An Analysis Of Chinese Female Address Forms

Address forms, as an important linguistic phenomenon, have always been the object of sociolinguistic researches. The choice of address forms can reveal many social relationships such as power and solidarity. Female address form plays an important role in the addressing system. It is a kind of special social phenomenon. We can understand some problems on the relationship among people in the social system by studying, observing and analyzing this special phenomenon, especially on how people treat femaes. People in different countries may have different attitudes towards females and female address forms according to their different moralities and customs. This thesis will explore some female address forms used in current Chinese, mainly on the base of the Chinese culture nowadays.This thesis is composed of seven parts: Chapter One serves as introduction, which presents the definitions, classsification and function of address forms, and it also clarifies the scale of the thesis; Chapter Two is concerned with various theories on address forms home and abroad. Chapter Three presents the relevant theories about address forms, which involves the researches on "power" and "solidarity", speech accommodation theory and politeness strategies. After introducing the basic theories and concepts, Chapter Four begins to explain the female address forms in detail. In this chapter, the author explores the current usages of some female address forms in eastern and western countries and their semantic changes caused by changes of times. Chapter Five and Chapter Six mainly focuses on the current usages of female address forms in China. Chapter Five introduces the method and purpose of the research survey. Chapter Six makes a survey of the female address forms currently used in Chinese and deals with data collection and analysis, trying to find out some factors such as age and profession, which can influence people's choices of an appropriate female form. The last chapter is the conclusion part of this thesis, which summarizes the current situation of the usage of the female address forms in Chinese, point out the phenomenon of the absence of female address forms nowadays and give the author's own suggestions about the phenomenon in hope of making some contribution to the English teaching and cross-cultural researches.