A Study On The Rise And Fall Of Internet Catchwords From The Perspective Of Cognitive Memetics

In recent years, the rapid development of the network has a huge impact on people’s lives. More and more people begin to pay attention to the network information. They communicate with each other, go shopping, and entertaining, writing email, writing advertisements, etc. on the Internet. In order to facilitate the social exchange, a new kind of catchwords emerged. This kind of catchwords is very popular among netizens for its distinctive characteristics, concise and comprehensive features and harmonious and interesting traits. And then they expand to social groups and are recognized and accepted by people in the society. It is called network catchwords. Due to free forms, distinct characteristics, high replicability and entertainment, network catchwords have been widely imitated and transmitted. Therefore, more and more scholars study this phenomenon from different angles. They not only studied network catchwords from the perspective of translation, but also from the perspective of linguistics, even from sociology. But most of the articles are ordinary trait and they have no-depth study. Besides, the theories they used cannot accurately describe the reasons for the spread of network catchwords. So it is necessary to explore the generation and propagation mechanisms of network catchwords from a new perspective by using a new theory so as to grasp the development direction and guide it towards a healthy direction.Memetics is a new theory. It aims to explain the law of cultural evolution based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. The term Meme was first proposed in the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in 1976, who was a Zoologist of Oxford University. Memes can be divided into strong memes and weak memes. Network catchwords are a new form of language, they have a very close relationship with Memetics. In modern society, only through intense competition can anything survive including network catchwords, which is the same developing way as the strong memes. The development process of network catchwords is the replication process of memes, so it is rational to study the causes and development of network catchwords from Memetics. Besides, there are not enough people who study network catchwords from Memetics and the research is still not deep enough, the corpus is still not perfect enough. We need a relatively new and wide spreading range corpus to obtain a more accurate and complete conclusion.This thesis attempts to analyze the network catchwords from cognitive Memetics with a view to explore their nature and characteristics. Memetics has provided a new tool for analyzing language imitation, replication, change and development. Learning the replication and dissemination ways of memes enables us to understand the development and changes of the language better and predict the development direction of language. Besides, it impels us to use and create strong memes to promote exchange and development of culture.