THE LANGUAGE BEHIND
Elena Lathrop
Sociology, 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 dosupport, 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)