Comparative And Contrastive Study Of Vocabulary In Netspeak Between English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Memetics

The rapid development of the Internet has a profound impact on people’s lifestyle. As the product ofnetwork culture, netspeak has attracted great attention in linguistic field both abroad and at home. Besides, thedifferences between Chinese and western culture will inevitably influence the language users’ lexical cognitionand usage. Therefore, it is highly important to make comparative and contrastive researches on netspeak betweenEnglish and Chinese. It will greatly help English learners to clear obstacles in network communication and havea better understanding of foreign cultures. Memetics, based on the view of Darwin’s theory of evolution, can beapplied to explain culture evolution. It provides a newly perspective on netspeak research. The present studyaims to take the vocabulary of netspeak in Chinese and English as the research point, making comparative andcontrastive study on replication and transmission of the two netspeak memes from perspective of memetics.Three kinds of data are adopted in this paper. Firstly, the author collects original data by participation and divingobservations from chat rooms, BBC, etc. Secondly, the author selects netspeak from published dictionaries andonline dictionaries. Thirdly, the data is from the existing online database.This paper mainly consists of seven parts. Chapter one is a brief introduction. It expounds the researchbackground, significance and research purposes. Chapter two is literature review, which consists of the researchresults of the netspeak and memetics at home and abroad. Furthermore, the innovation of the present research isalso indicated. Chapter three is the description of the theoretical framework as well as relevant concepts. Theauthor presents the definition of the meme, the relationship between meme and imitation, the life span of meme,strong meme and weak meme and lexical stencil. Chapter four is the design of the present research, whichconsists of research questions, data collection and research method. Chapter five and six, which are the centralparts of the present thesis, are devoted to make comparison and contrast between English netspeak and Chinesenetspeak from the perspective of memetics. In Chapter five, the author tries to apply memetics to analyzesimilarities in the vocabulary of netspeak in Chinese and English. It will be discussed in respect of meme’s lifespan from the following respects: assimilation, retention, expression, transmission, imitation of English andChinese netspeak. The conclusion is that there exist many similarities in vocabulary of netspeak betweenChinese and English. In Chapter six, the author contrasts the different meme systems, different culturalenvironment that meme develops and differences in hosts to get the reasons of differences in English netspeakand Chinese netspeak. Furthermore, Leet is studied as the typical English netspeak and Lexical stencil isexampled as the typical Chinese netspeak. Chapter seven is the conclusion part of this paper which reached that English netspeak and Chinese netspeak have the similarities from the perspective of memetics. In order tosurvive, both of netspeak memes go through the same process of replication and transmission. However, thedifferences between two netspeaks lie in the different language meme system, different hosts and the culturalenvironment.