A Sociolinguistic Study Of The Use Of Ni And Nin In Beijing Dialect

Personal pronouns are an important means for people to establish and maintain social relationships in communication. T/V distinction refers to a binary system of second person pronouns found in many languages. The two pronominal forms in this system are used to address different people in different ways on different occasions.T/V usage has received much attention since Brown and Gilman published their seminal work "The Pronoun of Power and Solidarity" in1960. In Beijing dialect, there also exists a binary system of second person pronouns: ni (你)and nin(您), corresponding to the T form and the V form as described by Brown and Gilman.The primary purpose of this study is to find out the patterns of pronominal usage in Beijing dialect and reveal the relationships between pronoun choice and socials factors. The ethnography of communication by Dell Hymes provides the theoretical and analytical framework for this study. Altogether1013instances of pronominal usage were collected from20television series broadcast in China between2011and2013. Social variables such as gender, generation, educational level and social class of addresser and addressee, kinship, familiarity and rank relationship etc. were coded for each occurrence of pronoun. Then the data was processed with SPSS to generate a descriptive analysis of the distribution of pronominal usage across these social variables. Chi-square tests were also conducted to examine the relationship between pronoun choice and social factors.Results indicate that age difference, rank relationship, degree of familiarity, setting and emotion play central roles in influencing pronominal usage, other factors such as the gender of addresser, educational level and social status of addresser and address also exert influence on the option of one pronoun over another, though to a lesser degree.