A Study On Address Form In Communication Of Chinese Online Community

No one will deny that language is essential for mankind. Language is, first of all, a tool that is applied in communication in human society to establish, maintain and alter interpersonal relationship. Even it has been too exaggerative in the real world to claim that language builds the world, this saying does make some sense when the world refers to the virtual one, where all that we know about another individual and we identify ourselves is mainly with words. The virtual world is a world that has been said rather than experienced in any other way. Thus, it has provided us with an ever better laboratory to examine how language interacts with other social factors. Meanwhile, the topic of address form has always been listed as one of the best choices for study aiming to investigate how language is influenced by and reflects the interpersonal relationships.In order to present a better illustration on the correlation between language and non-linguistic factors, this thesis is focused on the study of the use of address form in an online community, which has been formed primarily by two QQ groups, whose members share a common interest in female-oriented fiction. As a part of the study on sociolinguistics and pragmatics, the present study adopts a method of discourse analysis, in order to avoid subjectivity in an empirical research, collecting conversation record from the two QQ groups, through which the online community has been established. Meanwhile, other necessary information about the two QQ groups and the online community may be accessed via interview with the administrators or members in the groups.Through the study, the thesis aims to depict the use of Chinese address form in an online community, including its derivation, formation, classification, and also the unique features as applied in an online context. Besides, this thesis has also examined factors that influence and are reflected by the use of online address form according to the faceted classification scheme proposed by Herrings (2007), which provides an open-ended classification of the factors that affect computer-mediated discourse mainly from two aspects:the medium factors and the social factors. The major finding of this thesis could be conluded as follows:1) Differed from the structure of address form in colloquial Chinese but agreed with trend of simplification of address form, the address form used in an online community blurs the distinction between direct and indirect use;2) The address form used in an online community are formed on the basis of netnames, which, in spite of being claimed as innovative and weird, turn out to be rather conventional as sharing a similar structure with traditional Chinese names, and the approaches to forming an address term are limited;3) The address form in an online community features a special use of virtual-kinship term, which, unlike the extensive use of kinship terms in colloquial context, is to refer to addressees who have actually formed a kinship established in the online community;4) The choice of address form used in the online community can be influenced by medium factors listed in the faceted classification scheme in the ways that partially synchronicity of QQ group communication may promote the use of address term of full netname as an indirect address term; the delay of message transmitted through mobile phone may affect the address terms to be used in isolation and simplification; the persistency of the QQ group communication promises the consistency of the address term between or among group members, and the connection between the address term to the identity of a group member; the introduction and increasing application of mobile phone as a hardware terminal restrains the code of the address terms from using mixing code or unusual Chinese characters;5) Major social factors that portray the characters of the particular online community can be observed through the use and negotiation of online address terms:an over frequent use of addressing terms may imply a difficulty in keeping track with the process of communication; a committed address term, especially a virtual kinship term may signify a stable and intimate interpersonal relationship between or among the members in the online community; the dramatic shrink of the possible address terms may indicate a high level of equality in the hierarchy structure of the online community;6) The significant deficiency of the female virtual-kinship terms and the extended use of male kinship terms that are used to refer to a virtual kinship between or among community members who are actually female in the online community could be understood as a reflection of the feminist ideas popularized in the female-oriented fictions-the common interest attracting all the members in the community.Despite the fact that this thesis is far from exhaustive in the study of the address form in an online community, the present study has endeavored to fulfill the gap between the study of computer-mediated communication and address form used in modern Chinese by both describing the current use of the address form in an online community, and examining how the medium factors may influence the selection of address terms and how social factors, including other related factors such as feminist ideas, buried in core of the topics that discussed in the community, could be reflected through the use and negotiation of the address terms. Hopefully this thesis may inspire more profound and valuable researches in sociolinguisties and pragmatics on computer-mediated communication and address form.