An Adaptive Study On The Language Memes In Twitter

Since the emergence of twitter in2006, it has become one of the top ten mostvisited websites throughout the world. Twitter is a social network which can providemicro-blog service. As a new medium of information transmission, twitter iswidespread throughout the world for its ease of operation, real-time post and “zerobarriers to entry”. Owing to wired networks, wireless networks and communicationtechnology, there are hundreds of millions of tweets posted daily, highlights theenormous personal, business and social value, including creating and enhancingpersonal values, enhancing the influence of celebrities, providing marketing channelsfor corporations, participating in the public events, constructing the charity and so on.This thesis aims to study the characteristics and the inherent laws of the most populartweets in common from the perspective of linguistics. The thesis discusses theconcept of strong meme, the four stages of the life cycle in meme, and some relevantstudies on adaptation theory. Combined with the exploration and analysis of a largenumber of tweet cases, the study has revealed that tweets became popular byreplicating and transmission via twitter. The prevalence of tweets makes therealization of a strong meme, which have contributed to the language memephenomena eventually. The most retweeted tweets hold the properties of simplicity,novelty, authority and emotional drive, except for the basic selection criteria of strongmemes. In order to possess these crucial properties, the language should makecontinuous choices and adaptations to the communicative context such as mentalworld, social world and physical world of utterers, in addition to the adaptation to thelinguistic level. The study presents some theoretical and practical significance. Fromtheoretical perspective, it is a tentative exploration of the phenomenon of languagememes in the perspective of adaptation theory. From practical perspective, the studycould provide reference to a wide range of groups including individual, business,community organization and government so as to post more efficient tweets in twitter.