The Purpose Of Communication With The Salutation Conform To The Mechanism

The address form plays an important role in the speech communication and it is the first information that conveys to the listener. The address form is a sensitive communicative component, whose usage takes highly flexibility. The speaker intentionally chooses a specific address form as a communicative strategy for the sake of achieving certain communicative purpose. The thesis applies the Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren (1999) for the analysis of the use of address forms. According to the Adaptation Theory, the use of address forms is a linguistic choice-making process, in which speakers make adaptation on the basis of their communicative purposes.The thesis is composed of five parts. The first part is the introduction, which reveals the significance and aims of the study. Chapter One introduces the definition of address form and its classification. In addition, the western and Chinese scholars'researches on address forms are briefly reviewed. Chapter Two, the theoretical foundation, is devoted to introducing the theories applied in the thesis. Chapter Three is the main body of the thesis, which chooses a lot of examples from literary works and discusses the adaptation system of the address forms according to different communicative purposes. Chapter Four is the contrastive study of address forms'systems between Chinese and English and explores causes for those differences. Chapter Five concludes the thesis by pointing out the limitations of the thesis and making suggestions for further study.In all, this thesis deeply discusses the nature, features and pragmatic choices of address forms. It takes the communicative purpose as the core and makes some explorations for pragmatics to get out of the dilemma. Address forms are very common and inevitable factors in communication. The research of address forms can enable students to make successful communication with foreign languages.