A Sociolinguistic And Ecolinguistic Study Of Chinese New Forms Of Address On The Internet

The latest decade has witnessed the miracle of rapid development of Chinese Internet. In2003, broadband service just came into use in China, and10years later, China’s netizen population reaches591million. There is no doubt that the Internet has become an indispensible part in people’s life. A cyber society was established in the online space, people get newest information and exchange their ideas online; and since language is the carrier of social activities, there gradually develops a specific way of talking and writing-cyber language. Cyber language is very much resemble the Internet, it is easily mastered, effective, and most importantly, it reflects social events in our daily life in its own way.Recently, some new forms of address come into our sight and attract our attention. There are two typical kinds of forms of address; one is’ABB’style of address forms such as "Fan Paopao","Lou Waiwai", and the other is’Central word+relative appellation’style of address forms like "Biao Ge","Fang Shen" and so on. They appeared on the Internet along with the latest social affairs in China. These new forms of address are unlike traditional Chinese address forms, but people accepted them very quickly and spontaneously. People used them naturally and were active in creating more of these styles of address forms. Is there any regular pattern of these new forms of address? Why are people interested in using these words? What is the relationship between these words and the social events behind them? How do social factors influence the creation of these address forms? Do these new forms of address reflect any emotion or willing of the people who use them? Are these kinds of word forms good or bad to be exist linguistically? Are there any ecolinguistic features of these words? All these questions are what the author would like to make clear in this thesis. This thesis aims at exposing the internal and external features of these typical kinds of forms of address. It is intended to elaborate the linguistic and social factors that influence the emergence and development of new forms of address on the Internet in China, as well as exploring the ecolinguistic mechanism in these words, and the further effects they would bring to our society. -making full use of the internet, statistics, research data and examples in the thesis are all selected from news reports of popular news websites home and abroad, in the hope of making the analyses more objective and reflective. With the help of a considerable work on reading, exploration and data collection, the author studied two typical kinds of new forms of address on the Internet in China and concluded that the new word forms do not belong only to the cyberspace, they enrich and develop the Chinese vocabulary. In a broader sense, cyber language endows traditional words new meanings and usages, and it has its unique value and significance of existence.