A Study Of XX-ZU Words From The Perspective Of Memetics

In November 2009, there was a report about a group of graduates who live in poor conditions and still work hard for a better future, which attracted much attention of the public. Such kind of people are grouped and named as "the Ant Tribe" due to the similar situations they are in and the characteristics they bear with ants. With the emergence and popularity of "the Ant Tribe", people are more inclined to group themselves into different types of tribes, known as "XX zu", among which are NEET, DINK, Freeter, 月光族,裸婚族, etc. The XX zu words not only reflect the lifestyles emerging and existed, but also convey much information about the development of language and culture.Memetics is a new theory based on Darwin’s Evolution Theory, studying the evolution of culture. As the core term of memetics, meme plays a crucial rule during the process of transmission. Many researchers have devoted themselves to the theory and it is in full swing abroad. However, the theory of memetics is relatively new in China. It was in 1999 that the term was first brought in China in an article "The Culture Vulture" which introduces the contents of Blackmore’s book "The Meme Machine". Since then, the theory has been given greater attention to in the Chinese academic circle. Based on the previous researches, the author attempted to analyze the XX-words from the perspective of memetics. In order to do the research more comprehensively, the author collected 401 words about XX-zu words from the internet and both qualitative and quantitative analyses are adopted. Under the framework of memetics, the thesis analyzes the transmission modes of XX zu words, that is, memetic genotype and memetic phenotype. And the author finds that memetic phenotype plays a major role in the process of "XX-Zu Words" transmission. Furthermore, the features of XX zu words are also interpreted from the memetic perspective as longevity, fecundity and copy-fidelity. What’s more, the reasons for the popularity of the XX zu words as successful memes are summed up into three factors, which are social factor, language factors as well as factor respectively. No doubt there are some limitations of the thesis, but it is hoped that the thesis will be beneficial to the understanding of the language phenomena of XX zu words as well as the theory of memetics, and also shed light on the future studies.