英语论文TheMemesinAdvertisingSlogans.doc

The Memes in Advertising Slogans
I. Introduction
Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underlie biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as (replicating) units of biological information to a new type of (replicating) units of cultural information: memes. Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. A meme, invented to suggest a strong analogy with genes, is a unit of cultural imitation, a self-propagating idea much like a biological puter virus. The contagious nature of memes has such a natural affinity with advertising that it drives many marketers to conduct their advertising research from the perspective of memes. In order to use language effectively and strategically, advertisers may resort to different devices, such as idioms, proverbs, common sayings, famous remarks and classic poems and so on. Those essful ad slogans are mostly the result of the operation of memes.
II. The Basic Concepts and Relevant Theories of Memes
The Definition of Memes
In 1976, Richard Dawkins, an eminent Oxford zoologist, first coined the word “meme”in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene. At the end of the book, he radically proposes that biology is not the only field where evolution is at work; human culture also evolves and changes. Gene is the biological replicator, so by analogy, “meme” is the cultural replicator which drives the culture evolution.
Dawkins invents the word “meme” form the Greek “Mimeme” which means imitation, but shortens it to sound like “gene”. In this book, Dawkins further elaborates it as follows:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broa