A Survey On Social Address Forms Shuaige And Meinü In Department Stores Of Xiangtan

Human languages are not static, and they are always in the state of change, but this kindof variation is affected by various complicated social factors. The development of languageitself and influence of social factors will unavoidably cause language variation in phonetics,lexicon and syntax. Shuaige and meinü are just newly arisen social address forms because oflanguage development and influence of social factors. The appearance of shuaige and meinüreflects the relationship between changes of time and social communication needs.Taking the use of shuaige and meinü as an example, this study analyzes these two termsof address from the perspective of politeness theory. The informants in this study are180people in department stores of Xiangtan who are staffs and customers in the department stores.This research adopts the methods of tape-recording of people’s naturalistic conversation andobservation of people’s daily speech, and a large amount of sentence samples of shuaige andmeinü have been collected, and then as a supplement, a questionnaire survey is used to revealpeople’s attitudes towards shuaige and meinü. In the end, all data are analyzed statistically bythe software of GoldVarb X and Excel (2007).The present study mainly discusses the following three questions:1) the usage of socialaddress forms shuaige and meinü in department stores;2) the distribution of social factors thataffect the use of shuaige and meinü;3) people’s attitude towards shuaige and meinü.It is found that the use and diffusion of shuaige and meinü are the result of both languagedevelopment and influence of social factors. Shuaige and meinü have gradually lost theiroriginal words meaning, not only focusing on the semantic meaning of handsome andbeautiful young man, but become the name of all males and females. The proportion of theuse of shuaige and meinü is obviously higher than other types of address forms in departmentstores, since shuaige and meinü have vivid characters and are words of praise, thus, these twosocial address forms are easy to be accepted by people. In terms of the social factors affectingthe use of shuaige and meinü in department stores, females tend to use shuaige and meinümore frequently than males, and informants of21-25years old have tendency to use these twosocial address forms. In addition, informants use more proportion of shuaige and meinü wheninterpersonal relationship is between salespersons and customers; due to their statusawareness, informants who are managers in company and civil servants use lower proportionof shuaige and meinü. Compared with other social factors, informant’s educational level isfound to be not significant to the use of shuaige and meinü. Generally speaking, the use ofshuaige and meinü is accepted by most people, but these two terms of address have no limit to the addressee’s age and appearance and even are abused, thus, some people hold negativeattitude towards them.Shuaige and meinü are newly arisen social address forms in recent years. The study oftheir usage can reflect social culture and humane value in this period, contribute to peoplefurther understanding such new language phenomenon as this address form, as well as helppeople take a correct attitude to their use. On the other hand it can enrich the languagevariation study as a whole through exploring the relationship between language use and allkinds of social variables.