Study On The Appellations Of Prostitute In Yuan Drama

This thesis mainly discusses appellations of prostitute in Yuan Drama.Appellations are those words and expressions reflecting kinship or social relations between people, meanwhile they can reflect people’s identity, occupation, social status, etc. In addition, appellations also can reflect the speaker’s emotion, attitude, individual morality and cultural accomplishment. To some extent they even reflect an era, a nation’s cultural traditions, customs and national psychology. Appellations play a very important role in our daily life.This thesis focuses on the appellations of prostitute in Yuan Drama which told stories in the form of dialogue. Yuan Drama recorded the daily life language at that time, and had colloquial and popular characteristics. There were lots of prostitute subject works with great quality in Yuan Drama that recorded a variety of appellations of prostitute. The prostitute industry was very prosperous in Yuan Dynasty, and prostitute was an important social group at that time. The study on appellations of prostitute in Yuan Drama from the perspective of the language is a good way to analyze the social and cultural connotation behind those appellations.This thesis tries hard to collect the relevant appellations as much as possible from the prostitute subject works in Yuan Drama, and classifies and analyzes those appellations. The thesis classifies those appellations into four categories:occupation appellations, image appellations, relative appellations generalization and emotional appellations. This thesis on one hand classifies the appellations, explaining obscure appellations and analyzing typical appellations, on the other hand tries to outline the social status and living condition of prostitutes, to find out social attitude to this group at that time.