The Study Of The Pragmatic Transfer Of English Address Terms By Chinese College Students

Address terms are the expressions used to designate the addressees by the addressor. In daily communicative activities, as an important part of social etiquette, those linguistic units directly reveal attitudes, emotions and interpersonal relationships. Accordingly, the appellation is not only the identity of a person, but also a symbol of a culture. Every language and culture connects with its own addressing system. Different cultures establish different conventions of the usage of different address forms, which results in the usage of addressing taking high flexibility, rather than acting in a static or stable way.As an attractive topic in both sociolinguistic and pragmatic fields, address terms are closely related to native cultures. The Chinese and English address systems come into being under different cultural backgrounds so that the disparities of the two systems inevitably tend to bring pragmatic transfer in the process of using address terms. Pragmatic transfer is one of the important components of interlanguage pragmatics which studies interlanguage learners'ability to understand and perform speech acts. It is a branch of second language acquisition research, and at the same time, covers the field of inter-cultural pragmatics. Therefore, this thesis studies the pragmatic transfer of address terms by college students.Employing both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the empirical study discovers that the pragmatic transfer is apparent in the use of address terms by Chinese college students. Moreover, the pragmatic transfer is caused by the dissimilarities between the two addressing systems, which proves that culture exerts great influence on language and language reflects culture in turn.Additionally, this thesis explores the different cultural values set by the Chinese and English on the factors that influence the pragmatic transfer of address terms. It also provides some pedagogical implications for foreign language teachers and learners to facilitate communication among peoples of different cultures in terms of strengthening cultural awareness, avoiding negative stereotyping, and cultivating pragmatic competence.This research is a new angle of studying pragmatic transfer and address terms, in which some new findings have been achieved; however, there is much to be desired.