A Memetic Approach To The Analysis Of The Generation And Transmission Of Chinese Parody

The theory of memetics is first proposed by Richard Dawkins, a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist in Oxford University, in his best seller book The Selfish Gene in 1976. Based on Darwinian evolutionism, memetics tries to elaborate the cultural evolutionism. According to memetics, meme is the unit of cultural information or the replicator of culture, whose core is imitation. Any information unit such as music, melody, idea, thought, clothes, fashion, building, chain letter, virus marketing, book, map and religion can be called a meme as long as it is capable of replicating and spreading by imitation.Since the introduction of memetics into China, some domestic scholars have applied the theory into language phenomena, which is a relative new research field. The language meme explains the features and rules of language replication and transmission. During verbal communication, the selection and use of language is the process of the competing, replicating and spreading of language memes. The replication and transmission of language memes have two ways:one is genotype referring to "the same contents but different forms"; the other is phenotype referring to "the same forms but different contents". During replication and transmission, a meme goes through four stages:assimilation, retention, expressivity and transmission. During the four stages, the meme depends on several selection criteria. Those of which are in accordance with the selection criteria can better replicate and spread themselves.Human beings are born with imitation. This ability as reflected in language is one of the applications of rhetoric, that is, parody. During the development of Chinese rhetoric, parody is an old but new figure of speech. It is old because it can be traced back to Qing Dynasty and Han Dynasty. It is new, however, denoting that it had not acquired the term "fang ni" (parody) until it was fist propose by Chen Wangdao in his book An Introduction to Rhetoric in 1932. As for the studies of Chinese parody, domestic scholars have mainly explored it from the perspectives of rhetoric, aesthetics, cognitive linguistics, psychological and pragmatics. However, few of them have applied memetics into the studies of parody. Therefore, the present study attempts to use memetics to research the generative mechanism and transmission process of parody.This study puts forward the following three questions.1. What is the generative mechanism of parody?2. Does the replication and transmission of parody follow the four stages of replication and transmission of meme?3. Is the replication and transmission of parody dependent on the selection criteria?Through the memetic studies of parody, this study draws several conclusions as follows.1. The generative mechanism of parody follows the phenotype but not the genotype;2. The replication and transmission of parody is in accordance with the four stages of meme replication and transmission. It goes through noumenon assimilation, noumenon retention, profile model expressivity and profile model transmission.3. The replication and transmission of parody relies on the selection criteria, namely, objective criteria, subjective criteria and intersubjective criteria.On the basis of memetics, the present study makes a tentative study of the generation and transmission of parody. The memetic theory provides the study of parody with a new perspective both theoretically and practically. First, the present study contributes to the understanding of memetics which also expands its research fields. Second, it sheds new light on the study of parody, which, by means of replicating and transmitting, makes use of language more expressive.