THE LANGUAGE BEHIND

1. THE LANGUAGE BEHIND Elena Lathrop Sociology, B.A. University of California, Los Angeles INTERNET MEMES

2. 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

3. EXAMPLES

4. 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

5. THE “XZIBIT YO DAWG” MEME - RECURSION • Also called the “Recursive Xzibit” meme on some websites

6. 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 “XzibitYoDawg” meme demonstrates adjunct recursion

7. THE “XZIBIT YO DAWG” MEME - RECURSION

8. THE “XZIBIT YO DAWG” MEME - RECURSION

9. THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES • Meant to seem racist and stereotypical, until one reads the entire sentence from top to bottom

10. 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:

11. 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

12. THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES • My father left us.

13. THE “SUCCESSFUL BLACK MAN” MEME – GARDEN PATH SENTENCES • My father left us a large estate […]

14. THE “Y U NO GUY” MEME – CHILD SPEECH

15. THE “Y U NO GUY” MEME – CHILD SPEECH • Brain, why don’t you work?

16. 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

17. 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 & Bellugi1966)

18. 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)