A Study On The Vacant Phenomenon Of Social Address Forms In Chinese

Sociolinguistics attaches importance to the social nature of the language. It adopts the demonstration way to study language in the social environment .We studied the vacant phenomenon of social address forms in Chinese which are based on it.The vacant phenomenon of social address forms in Chinese has two meanings. One of them, the narrow definition, refers to the lack of some main social address forms. The other one, the broad definition, refers to that the speaker is not certain of the relationship between he and the listener and he do not know how to address him. The former is our studying target.We did a survey of the vacant phenomenon of social address forms in Chinese in a certain range, which main objective is to investigating the vacancy phenomenon and people's attitude to it. This part is the main body of the text. By carrying out the quantity and quality analysis on the result, we have reached the conclusions as follows.The vacant phenomenon of social address forms in Chinese has certain universality according to the result that a greater part of people has similar language experience.The phenomenon of social address vacancy is actually the asymmetry of language caused by the lack of some main social address. They are the gender asymmetry, the relation asymmetry, and the social general address terms asymmetry. Firstly, the gender asymmetry refers to the lack of address related to the woman, such as the lack of women teachers and women boss `s husbands address forms and the general social address forms of woman. Secondly, the relation asymmetry means that addressing the stranger is harder than the acquaintance in China. Thirdly, the social general address asymmetry refers to the lack of the general social address forms. The age and the education level are two important social elements that affect the usage of society general address forms. The age effect is shown mainly on the difference between using old-fashioned address forms and new style address forms. The education level effect is shown mainly on the difference to use the western style address forms.The vacant phenomenon of social address forms in Chinese will continually exist. A greater part of people thought it is not necessary to standardize this phenomenon. The social address forms system is able to adjust itself to adapt to the changing of the society.The emergency of this phenomenon dues to the affection of the tradition culture mentality and the development of the society .The essence of this phenomenon is the language alteration arousing by the changing of the society. It is a fairly peculiar phenomenon in Chinese.People can address listeners in other ways if the vacancy appears. One way is not to use the address forms. Or use some courtesy words such as"Ni Hao/Nin Hao , Excuse me"and so on. Another way is to use some special address forms as the general social address forms like"Shi Fu","Lao Shi",or some addresses forms used in relatives.The text set its angles from sociolinguistics, and we did a survey of the vacant phenomenon of social address forms in Chinese. Meanwhile, we reach the conclusion by anglicizing the data. We try to make a demonstration study on this phenomenon, but not only being confined to depicting it. We look forward to being able to go a further step on the studying of the relationship between language and society.