A Study Of Address Terms In Vanity Fair Based On Adaptation Theory

Address terms are the important linguistic phenomenon on how to address others so as to promote the communication in daily life.People usually begin their discourse and establish their relationship with address terms.Therefore address terms play very important roles in communications and they are the extremely important conveyors of social information.Brown and Gilman have begun the earliest researches on address terms in the field of sociolinguistics.Later researches were mostly just the refinement of their theoretical framework.Researches from sociolinguistic perspective neglected some other aspects such as linguistic reality and mental states though they emphasized the social factors related.Therefore,it is very necessary to carry out the investigation from other perspectives.This thesis will study the employment of address terms based on the Adaptation Theory of Verschueren(Verschueren 2000).Verschueren(2000)holds that the use of language is actually the process of making of linguistic choices consciously or unconsciously so as to satisfy the needs of communication.As the properties of language,variability,negotiability and adaptability help speakers make the various choices in the process of communication.The property of variability makes it possible to the choice-making of language,while the property of negotiability makes it changeable rather than mechanical.Both variability and negotiability stimulate people to make the choices with the aim of realizing the goal of communication.The author chooses the novel of Vanity Fair as the communicative context and mainly studies the choices of address terms in the process of communication.We do not choose the other novel but Vanity Fair just because the characters in this novel pay much attention to social status and power.The complicated mental world is fully displayed.Thus it provides a large numbers of address terms involved in the mental world,social world and physical world.According to Verschueren(2000),the linguistic choice-making is actually the process of adaptation to the communicative context.In this thesis,the choice-making of address terms in Vanity Fair is also the process of adaptation to mental world,social world,and physical world of the characters in the novel.The mental world such as the personality,emotion,belief,desire,etc.influences the employment of address terms.The adoption of address terms reveals the process of adaptation to some physiological motivations such as the motivation of self-denigration,satirizing,solidarity building,and contempt.The social context and environment cause people to adopt address terms under the restriction of social settings,institutions and culture.Besides,the temporal deixis and spatial deixis also impact the choices of address terms in communication.Therefore,this thesis will focus on the analysis of the adaptation to the mental world,social world and physical world during the process of choosing the address terms.