmitted by hosts(the car owners who can accept the meme) in order to become strong language meme. The presentation anddevelopment of memetics provide a brand-new research perspective and direction for BSL.This essay is composed of five chapters with the first chapter mainly explaining the background, objective and importance of the research as well as the problems settled by the research, the data collection situation and the chapter distribution of the whole essay. The second chapter is the general review of literature, illustrating the concept of meme, the relations between meme and language and the research on meme both at home and abroad. Also, it summarizes the definition, origination and development of BSL as well as the research situation of predecessors and figures out its research value under the perspective of meme. The third chapter is the theoretical framework of the whole essay, pointing out the theories relative to meme including strong meme and weak meme, the life cycle of meme,the features of strong meme, meme and meme complex, host and vector in order to provide theoretical foundation for the meme research of BSL. The fourth chapter is the major body of this essay. The fourth chapter analyses the relationship between BSL and meme from the following parts. First, it generalizes the features of strong BSL meme(that is the transmissibility,entertainment value, replicability, imitativeness, storability and reasonability, which also conforms with the three features of strong meme of fidelity, fecundity and longevity) and the categories under the characteristics of strong meme. Second, it researches the forms of BSLmeme transmission, which is categorized in the genotype and phenotype while showing the BSL meme transmission process of how the BSL transmits under the theory of meme life cycle. And last analyzes the transmission causes of BSL meme from both internal and external point of view. The fifth chapter is the conclusion of this essay, analyzing the achievements, disadvantages and development prospect of the research. |
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