The Diachronic Study On Chinese Wife-address Terms From The Perspective Of Sociolinguisitcs

Language could show the culture, the custom and manners of anation. It is tightly connected to the society of its nation. Thus thevariation of language reflects the variation of the society and therevolution of the nation’s history. The variation of human’s social statuscan also be reflected by the language he or she is using. The usage ofvocabularies by different people is various. As the vocabularies ofrecognizing human’s status and names, address terms are used daily andcannot be neglected. However, Chinese address terms are completelydifferent from English address terms. There are more complex relationsand deep meaning in Chinese address terms than English. As we all know,Chinese owns longer history whose vocabularies are large which havetheir own features and unique characteristics. The address terms whichare dated from ancient times record the development of a society, therevolution of culture, the advance of time. It also reminds people thateach address term has different roles in different social systems.This paper will emphasize on the wife-address terms in marriagein different Chinese social systems. Wife-address terms denote theaddress terms which are used for women when their husband call them inthe relation of a marriage. The author has collected250words about thisresearch which should be analyzed in groups. The typical words in each group are generated in one condition of social system. In the process ofthe analysis of those words, the temporary typical literature works, novels,even the films will be taken as the source of the examples to show thereality of that period. And after the comprehensive discussion andcomparison between the variation of the data in different dynasty’ssystem and the variation of the address terms for wives according todifferent status of the female’s, it can be revealed how address terms andchanges of the society connect according to the mutual effects anddeveloping trends.This paper applies qualitative method to analyze the collected datadiachronically. First of all, the author classifies the social conditions forwives according to the social system and its structure with classifying thewords into groups. The data can also be divided according to face-to-faceaddress and back-appellation, which can also be called direct referenceand indirect reference. Then from the perspective of sociolinguistics, andbased on the the variation theory in sociolinguistics, the author willdiscuss the social factors and effects for the diachronic variation ofwife-address according to different systems. The reflected correspondingvariation of women’ s status can be demonstrated.The discussion and analysis of the whole research can be concludedas the following questions which can also be taken as the researchquestions: 1What are the characteristics of wife-address terms under differentsocial system?2. What kinds of wife-address are kept nowadays and why?The research result obviously shows that the status of women isclimbing continuously from ancient times to nowadays. But during theresearch how the characteristics of wife-address terms demonstrate thatsocial phenomenon can be discussed in detail in this paper.