A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Naming Addresses Between American And Chinese College Students

Scholars both at home and abroad have contributed a lot to the study of the definition, classification, connotation of names and the cultural information conveyed through the use of different naming addresses; nevertheless, several aspects are in need of improvement. First, the research is, to a great extent, a monolingual study, and thus unable to offer us a panorama with regard to the use of the same naming address in different languages. Second, great attention is only paid to the lexical level with the emphasis on the conceptual and associative meanings of English and Chinese names, which is suggestive of the fact that the study of naming addresses is by no means that of addresses but that of names. At last, the qualitative approach is overwhelmingly adopted, which might add some subjectivity to their research.The paper attempts to test the following three hypotheses. First, since relative power, social distance and gender are among the important factors in sociolinguistics, both the Chinese and American college students might be influenced by them in the use of naming addresses and the extents to which they are affected respectively might vary. Second, now that speech act theory makes it clear that when we utter a sentence, we are performing three different acts simultaneously: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act, the speech acts which are performed by the Chinese naming addresses might be different from those by their English counterparts if the speaker and the listener have a general relationship. Third, given that relationships are performed through the use of naming addresses, the relationship performed by a Chinese naming address might differ from that by its English counterpart. The originality of this paper lies in its adoption of speech act theory in the study of the four commonly-used ways of naming addresses: "(Mr./Mrs./Miss.) last name", "first and last name", "first name only" and "nickname" among current American and Chinese college students through the collaboration of qualitative and quantitativeapproaches.In accordance with the data collected from the valid questionnaires...