A Memetic Study Of Mottos Of China's Universities

University motto is an interesting and important language phenomenon, but it has not received enough attention in the academic circle. The extant studies mainly focused on the significance, functions and so on of the mottos. Few of them studied it from the any one of the main linguistic theories.Both the academic circle and the society hold a critical attitude towards the current condition of China's university mottos because they lack of originality and effectiveness for the monotony of the sentence patterns, too many repetitions and so on. Most of them complain much but few of them could propose effective solutions. Their suggestions are hard to be effective since they are theoretically groundless.University mottos, as a kind of meme, could spread far and wide from the perspective of Memetics. However, it calls for good pragmatic competence of the motto makers. If the mottos meet the requirements of Memetics, they are improved much in educating the relevant readers on the one hand and they can provide the outsiders and even the foreigners with an effective shortcut to know the spirits of universities in question on the other hand.This thesis works out a Meme-Salience Model (MSM) by integrating Memetics and Salience Theory. It functions, on the one hand, as the standard of evaluating the quality of China's university mottos, and on the other hand, as the theoretic base for the motto makers or revisers.In light of MSM, we analyze 486 China's university mottos from three aspects: sound, meaning and sentence patterns. We discriminate their satisfactory parts from the unsatisfactory parts and provide the latter with solutions. The ultimate goal is to make China's university mottos function as well as they should do.