A Memetic Approach To Humor In Chinese Humorous Cellphone Text Messages

From ancient time till today, humor has always been a popular subject among scholars and has become a multi-disciplinary research subject, which involves philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, literature, medicine, anthropology, etc. This thesis chooses a special kind of verbal humor—humor in Chinese humorous cellphone text messages(CTM) as the research subject.This thesis intends to study humor in humorous CTM from the memetic perspective. Although Memetics is a relatively new theory, many scholars at home have adopted it in the field of linguistics and used it to explain various kinds of language phenomena. Amony these scholars He Ziran is an important representative and he developed the Language Meme theory. According to this theory, language itself is a series of memes and the meaning of language is brought out in the form of memes. Any word, phrase, sentence, paragraph or even article can become a meme as long as they are propagated and replicated through imitation.Based on the Language Meme theory and the Incongruity-Resolution theory (IR theory), this thesis aims to reveal the memetic mechanism of humor in humorous CTM through analyzing language in humorous messages. First, according to the language meme theory, the author will classify the language memes in humorous CTM and analyze the replication and transmission mode for them. On this basis, with the guidance of the IR theory, the author studies incongruities in humorous CTM from the perspective of language memes and finally reveals the memetic mechanism of humor in humorous CTM.The research shows that, according to language structure, from small language unit to big language unit, language memes are classified into vocabulary memes, sentences memes and paragraph memes. According to language style, there are poem memes, lyric memes, advertisement memes, notice memes, weather report memes, decree memes, couplets memes, riddle memes, mathematical formula memes, etc. These language memes are mainly replicated and transmitted in two ways, namely, repetition and analogy which respectively consist of several conditions. The research finally finds that language memes are closely related to the generation and resolution of incongruities in humorous CTM, in other words, language memes are closely related to humor in humorous CTM. On the one hand, the replication and transmission mode of language memes can cause various kinds of incongruities in humorous CTM; on the other hand, with the aid of the context and meaning of language memes, incongruities in humorous CTM will be resolved and the humor effect will be achieved.