| The development of Internet media has brought great changes to people's lives and the field of language.As a variant of language,cyber neologism is widely used by netizens in their online communications.The unique language features and forms of cyber neologism are novel supplement of the traditional language,and thus it attracts the attention of scholars both at home and abroad and becomes a hot topic of study.The previous studies on cyber neologism are mainly on its definition,characteristics and pragmatic effects,while the studies on its generation and transmission are rarely documented.In order to help people get deeper insight of cyber neologisms,a comprehensive discussion and analysis on cyber neologisms is necessary.Memetics is a brand new theory of culturology,which provides a new perspective for the analysis of various social and linguistic phenomena.Based on Meme Theory,the present study intends to make an intensive study on the generation and transmission of cyber neologisms in 2016-2017,which are collected from authoritative websites,BBS,Wechat,Post Bars and so on.This study makes use of qualitative and quantitative study and makes a detailed exploration into the generation and transmission of cyber neologisms from memetic perspective by a thorough analysis of the collected data,and the present study finds:Firstly,the principal generative ways for cyber neologisms include phonological deviation,lexical deviation,semantic deviation and graphological deviation,the generation undergoes four replication stages and the cyber neologisms created are of high fecundity,fidelity and longevity and conform to the selection criteria for successful memes.Secondly,the transmission for cyber neologisms is of two major types: genotype transmission and phenotype transmission,and the novelty,timeliness,simplification,variability and selectivity promote the replication and transmission of cyber neologisms.Thirdly,cyber neologisms undergo a great variety of semantic changes in transmission,and semantic imitation,semantic misinterpretation and semantic expansion are the major types of changes,and factors such as netizens' association,imagination,original memes,host's cognitive competence and context contribute to these changes.Besides,these semantic changes also enable cyber neologisms to have longer lifespan by higher frequency of repetition together with unique linguistic features and specific pragmatic functions. |
PDF Full Text Request