A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Internet Catchwords

The Internet has entered into thousands upon thousands of families, and has been changingour life. Language, as the most important communication tool, is undergoing the baptism of theInternet and is continuously changing which becomes more and more profused.The Internet catchword, as a new language variety, has played a very important role in theComputer-mediated communication (shortened as CMC) and has become more and morepopular with netizens. In recent years, the study on the Internet catchword spreads in every field,such as communication, social psychology, linguistics, philosophical ethics and so on. As to thelinguistics, the main study perspective is from the static description of the constitutivecharacteristics and social conventions of the Internet catchwords, and there still lacks of thesystematical study on the Internet catchwords. This thesis tries making a dynamic analysis of theInternet catchwords from the pragmatic perspective.On the basis of the main pragmatic principles, the author wants to make clear whether thiskind of new language variety can obey these traditional pragmatic principles or not. Byanalyzing the language materials collected from the network, the author argues to what extentthey can obey these traditional pragmatic principles and to what extent they violate thesetraditional pragmatic principles. As for Austin’s speech act theory, the author introduces the mainideas of Austin on speech act, and thinks that the Internet catchwords obey this principle,because every catchword has its own "locutionary act", "illocutionary act", and "perlocutionaryact", and they have certain conversational implicature. As for Sperber and Wilson’s Relevancetheory, the author introduces the optimal relevance and presumption, and deliberates on theapplication of this principle in the network context. The author analyzes the ostensive-inferentialprocess in details in CMC. As for Grice’s cooperative principle, the author mainly introduces thefour maxims of this principle (the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relationand the maxim of manner) and makes a detailed analysis of the conditions of violation of thesemaxims in the Internet catchwords. As for Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory and Leech’spoliteness theory, the author introduces their main thoughts on politeness and also compares theirthoughts with the Chinese politeness principle which is advanced by Gu Yueguo. The author advances that this principle is the most distinctive difference between the computer-mediatedcommunication and the daily communication. The author believes that there exist a lot ofphenomena that the communication on the network seriously violates the politeness principledue to the special context of the Internet communication.After analyzing the application of the traditional pragmatic principles in the Internetcatchwords, the author introduces the turn-taking rule in the Internet catchwords. The authoradvances that there is distinctive difference between the computer-mediated communication andthe daily communication in the turn switch.In the following passages, the author also introduces the contextual theory and analyzes thespecial context of the computer-mediated communication. Generally speaking, the context canbe divided into linguistic context and extra-linguistic context. Different from the context in ourdaily communication, the context of CMC is "absent" instead of "present", thus this kind ofcommunication has its own specific characteristics and the meanings of the Internet catchwordsare also different in the different context.Besides, the author also delibrates the definition, property, origin, pragmatic features andtypes of the Internet catchwords from the linguistic perspective. The author hopes that furtherstudy from the pragmatics perspective can be carried out in the future. For instance, newpragmatic principles can be advanced to compensate the shortage of the traditional pragmaticprinciples on the application in the Internet catchwords.