On The Realization Of The Strong Memes In Newspaper Headlines

The ways of getting information are various in the over-communicated society. So the newspaper, as a traditional media, faces the rising challenge of being easily neglected and inundated in the information, and the news writers have only a tiny window of opportunity to grab the readers'attention .However, a short and powerful headline will draw people's unstable attraction to what has happened in the world.Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. A meme, invented to suggest a strong analogy with genes, is a unit of cultural imitation and a self-propagating idea much like a biological or computer virus. The contagious nature of memes has such a natural affinity with headline that it drives many news writers to conduct their research from the perspective of memes. Following them, the present research explores how to turn a newspaper headline into a strong meme, in view of the increasing importance of newspaper headline in the over-communicated society and the insufficient study about them. Strong meme in this thesis refers to: legends, idioms and sayings, which are handed down from ancient time until today.Based on the adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren (2000), and enlightened by the theory of memes, this thesis attempts to construct a conceptual framework for the analysis of strong meme creation. The general argument is that successful headlines can be regarded as meme products and the meme products are the outcome of writers'adaptive behavior. Human minds and other memes in the meme pool constitute the selective environment of memes. The primary contextual correlates of adaptability for strong memes basically include: the inherited hardwired cognitive architecture of the brain; the emotional status of mind and the acquired cultural software with which we are socialized. The authentic examples are all taken from the latest issues of The New York Times, which is the authority of the newspapers in America. After the manual identification, we can conclude that in order to make a newspaper headline emerge from its competitors as a strong meme, writers must make negotiable choices to make it adapted well to its surroundings. During the whole process of adaptation, an important strategy that accompanies the newspaper headline writers is attaching a new or weak meme to a strong meme, either"a strong meme of content"or"a strong meme of form"to enhance its strength. The research results show that the likelihood for headlines to be a strong meme can be greatly enhanced by the writers'deliberate choices.