A Study Of The Use Of Female Social Address Forms:Decoding The Dialogues Of The Two Heroines In Vanity Fair

Address form is defined as a term used by speakers to designate the person they are talking to when they have the social interaction with each other. Since how to adopt an appropriate address form is essential for the speaker, it has become a hot topic investigated in sociolinguistics. As an integral part of language system, the option of a certain address form has the capacity of setting the tone in the whole communication course. It reflects interpersonal and social relationships and social status between addresser and addressee as well. Address form is affected by communication context. Social relationships and status reflected by diverse address forms can be only embodied in a specific context. The choice and use of social address forms present dynamic features of power and solidarity semantic, and the variability of two speakers in terms of social relationships, communication context, psychology, social ideology. Besides, due to the fact that the social tendentiousness to men and women are different, the address form is inevasibly impacted by social and cultural factors as well as gender differences, the choice and use of female social address forms reflect their social status and social roles in a specific social context.This thesis, taking the theories of Brown and Gilman’s’Power and Solidarity’, Malinowski’s’context of situation’as framework, makes an approach to the female social address forms. The corpus for analysis is extracted from the dialogues between the two heroines, Becky and Amelia in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Through the analysis of the dynamic features of address forms used by the two heroines, the thesis further explores the hidden social and cultural factors, such as their social identity and status, social environment, communication context, social ideology, and emotional variation.The findings show that the use of social address forms by the two heroines is governed by the power and solidarity semantic. And also, the choice and use of their social address forms are the dynamic reflection of their social status, social relationships, interpersonal relationships. Besides, influenced and restricted by communication context, such as the time, course, objects, the social address form reflects the speakers’psychological orientation at that moment, and their hope of maintaining certain social relationships. Since the literary works are the true representation of the social reality of the writer’s time, the analysis of female social address forms in Vanity Fair is the manifestation of power and solidarity relationships reflected in a particular historical context.