Analysis On The Popularity Of Chinese Four-Character Pseudo-Idiom Coinages Based On Memetics

Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinages are a kind of new catchwords,which use the mixed form of Chinese and English to constitute four-character coinages that are similar to Chinese four-character idioms,thus forming an unique language features.In spelling,most parts of the idioms are Chinese characters,and one(or several)word(s)is replaced by English words in those coinages.In terms of syllables,the number of syllables is in accordance with Chinese four-character idioms.For semantics,there may be two possibly semantic explanations: one is that they are the phonetic variants of Chinese idioms,but their semantic meanings are the same with Chinese four-character idioms.That is,semantically,they have the same meaning with the replaced Chinese four-character idioms,and they replace the existing Chinese idioms in the overall structure.Another explanation is that its composition is irrelevant and weird,because they are neither Chinese idiom,nor do they express any semantic meanings.Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinages belong to the newly coined words on the Internet.As for its language style,the original purpose of the creator is to create a humorous effect of language.After gradually becoming popular,its number also begins to increase and they gain certain popularity.There are many research perspectives for newly created words in network language.By taking Memetics as the theoretical basis,this thesis holds that this kind of Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinages is a kind of language memes,so it has its own law of emergence,development and extinction.First of all,according to Memetics,there are possibly certain language users with rise of these idioms.This thesis uses the method of questionnaire to explore its popularity in different language user groups.The questionnaire is distributed through Tencent Questionnaire;a total number of 388 questionnaires are collected.They are mainly college students and graduate students,and people of different occupations between the age of 20 and 60 are also included.Secondly,based on popularity and through statistical analysis,the correlations between popularity and different social variables,including gender,age,educational background,occupation,media contact behavior and language attitude are acquired,and the specific correlations are explained too.Thirdly,based on Memetics and popularity,as well as its correlation with various social variables,the process and causes of its growth and demise from the perspective of Memetics are further analyzed.It is found that the overall popularity of Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinage mixed with English is low,which is only 2.33 in Likert five-point score,and only 4 words have a popularity of more than 3.The popularity of Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinages has no correlation with the gender and occupation,but has a low negative correlation with age.There is a low positive correlation between the popularity and education background.It also has a positive moderate positive correlation with media contact behavior,and a high positive correlation with language attitude.Based on Memetics,we tend to understand the above results as the following: the development of Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinages is the result of the competition between strong memes and weak memes.At the beginning of these idioms' emergence,they are sought after by people because they are strong memes,and strong memes promote the popularity of language to increase language's longevity and stability.At the same time,language memes are also affected by the subjective factors of the meme host,and have varying degrees of correlation with the host's individual cognition,education level,language using environment,language attitude and so on.Due to the subjectivity of the meme hosts and the limitation of the using context,the scope of Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinages' spread is limited,and its competitiveness gradually declines in the four stages of its transmission,thus becoming weak memes and dying out.Through the memetic analysis of the popularity of Chinese four-character pseudo-idiom coinages,the subjectivity of meme hosts and the semantic innovation of memes together with the importance of context to meme selection are effectively explained,which provides empirical evidence for the spread of language memes.