A Study On Strong Memes In The Lyrics Of English Popular Songs

Meme is a unit of cultural information,which is inherited like a gene and spreads like a virus.The lyrics of English popular songs belong to a special form of language,which have a powerful replication with the characteristics of high frequency and profound impacts on the society.Therefore,they can be regarded as strong memes in the lyrics of English popular songs.As one of the most universal and influential forms of contemporary culture,the strong memes of song lyrics deserve study as it is significant for songwriters,singers and the audience.The author collects the lyrics of 300 English popular songs from the ranking charts of UK Chart,American Billboard and Baidu Music,which constitute a small corpus of lyrics.By the quantitative and qualitative studies of the corpus,the author finds out that creating strong memes in the lyrics of English popular songs is a process of adaptation to correlated contextual factor in the three worlds,namely,the mental world,the social world and the physical world.Because the length of this thesis is limited and the most important function of popular song lyrics is expressing inner feelings or emotions,the thesis only studies the adaptation to the audience's mental world.Here are the results of the study.Firstly,compared to Brown corpus,rich meanings and strong emotions are conveyed by refined and simple language in the lyrics,which is the result of adapting to the constraints of working memory.Secondly,lyrical expressing is best conveyed by the intercommunication of the first-person and second-person;both the keyword list and the wordlist of nouns indicate that love is the top theme of the lyrics and the everlasting topic in the world;the friendship lyrics mainly express the situation of mutual help,so the when-clauses and if-clauses are highly frequented.These are the result of adapting to the audience's psychological needs,especial their desire for love involving both giving and receiving love.Thirdly,some methods of creating strong memes are proposed,such as,alliteration,repetition and parallelism.