A Cross-cultural Study Of Address Forms In Chinese And English

Address forms, as one of the most important aspects of language, is an attractive topic in sociolinguistic and pragmatic field. Every language has its own address forms and particular address system. Therefore, address forms are connected closely with cultural background and different cultures hold different rules in the use of address forms. The speaker's choice of an address form should be explained under his/her specific cultural background. Thus there is great necessity to make researches on address forms from the perspectives of context and culture.Based on the theories of Speech Act, Power and Solidarity and Politeness, this thesis conducts a cross-culturally contrastive study on how native English-speaking and native Chinese-speaking students address their teachers respectively in English and Chinese in the university community, trying to find their similarities and dissimilarities and how the social factors such as age, gender, occasion, and rank influence their choices of address forms; furthermore, to reveal the distinct culture features reflected by them. In the study, the data is collected via written questionnaires in the forms of Multiple Choice and Discourse Completion Test. 52 native-English speakers and 120 native-Chinese speakers participated in the study. The data collected are analyzed quantitatively as well as qualitatively to get a more convincing result.The findings achieved in the study are as follows: there exist similarities and dissimilarities between English and Chinese address forms in the university community; factors which influence the choice of address forms are different;...