A Sociolinguistic Study Of Campus Address Terms

Address terms, as a complicated and flexible system, play an important role in verbal communication in daily life. With the development of the society, address terms present different characteristics that conform to the historical background.Address terms have experienced great changes- many address terms have new lexical meanings and some are less frequently used, while many new address terms have sprung up with the spread of the Internet. Address terms have been a powerful force,endowed with different connotations and emotions, and are the bonds that build relationships with others. How to address others appropriately is the premise of interpersonal communication. People can address others by their Full Names, Last Name, First Name, Titles and so on, which can indicate the social roles, social distance, identity and status, and even the attitudes and emotions between the speaker and the addressee. As for the definition and classification of address terms, different scholars hold different views. Ralph Fasold defined address terms in The Sociolinguistics of Language as “ Address forms are the words speakers use to designate the person they are talking to while they are talking to them”(Fasold,1990:1). And address terms can be classified into kinship address terms and social address terms; face-to-face address forms and narrative address terms. This paper focuses on the study of the use of face-to-face social address terms by college students on campus. The research on address terms has been a top topic by linguists. And there are fruitful researches on address terms from the perspectives of sociolinguistics,semantics, pragmatics, and so on. This paper tries to investigate the use of social address terms from the perspective of sociolinguistics according to the social factors,explore their features, and hope to give instructions for students to address others appropriately.College students are more likely to follow the trend, and grasp the development of the society. Nowadays, college students are worthy of the name “90s”, who are active and creative, and show the characters and features of the time. This paper takes college students from Zhuhai College of Jilin University as the research subjects,investigates the use of social address terms on campus by the methods of observation,interview, and questionnaire under the context of Mandarin. The data collected from the questionnaire are classified and analyzed according to gender, age, social distance and so on to show how students address their fellow students, teachers, teaching staff,and logistic staff(such as plumbers, shoe repairers and so on, and explore the cognition of address terms of students. The study finds out that: 1) Different social factors, such as gender, grade, occasion, social roles, and social distance and so on,exert great influence on the use of social address terms by college students. 2) When college students address their teachers, “Laoshi”, “LN+Laoshi” and “FN+Laoshi” are most frequently used whether on formal occasion or informal occasion. In terms of ages, students tend to use nicknames or Fictive use of Kinship terms to address young male and female teachers, while they tend to use “Post” and “Rank” to address senior male and female teachers. 3) When college students address their fellow students,social distance is the priority to consider. The most frequently-used address terms are“LN+FN” and “FN”. The use of address terms depends on social distance. The kinds of address terms to unfamiliar students by female students are less than those by male students, and female students tend to use pet names to address familiar students, while male students tend to use titles to address students. 4) When college students address teaching-supporting staff, “Laoshi” is the most frequently used. But, college students also choose “Title”, such as “Fudaoyuan”, “Daoyuan”, to addess their tutors. 5) When college students address logistic Staff, there appears little difference between male and female students, and “Laoban”, “Fictive kinship terms” and “No-addressing” are relatively frequently used. The research also investigates students’ cognition of address terms, and “Tongxue”, “Laoshi”, “Aunt”, “No-addressing” and “Laoban” are considered as most frequently-used common address terms on campus. By investigation, this paper aims to enrich and update the study on address terms, andhopes to give reference to English teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.