A Comparative Study Of Markedness Of Address Forms In English And Chinese From The Theoretical Perspective Of Iconicity

Address form is one of the most important language phenomena in people's daily communications, which has been widely studied by many scholars in the fields of linguistics, especially in semantics, sociolinguistics and cross-cultural communication. With the rapid development of cognitive linguistics, more and more language studies are made from the cognitive perspective. In this thesis, address form is classified into kinship term and social term. With Wang Yin's Markedness Iconicity principle as the theoretical framework, a comparative study of markedness of address form in English and Chinese is made, based on a brief review of previous studies of address form at home and abroad, aiming to interpret the iconic relationship between the similarities and dissimilarities and the cultural factors in both cultures.This thesis analyzes the relationships between linguistic forms, uses, cultural factors and people's mode of thinking from an iconic theoretical perspective, and finds that the iconic similarities are shared by both languages. This study is expected to be helpful for English teaching in China. English learners can apply knowledge of their own culture and their modes of thinking when learning mother language to English study in order to get a better understanding of English language and increase learning efficiency. Meanwhile, this conclusion is hoped to be helpful for cross-cultural communications.