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)