THE LANGUAGE BEHIND Elena Lathrop Sociology, B.A. University of California, Los Angeles INTERNET MEMES
Mar 28, 2015
THE LANGUAGE BEHIND
Elena LathropSociology, B.A.
University of California, Los Angeles
INTERNET MEMES
WHAT IS A MEME?• From the Ancient Greek work “mimɛma” meaning
“something imitated”• Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “an idea,
behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”
• On the Internet, they take the form of concepts that spread, such as images, videos, hyperlinks, acronyms, or even ironically misspelled words/typos such as “teh” instead of “the” or “pwn” instead of “own”
• In this presentation, I will focus on images coupled with text
EXAMPLES
WHAT TYPES OF LINGUISTIC PHENOMENA DO THESE INTERNET MEMES EXHIBIT?
• They are extremely productive – there are over 75,000 categories of image memes, with new categories being created daily
• Category-specific:– Recursion– Garden path sentences– Syntactic structures mimicking child speech
THE “XZIBIT YO DAWG” MEME - RECURSION
• Also called the “Recursive Xzibit” meme on some websites
THE “XZIBIT YO DAWG” MEME - RECURSION
• Clauses can be embedded within sentences to obtain recursion– Theoretically, this can be done infinitely– Ex.: I said that Mary told Suzy that John said […]
• The “Xzibit Yo Dawg” meme demonstrates adjunct recursion
THE “XZIBIT YO DAWG” MEME - RECURSION
THE “XZIBIT YO DAWG” MEME - RECURSION
THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES•Meant to seem racist and stereotypical, until one reads the entire sentence from top to bottom
THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES
• Example: The horse raced past the barn fell.– Upon hearing this sentence, the speaker wants to insert a
period after “barn”, yielding this structure:
THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES
• …but with the word fell at the end of the sentence, The horse raced past the barn is a reduced relative clause (it does not contain a who or that) and the theme of the action fall– Sounds awkward and
ungrammatical to most native speakers, but is actually grammatically correct
THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES
• My father left us.
THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES
• My father left us a large estate […]
THE “Y U NO GUY” MEME – CHILD SPEECH
THE “Y U NO GUY” MEME – CHILD SPEECH
• Brain, why don’t you work?
THE “Y U NO GUY” MEME – CHILD SPEECH
• Brain, why you no work?
• English sentence lacking do-support, and therefore no head (T to C) movement
THE “Y U NO GUY” MEME – CHILD SPEECH
• This resembles the speech of English language learners aged 1-4 (Brown 1968, Bellugi 1971, Stromswold 1990, Guasti & Rizzi 1996)– They tend to leave out auxiliaries such as do, producing
“auxless questions”– They tend to lack subject-auxiliary inversion, especially in
negated questions• They have no auxiliary to invert in the first place, since it
is often omitted– They avoid raising Neg. to T– They lack do-insertion
• Examples: Where daddy go? What daddy have?– They use no instead of not in negated sentences (Kliman &
Bellugi 1966)
CONCLUSIONS
• Internet memes demonstrate recursion, garden path sentences, and child speech in ways that make them humorous and ironic
• Their syntactic structures are different than those of Standard American English, yet still systematic
• Native speakers can create new and different ways of speaking their language, yet maintain understanding and productivity
• Evidence for Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG)