A Diachronic Socio-cognitive Study Of English Female Address Terms

Term of address(abbreviated as To A)plays an important part in daily communication.For sociolinguists,To A is a highly condensed part in the long history of language development,which has a great reflection on the social structure,social values,and people’s emotional intention in a speech community.As women who support half of the human society,the language of addressing them is also precipitated under the influence of social culture.In A Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address compiled by Leslie Dunkling(2008),129 To As that only refer to women can be collected,which provides the source of the research object for the study.Throughout the previous studies,few studies are focused on the diachronic change of English To As from the perspective of social cognition,and there are even fewer systematic studies on the whole female term of address(abbreviated as FTo A).With the continuous integration of the“social”and“cognitive”factors of language,social cognition has become a powerful perspective to explain the language phenomena.Therefore,this study employs the three theories of social cognition,metaphtonymy,and prototype,from a diachronic social cognitive perspective,aiming to construct the S_CMP model(“S_C”stands for the social cognition theory,“M”for the metaphtonymy theory and“P”for the prototype theory),taking 129 FTo As as the research objects and utilizing the S_CMP model to investigate the diachronic usage of these data in order to reveal the social cognitive motivation and mechanism behind the formation and semantic evolution of these FTo As.The thesis makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 129 FTo As.On the horizontal axis(time),the corpus is divided into four phases:Old English period,Middle English period,Early Modern English period,and Modern English period.From the vertical axis(meaning),the data is divided into seven categories:polite terms,title,endearment,kinship terms,disparaging terms,professional terms and neutral terms,in which social factors affecting the terms are annotated.Then,the thesis employs the S_CMP model to conduct a qualitative discussion on the seven categories.Through analysis,the study finds that the S_CMP model can well reveal the social cognitive motivation behind the formation and evolution of FTo As.The model explains the inner relation among the addresser,the addressing context,and the female addressee.Hence,four trends of FTo As’semantic evolution are concluded,namely,pejoration of the tone,amelioration of the tone,no change of the tone,and generalization of the semantic meaning.Based on proportions of the four trends,the change of women’s social status is on the rise generally,which indicates that FTo A is not only the product of social cognition,but mirroring the rise of female subject consciousness-their pursuit for equality and freedom.Besides,FTo As also construct changes of women in the long course of human history,and indirectly reflect the fact that women hold up half the landscape of the human world.