On Semantic Fission Phenomenon Of Chinese Widely-used Address Forms From The Perspective Of Prototype Theory

Nowadays, address forms are essential parts of verbal communication, and play a significant role. The Chinese addressing system is a big and complicated one, which covers so much, and it largely includes name address forms, kinship address forms, honorific address forms and social address forms. These can be divided into widely-used address forms, proprietary address forms and zero address forms. In this paper, the author chooses the widely-used address forms in the daily communication as research object, two inherited from address forms:"shifu"and"tongzhi"; two rising address forms:"laoshi"and"laoban"; three reactivate address forms:"dajie","xiansheng","xiaojie"and two coming from generalization:"meinv"and"shuaige". The widely-used address forms which could embody the social status on the one hand, and make people closer on the other hand.In this thesis, the author tried to use prototype theory in cognitive linguistics to analyze their semantic fission phenomenon. Nowadays, cognitive linguistics has developed as the most popular branch. It is a new subject of language. Prototype theory is the basic theory in cognitive linguistics. So to illustrate this phenomenon within the theory, the prototype theory can make them rise to the height of its evolution mechanism, and make them more systematic and theoretical.So based on the above consideration, with prototype theory as a tool, the author will make analysis of semantic fission phenomenon. The thesis seeks to find the answers to the following research questions:(1) What is semantic fission phenomenon and why do Chinese widely-used address forms have semantic fission phenomenon?(2) Do the basic meanings change during semantic fission of each widely-used address forms? If yes, how do they change?(3) What is the process that each widely-used address forms has semantic fission phenomenon?In order to make clear about these questions, this author has mainly adopted quantitative analysis to make this paper valid and effect. So the author firstly collects the data from"Dictionary of Chinese Address Forms"which is written by Ji Changhong in 2001. There are totally fifty address forms that the author collects, and finally the author selects nine of them as objects. Secondly, due to these data, the author makes clear analysis of semantic fission phenomenon of each widely-used address form, and finally draws some conclusions.The thesis mainly obtained the following major findings. Firstly, language and society change at the same time. And another aspect is widely-used address forms in some large extent are the general social address forms, whose semantic fission also reflects social situation, people's mind and social psychology. Secondly, words that have the phenomenon of semantic fission are a fundamental tendency of modern Chinese system of address forms. Thirdly, widely-used address forms nowadays mostly come into being by generalization. These will not be used as a special widely-used address forms after generalization, but still be used as a specificity. Fourthly, although the situation could be complicated, yet there are some regulations in them.