A Study Of The Generative Mechanisms Of Verbal Humor In CCTV Spring Festival Gala Language Programs From The Perspective Of Language Memes

Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop? Richard Dawkins suggests culture evolves and memes are cultural replicators, subject to variation and selection in the same way as genes in the biological world. Meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in the book The Selfish Gene and is the core term of memetics which is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. Since it was proposed, considerable scholars have demonstrated extreme interest and applied it to a wider scope in addition to biology. The language meme is one of the manifestations of memetic application to linguistics.CCTV Spring Festival Gala held in new year’s eve is a cultural feast expected and shared by Chinese all over the world. Among all the programs of SFG, language programs including sketches and cross talks are the most attractive part for they create a joyful atmosphere and bring people much laughter. Given this, language programs in CCTV Spring Festival Gala are very fit for studying verbal humor. Studies concerning verbal humor in CCTV Spring Festival Gala language programs from a memetic perspective are not few. Some of them have tried to expound the memetic phenomena in verbal humor and some have applied memetics to analyze verbal humor from transmission and replication ways of language memes, namely genotype and phenotyepe, but studies concerning a systematical and complete analysis of the generative mechanisms of verbal humor from the perspective of memetics are relatively few. Therefore, the author determines to study the generative mechanisms of verbal humor in CCTV Spring Festival Gala language programs from the perspective of language memes.Generally only one main question is explored in this thesis and that is how verbal humor in CCTV Spring Festival Gala language programs is produced by language memes. To be specific, it involves four questions:1. Whether can verbal humor be produced by transmission and replication ways of language memes and if yes, how?2. Whether can verbal humor be produced by variation of language memes and if yes, how?3. Whether can verbal humor be produced by other aspects of language memes and if yes, how?4. Which aspect of language memes contributes most to the verbal humor in CCTV Spring Festival Gala language programs?After analysis, it’s found that verbal humor can be produced by transmission and replication ways of language memes which includes repetition and analogy. Verbal humor can be produced by variation of language memes which comprises rebirth of old language memes and strengthening of weak language memes, and emergence of memeplexes. In addition, verbal humor can also be produced by deliberate misinterpretation of language memes and by disharmony between default context and new context of language memes. Deliberate misinterpretation of language memes includes deliberate misinterpretation of homophonic language memes, polysemous language memes and the literal meaning of language memes. Disharmony between default context and new context of language memes is analyzed from the lexical and syntactical level of language memes. In addition, it’s also found in 2010-2014 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, deliberate misinterpretation of language memes are the most frequently adopted one to provoke verbal humor, which is followed ways of language memes to be transmitted and replicated, disharmony between default context and new context of language memes and variation of language memes in sequence.All together the thesis contains five parts. Chapter one is a brief introduction of this thesis which points out the research background, research significance and organization of this thesis. Chapter two is devoted to the literature review. In this chapter, memes, language memes and verbal humor are reviewed. Chapter three describes the methodology of this thesis which includes the research questions, data collection and research procedure. Chapter four detailedly analyzes the generative mechanisms of verbal humor in CCTV Spring Festival Gala language programs from four aspects with language memes as theoretical base. Chapter five is the conclusion part summarizing the major findings of the whole thesis, pointing out the limitations of this thesis and providing some suggestions for further studies.