A Study On The Pragmatic Functions Of Chinese Cyber Word "Qin" From Memetic Perspective

Studies on internet language have always been very active in the realm of academic research.With an overall review of the literature in this field,it is not difficult to notice that early studies on internet language in Chinese primarily focus on the public attitudes towards netspeaking,and whether or not it is accurate to define netspeaking as a language.The influence of internet language on natural language has also been a focus of the researches during this period of time.However,as internet becomes more prevalent,internet language itself has also become a vital tool of communication among youngster.Consequently,studies on netspeaking have started to concentrate on semantic and pragmatic perspectives of internet language.This thesis is intended to study the pragmatic functions of cyber word "qin" by applying the theory of memetics.The primary purpose of this study is to answer the following three research questions.First,what kind of pragmatic functions does the word "qin" serve in the context of internet? Second,what are the selective advantages of the word "qin"? Third,how does the replication mechanism of the word "qin" works? In order to fully answer those questions,two kinds of research tools are applied,a survey that investigates the public attitude towards this cyber word and a corpus of 50 dialogues that occurred between sellers and buyers on Taobao site.Each dialogue in corpus contains at least one occurrence of the word "qin".And the function of the word is then carefully studied by considering the entire context of the conversation.The survey is administered to 200 candidates between the age of 19 and 22,half male and half female.Results of the survey are converted into different kinds of diagrams to get a better and clear understanding of the data.The results of the research reveal that the word realizes three pragmatic functions,namely marker of politeness,addresser and conversation initiator.The meme has been so successful largely because of its two selective advantages.First,it is linguistically more favorable than others,since most of the internet communications are completed by typing the characters,"qin",as a monosyllable,is able to save the energy and time of typing and thus is able to meet the demand of communicators.Second,it is also highly compatible to the already existing memes.The mechanism of it replication is extremely complex,the results of the study shows that the process of this replication works with influences from both internal psychological factors and extern physical provisions.