A Study On Cyber Address Forms In Sina Weibo Language:A Rapport Management Perspective

Social development and the Internet popularity have had a significant impact on the development of address forms.Netizens can make comments and express their opinions more freely with the emergence of micro-blog.Meanwhile,a large number of new cyber address forms have sprung up.The previous studies on address forms have been conducted mostly from the perspective of word formation and social pragmatics,but few from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics.Moreover,the corpus of previous studies is mostly selected from literary works and dialects,and few of them involves cyber language.Therefore,there is still some space to study cyber address forms from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics.This thesis,based on previous research,combing qualitative with quantitative research method,selecting blog contents and related comments of Sina Weibo blogs from January 1,2019 to December 31,2019 as the research corpus,attempts to employ Hellen Spenser Oatey's rapport management theory to make a detailed study on the cyber address forms in blog content and relevant comments.Then some explanations about how bloggers and commentators use cyber address forms to manage their interpersonal relationships by choosing different online terms of address.The present research aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the characteristics of cyber address forms in Sina Weibo language?(2)How do different cyber address forms in Sina Weibo language threaten,maintain or enhance social relations by acting on face and social rights?(3)What factors in rapport management theory can affect people's choice of cyber address forms?The research results show that from the perspective of rapport management,cyber address forms are considered as a kind of language strategy.In Sina Weibo,influenced by politeness principle,cyber context and Internet culture,power relations,rapport orientation and message content,bloggers and commentators in Sina Weibochoose and use different kinds of cyber address forms to threaten,maintain or enhance the interpersonal relationship of both parties by threatening or enhancing the quality face,identity face,equity rights and association rights of listeners.The present research is of great significance both in theory and practice.Theoretically,based on rapport management theory,this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the cyber address forms in Sina Weibo from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics,which provides a new research perspective for the study of cyber address forms.Practically,this thesis can help people understand the role of cyber address forms in interpersonal relationship management and provide a reference for people to correctly grasp and use cyber address forms.In addition,the effective selection of cyber address forms can improve the quality of speech communication and make speech communication more efficient,which has important practical significance.