A Diachronic Study On The Semantic Change Of "Xiaojie"

Address terms as irreplaceable group of lexis in social communication have always been closely observed by linguistics in China and abroad. Yet either the early studies since Roger Brown and Albert Gilman or the late studies of the 1980s on Chinese address term"tongzhi"and"shifu"have seldom anchor from the perspective of semantic change of them, say nothing of a diachronic study of a typical address term like"xiaojie".The present study mainly adhere to Hermann Hirt and Mcarthur's semantic change mechanism taxonomy, divided 107 language pieces of authentic and representative data with"xiaojie"from 6701 entries from ancient Chinese language corpus, 17889 entries from modern Chinese corpus of the center for Chinese Linguistics of Beijing University and other more than 200 entries from popular newspaper, magazine and literatures into 5 time segments and finally concluded that"xiaojie"has mainly experienced semantic amelioration, semantic extension, semantic narrowing, and semantic pejoration mechanisms diachronically. Meanwhile the sociolinguistic background which may favor or triggered the actualization of the semantic change were discussed, which indirectly testified the language relativity of Sapir Whorf hypothesis by propagating that"xiaojie"as an address term - the most active factor of language has sensitively mirrored the social cultural change of a society.Datum of the present study is authentic with context, and they were analyzed with both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Another intention of this study is to qualify the idea that although the semantic pejoration of"xiaojie"has caused certain pragmatics bewilderedness, yet if used properly, it won't influence the position of"xiaojie"as an important general respect term of address for young female.