A Study Of The Address Terms In Hong Lou Meng In Light Of Adaptation Theory

Address terms are indispensable to human communication. In conversations, speaker uses them to refer to himself or herself, listener, and the other people who are spoken about. The studies of address terms have been made in semantic, pragmatic, and social-linguistic fields, and is fruitful. However these are mainly descriptive studies, and do not delve the deeper reason why interlocutors make use of certain address terms, which certainly concerns the dynamic context of using address terms and its salience feature.The Adaptation Theory is a relatively new theory in pragmatic studies, which takes pragmatics as a general functional perspective on language and takes the cognitive, social and cultural function of language into consideration. It is commonly accepted that compared with the traditional theories in pragmatics, the Adaptation Theory is more comprehensive and more closely connected with the social-linguistics and cognitive linguistics.This thesis makes an attempt to study the address terms in Hong Lou Meng in light of Adaptation Theory. Several factors, such as power relations, solidarity, emotion, and so on, will be discussed under the framework of context. These factors do not arbitrarily play their roles in the process of choosing address terms, but are allotted to physical world, social world and mental world. The use of address terms is a process of adaptation to these contextual correlates, and the process has the features of dynamics and salience, which are also discussed. To precisely clarify the interaction of contextual correlates and the use of address terms, both quantitative and qualitative studies are adopted in this thesis, which will help people have a deeper understanding of Adaptation Theory and a better appreciation of the outstanding classic masterpiece Hong Lou Meng.