The Research Of Social Common Address Terms Since The May4th Movement

As an indispensible language element in interpersonal communications,common address term has a great influence on the success of interpersonalrelationships. Common address term is a social phenomenon, and therefore itschange is closely related to the progress of the times and the changes of the socialculture. Since the May4thMovement, especially since the reform and opening-uppolicy, with the rapid economic and social development, together with theformation of new social concepts, the usages of a part of the address terms havechanged in actual use and even dilemmas on choosing address terms have appeared.Based on a closed corpus consisting of highly spoken literary works andnewspapers, comic talks, and real life dialogues since the May4thMovement, thethesis examines the semantic changes of sixteen common address terms andanalyzes the reasons of these changes as well as the existing of addressingdilemmas. This thesis consists of five chapters:The first chapter is an introductory part. mainly presents the significance,methodology and content of the research as well as a literature review of previousstudies on social address terms.The second chapter is the focus of the thesis. It examines the semanticchanges of sixteen social address terms since the May4thMovement and analyzesthe reasons of all these changes.The third chapter conducts an analysis of addressing dilemmas since thereform and opening-up policy and puts forward solutions or ways to improve thiskind of situation.The fourth chapter, based on the discussions in previous chapters, gives somesuggestions on the teaching of Chinese social address terms in the two aspects ofteaching materials and teaching processes, hoping to make its own contribution tothe teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.The fifth chapter is the conclusion of the thesis. It offers an overview of the semantic changes of common address terms since the May4thMovement andpoints out the limitations of the study as well as suggestions for further researches.