Semantic Research On Chinese Widely-used Social Addressings

Chinese addressing system is complicated, to which social addressing is indispensable. So research on social addressing is necessary and meaningful. In view of present mix-up over the social addressings, in order to help people make wise choice in specific social context, to avoid communicative embarrassment and communicative failure which result from misusing the social addressings. This thesis is mainly on the top-ten widely-used social addressings, i.e. "xiansheng", "xiaojie", "nüshi", "furen", "taitai", "shifu", "laoban", "laoshi", "tongzhi" and "pengyou" from the semantic viewpoint.The thesis mainly consists of four parts. Firstly, the conceptual differences between addressings and greetings are discussed. In addition, the functions and the grammatical features of greetings, characteristics of social addressings and their limiting factors are also discussed.Then is the main part of the thesis, including componential analysis and semantic field analysis. In the former part, descriptions of the semantic features and the differences of "xiansheng" and "xiaojie" are made. Then is the contrastive analysis of the top-ten widely-used social addressings in groups according to the similar function principle or similar feature principle. What's more, comparison of the corresponding social addressings between Chinese and English are made also. In the later part, the analysis is mainly on semantic fields made up of "xiaosheng" and "xiaojie" separately. Because of the limitation of "xiaojie", "-sao" addressing form and its three different fields are explored and analyzed in detail.The fourth part is mainly about the simple retrospection of semantic drift of the top-ten widely-used social addressings with a view to better understand the trail of their development in the language history. During the semantic development, "tongzhi" and "xiaojie" turn out to have certain special meaning, i.e. euphemistic meaning, therefore, an exploration into it is carried out. The standardization of the social addressings is referred as well.The thesis is a trial semantic research on social addressings mainly through the above four parts, aiming for finding out the real semantic features of the present social addressings in use, to help people to make correct and delicate choice of social addressings in order to achieve success in our daily communication.