Specialty: Linguistics And Applide Linguistics

This essay is mainly based on more than 300 social greeting words collected thoroughly from two novels, one is "Guan Chang Xian Xing Ji" in Qing Dynasty, the other is a modern novel "Cang Lang Zhi Shui". The emphasis of this paper is on the dynamic process of how people choose and use calling words to refer to themselves, to address others and to call the opposing side.Social greeting words are those words used by the fictional characters in a conversation to call those who are not their relatives. People's social relationship is much complicated than his or her family connections. Compared with relatively stable family greeting words, social greeting words and phrases are more open, apt to reflect the psychological trait of the speakers and cultural information brought about by them is much colorful.First, the collected greeting words could be divided into six types according to their pragmatic usages, that is, personal pronouns, names, professional titles, imitating relative words, social relationship greeting words, derogative greeting words. Under each category subtitles can also be divided. Combined with the theory of social stratification, each type could be described and explained in accord with their using and occurring regulation, which provides us an advantageous objective observing perspective to study what social greeting words are used.Second, contrastive research is carried out between social greeting words used in the two novels, which is in different Chinese language developing phases. The developing track is showed by analyzing their pragmatic traits and contrastive description. Focus is put on the difference of structural distribution, function type and language ethics of social greeting words. This is undoubtedly helpful for us to master the using situation of social greeting words and their characters in different historical stages.Finally, five microcosmical binding elements are summarized overall on how people choose their greeting words through perspectives of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. The using situation of social greeting words in official language context is also observed, and the cultural mechanism behind it should be explored from multiple perspectives of social greeting words.