A Memetic Approach To Chinese Catchwords

Memetics, based on Darwinian evolution, is created to interpret the evolution of culture. A meme is a basic unit in cultural evolution and is transmitted by means of imitation. In 2005, He Ziran proposed the theory of linguistic memeitcs and argued that language is a kind of memes, which reveals the internal laws of linguistic development and provides a new angle for the research on languages and culture. Catchwords, as a special linguistic and memetic phenomenon, have been playing a vital role in our daily life because they can record history, reflect social reality and penetrate every era. This thesis,based on memetics, aims to answer the following three questions: 1) How are Chinese catchwords created? 2) Why have some Chinese catchwords gained more prevalence than others? 3) How are Chinese catchword memes selected,replicated,transmitted and varied from the perspective of memetics?This thesis reviews the previous studies on catchwords and memetics. And then, in order to make this study reliable and valid, the present research adopts the method of literature retrieval to collect Chinese catchwords from authoritative newspapers, magazines,books, websites and so forth. Then taking the collected catchwords as examples, this thesis conducts the memetic study on them.Through the analyses, the author finds that: 1) The use of language and the linguistic communication are two main producing ways in which catchwords come into being; 2)Catchwords can be used by individuals frequently over a period of time due to the hype of media, massive social responses and the higher cognitive ability of individuals; 3) In response to the internal evolutionary mechanism of catchword memes, catchword memes must go through selection, replication, transmission and variation so as to be strong memes.Chinese catchwords can be selected in every stage of their life cycle due to the novelty,simplicity, practicality and publicity, and they always achieve their replication on phonetic and phrasal level. Moreover, Chinese catchword memes succeed in their transmission by genotype and phenotype. Thanks to the internal factors, namely, the features of catchwords,and the external factors, such as social environment, scientific and technological development and so forth, Chinese catchword memes can go through the variation that often occurs on word level and sentence level.