A Memetic Study Of Chinese Catchwords

As a new theory explaining cultural transmission and evolution, memetics has attracted extensive attention both at home and abroad. Memetics holds that just like genes in biology, there are memes in culture whose replication, transmission, selection and variation make the culture transmit among people and be passed down from one generation to another and develop over the years. The previous researches show that memetics can give a good explanation to many cultural phenomena. Hence, language, an important part of culture, can also be well expounded in the perspective of memetics and this paper tries to make a memetic study of Chinese catchwords.We believe that language is not only the carrier of memes, but a kind of meme itself as it is also acquired and transmitted through imitation and it undergoes replication, selection and variation as well, which are the three essential elements of all evolutionary sciences including memetics. The Chinese language is a meme pool comprised of linguistic entity memes and linguistic structure memes. The former includes independent words, phrases, sentences, and even texts, while, the latter refers to the fixed phrasal, sentential and textual structures. Different memes vary in the ability to replicate and thus we can classify them into strong memes and weak memes using this criterion. Chinese catchwords are the strong memes in the Chinese meme pool. The replication of Chinese catchwords memes proceeds in two ways:copy-the-product and copy-the-instruction which correspond to the replication of linguistic entity memes and linguistic structure memes respectively. The reason that catchwords can be popular lies in the success of pervasive replication and transmission of these linguistic memes. They succeed in extensive replication because they satisfy one or more criteria of the selection criteria for Chinese catchwords, namely, novelty, simplicity, practicality, authority and publicity. In the process of meme replication, variation may occur. For linguistic memes, variation proceeds in two ways, namely, mutation and recombination. Variations lead to not only the changes of meaning, pronunciation and form of words, but also the generation of new words, phrase and structures, and thus contribute to the enrichment and evolution of language. In Chinese, there are many catchwords coming from the variation of original memes. The variation of these memes is mainly attributed to the intrinsic variability of linguistic memes, human beings' creativity and their nature for novelty and uniqueness.