Memetic Comparison Between E&C(English&Chinese) Network Speech

We are living in a century that is greatly influenced by Internet and there’s no way wecan stop that ever-increasing power which profoundly changed the way we live, study, workand think. And it would be ignorant for anyone to underestimate the power of language,therefore network speech, being one of its kind and with its particular background in which itsets, deserves much more effort in its researches. The seeking of cause of formation ofnetwork speech is the seeking of truth of our lives. Network speech came with the tide ofInternet. And it’s not hard to understand that when we’ve already known that Internet ownsadvantages like fastness, conveniences and efficiency etc. More and more people startchoosing to use this kind of language when they communicate on internet, making it anirreversible trend in the future. With its increasing influence, network speech draws theattention from many linguists.Memetics is a rather new subject in Pragmatics, but with its growing potential, it istriggering more and more interest in the academic field. Memetics is a new theory thatexplains rules of cultural evolution based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. Memetics providepeople with a more intrinsic explanation for the world and our lives. The transmission ofmeme is based on the mechanism of true imitations. Memes are the utmost basic unit ofcultural transmission. They get passed from generation to generation in a similar way as genedoes, and the way they get propagated is very much like that of viruses. This transmissiveattribute of meme subsumes an inherent link with network speech which bears the samequality. The phenomenon of survival of the fittest in organic evolution is also the case interms of network speech which, in its transmissive process, is managed to screening outdisqualified memes according to norms of their own.This thesis attempts to make memetic comparison between E&C network speech. Thisthesis gathered many network speeches that are popularly used in China and the United Statesfrom related websites, classified different types of network speech, and expatiated on theformation of network speech from the perspective of memetics. The thesis is endeavored onan exploration of how language memes set in two different language environments getextensive propagation. The study finds that these two language memes bear similar rules of formation.Moreover, both have similar user groups with youngsters accounting for much of the number.However, the content of the two are quite varied, which could be interpreted as distinctness intheir cultural background. This comparative study is a first attempt in linguistic field, whichcould be served as a complementary study for memetics by expatiating on how networkspeech evolves in dissimilar language environments.