Research On The Evolution Of Modern Chinese Widely-Used Social Addressing Terms

The research of this paper is mainly on widely-used social addressing terms between adult in modern Chinese language, studies in its basic features in different historical periods, and analyzes the various trends and causes in the process of this evolution.Language changes as well as society. The development of Chinese widely-used social addressing terms can be divided into five stages from the late Qing Dynasty so far, it is significantly different that the society, politics, economy, culture and ideology in each stage, which makes people to use different widely-used social addressing terms including diverse situation and characteristics. As these different situations and characteristics, through the analysis and comparison, we come to three significant trends with its evolution:further diversification, equality tendency of addressing, enhancement of communication concept. The three trend have different forms:exacerbation of the generalization of kinship terms, generalization of some appropriative addressing terms, restart of some deprecated addressing terms, the loss of official color, the enhancement of non-identity. These phenomenon, or characteristics on the one hand embodies the shock and break to grade principle andemotion principle in the development process of widely-used social addressing terms, on the other hand also shows that the two principles are always accompanied by existence, development, boom and declination of widely-used social addressing terms. Moreover, the two principles are also the deep reason why there is no strictly widely-used social addressing terms in Chinese.