A Cultural Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Tourist City Slogans From The Perspective Of Memetic Adaptation

City slogan with refined words and expression can summarize city characteristics,to show its charm and attract tourists,so as to improve the comprehensive competitiveness of the city.Now as domestic and foreign transportation channels have all been connected,the market competition faced by the domestic tourism industry is no longer limited to the domestic,famous tourism cities abroad have also joined the competition of ―competing‖ for Chinese tourists,so it is particularly necessary to study the tourism publicity methods of Chinese and foreign cities.City slogan is an important tool in city publicity as it can summarize the key features.Meme,as a kind of cultural gene,is also widely applied in city publicity.According to Heylighen‘s selection criteria of memes,this thesis extracts the five most important criteria in the four stages of meme transmission: simplicity,novelty,formality,conformity and publicity as the core features of meme.This study selects over city slogans of Chinese and American cities(100 from China and 100 from the US)to explore how slogans of the two countries meet these criteria and forming such memetic characteristic.Next,through the adaptation theory,this thesis makes a comparative analysis of the memetic features and different forms of expression in Chinese and American city slogans,and studies the social and cultural factors behind these memes.The thesis consists of six chapters,in which the first chapter summarizes the research background,questions,significance,source of data and research methodology.The second chapter is literature review,in which the research on memetic application and tourist slogans is reviewed.The third chapter elaborates the theoretical framework of this study,namely memetics and adaptation theory.The fourth and fifth chapters analyze the characteristics of memes in Chinese and American city slogans and how they are formed and presented in this way according to Heilighen‘s selection criteria of strong memes,and then explain the similarities and differences from the four aspects of contextual adaptation.The last chapter makes a conclusion for this thesis,and points out the existing problems and the enlightenment of this research for future studies.The study shows that although the memes preserved in Chinese and American city slogans have many similarities,such as simplicity,novelty,conformity,etc.they are presented and contained in different forms,so that memes can be copied,retained and spread.Beside,this study further analyzes these memetic features from four aspects of contextual adaptation,and finds that the differences in the memetic phenotype of Chinese and American city slogans are mainly the result of different historical background,thinking pattern,communication style,power distance and other factors.Through the study of the memetic characteristics of Chinese and American city slogans and how they are formed,this thesis aims to bring some enlightenment to the design and translation of city slogans in the future.