Power/Solidarity Concepts As Reflected By The Address Forms In Outlaws Of The Marsh

'Personal address is a sociolinguistic subject par excellence' (Philipsen and Huspek, 1985: 94), the address system is a sensitive reflection of social relations. The dissertation takes a significant branch, non-pronoun face-to-face address forms, as a breakthrough point for sociolinguistic study.In an attempt of combining Chinese linguistic data with the Western power/solidarity theory created by Brown and Gilman, the dissertation presents a detailed quantitative study of social address forms, and makes a statistic research on the application of power and solidarity concepts reflected in the collected address forms. The linguistic data is collected from the three kinds of interpersonal relationships chosen from respective thirty chapters of the classical novel Outlaws of the Marsh, which is read as a real reflection of life in the Song Dynasty and full of complicated interpersonal relationships concerning over 500 characters. All the address forms are classified into different types from the speaker's stance to the addressees.Based on the statistic results, the dissertation has analyzed the group differences from pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Power concept is much more applied in the address forms between officials and between common people than between bandits. It can be referred that in ancient China with feudal hierarchical system there must have been an absolute predominance of the application of the power concept in the address forms between people of different social status. Along with the social development, the application of power/solidarity concept has changed a lot, which will call for more in-depth investigations.