A Study Of Code Switching In Address Forms

In daily communicative activities, address forms are usually the first information that the addressor conveys to the addressee aiming at establishing a certain social relationship between the two. At the same time, under the influence of a specific context and psychological factors, etc. the choice of address forms will also change, so that addressing the same person with different forms in one conversation often occurs. Generally speaking, there are mainly two types of address form switching. The first type refers to the fact that in a certain conversation the addresser and the addressee use an address form which is different from the usual one they always choose. The second refers to a situation the addresser and the addressee use different address forms in the same conversation (Wei, 1994: 302). The American sociolinguist Roger Brown (1960) finds the fact that sometimes the choice of a certain pronoun has obviously violated group norms and the speaker's habit, which shows the speaker's emotion and attitude. The change of address forms between two people must suggest the change between their mutual attitudes and relationship. Ervin-Tripp (1972) also thinks that"when there is agreement about the normal address form to alter specified status, then any deviation is a message".Code switching which refers to the alternations of linguistic varieties within the same conversation is a universal phenomenon in communication. Scholars from home and abroad have made a thorough analysis of bilinguals'code switching from the aspects of sociolinguistics, syntax, conversational analysis, psycholinguistics and pragmatics. Significant achievements have been made until now. The present thesis applies code switching theories to address form switching. Because the author holds that address form is also a kind of code in a broad sense, thus theories on code switching can be employed in the analysis of address form switching.To investigate this intriguing topic, the thesis firstly adopts Gumperz's theory...