A Study On Chinese Catchphrases From An Ecolinguisitic Perspective

In the 21st century, when the gobal ecological environment deteriorates, people began to care about the problem of how to keep survival. Language is a must-have of human society, without which we would withdraw into a primitive world. As a new and special type of language, Chinese catchphrases, humor and fashionable in style, have greatly grown in number and widely used among Chinese native speakers from 2007. The fast development and wide spreading of catchphrases trigger the reseach on them from ecological perspective. Fruitful studies have been made by researchers in China and abroad, which particularly probed from perspectives of collecting, characteristics, application and management. But questions such as how catchphrases are motivated and changes in network environment and how the catchphrases impact the envornment in its ecological system are still left for exploring and discussing.Ecolinguistics is a branch of linguistics, the theme of which can be traced back to Plato and gained attention since then. Through years of perseverant research of scholars like Haugen, Fill, Li Guozheng, Zhang Pu etc., the framework of ecolinguistics comes into lucidity. Yet the pity is that among all the topics that have been fully discussed, attention has seldomly been focused on the newborn "babies" of language, which will be a pitiful deficiency of the theory and seem to be so inappropriate in this ecology-valued epoch.Catchphrases are born to meet human requirements of communicating on the Internet, and are quickly spreading and developing in network environment. Essential part of the Internet culture as they are, catchphrases, which are in developing, are considered as inform and not accepted by mainstream culture and prescriptive language system. China, now in process of constructing socialism, advocates social culture with Chinese characteristics, according to which catchphrases will be considered as eccentric and abnormal. But the truth is that catchphrases, with characteristics and rules of their own, are undoubtedly the members of language ecological system, which qualifies them to gain attention from language researchers.In this study, it is believed that catchphrases can and should be explored from ecolinguistic perspective. By following ecological view of language, catchphrases and its envornment are considered as an ecological system, which is an analogy to natural ecological system. Two main theories of ecolinguitics, namely Theory of Language Holography and Nitch Theory, are applied to the analysis of catchphrases in its nature, environment, dynamic changes and vitality. The main findings are as follows:Firstly, catchphrases are organic individuals, who can go with their environment to form catchphrase ecological system. The ecological environment of catchphrases, which can be further divided into environment concerning nature, society and culture and environment concerning people, is artifical in nature with the feture of dynamic state, field, dependency and self-adjustment. The nature and feature of network environment are determined by its holographic nature. The network environment is analogical to natural enviornment not only in structure and function, but also in some process of changing. All in all, the network environment of catchphrases is an epitome of the natural environment, thus can take its place in the whole ecological system.Secondly, the catchphrases are always in process of coming into being and changing in its dynamic organic ecological system. The change of catchphrases can be observed both in morphology and semantics. Morphological changes, which are physical, will not cause any transformation in nature; while semantics variations, whose observation and analysis are more difficulte, do bring changes in nature or motivate some new meanings.1. The morphological changes of catchphrases embrace both pronunciation and formation. The catchphrases are concise in pronunciation, which includes a certain number of dialectal words (such as "Geili") and reiteratives (such as "萌萌哒"); a small part of translated words (such as "控") and foreign words with Chinese characters(such as "hold住") and a rather big protion of phonetic duplicated words (such as "杯具").The catchphrases in form of short sentences are also rhythmic in pronunciation, such as "且……且……". As for formation, the mono-morphmic words are declining whileas words in groups are increasing. Conversion is also a prevailing phenomenon in grammatical function, where noun to noun and noun to adjective are the most common types. Different in motivation, the morphological changes are meeting the needs of language development and human communication.2. The semantic changes of catchphrases are closely related to environment. In the temporarily balanced ecological system, any changes in environment will produce some "nourishing materials" for information, which can be processed into "structural components" by people’s cognition. In the network environment, these "structural components" will be assembled into various types of "resource elements", including "elements of semantic resources", that can be acceptedby the catchphrase ecological system. The "resource elements" stimulate the need of changes in language itself and in human communication, and then cause changes in the original distribution of language resources, which leads to the production of new meanings. The new meanings, together with its unique features in pronunciation and grammar, will be widely spread and finally result in the producing of new catchphrases. In the whole process, environment, human beings and semantic nitch are playing the role of information source, knowledge source and motivation.Thirdly, the semantic nitch of catchphrases can be regarded as their life indicators. Detailed studies on 70 catchphrases are carried out to verify the rules in semantic nitch and catchphrase vitality. The width of catchphrase semantic nitch is considered to be an important parameter to the ability of making use of resources in environment and can be used to measure the vatliry of catchphrases on a certain degree. Generally, the wider the semantic nitch, the more vital the catchphrases will be. Our study found out that the semantic nitch for common words is usually around 6, when the number rises up to 7, due to the changes in envorinment, the new temporary meaning has a high possibility to become a catchphrase meaning.Last but not least, this study, based on PSR model, suggests applying the previous findings into a warning mechanism to improve the intelligence of catchphrase recognition. It is theoretically possible to use the semantic nitch as one of the indicators in the Catchphrase Eco-Warning Meachism.The oriniality and novelty of this study lies in the following aspect: 1. it is a first relative large-scale collection of catchphrases from 2007 and detailed description on their definition, feature, nature and environment; 2. under the guidance of ecological language view, it is a first try of quantitive analysis on the morphological and semantic change with the support of Theory of Language Holography and Nitch Theory, which is siginigicant for the exploration of the rules and motivations of changes; 3. a ecological lexical reseach model was firstly constructed, which conbines the present "Haugen Model" and "Halliday Model", to observe the rules of change in environment and help build an ecological waring mechanism and propse ecological language policies; 4. semantic nitch and Catchphrase Eco-Warning Meachism, newly proposed in this study, can be applied into future catchphrase recognition to help improving the intelligence of pubic opinion monitoring in the Internet.