| Subjectivity is polysemous and ubiquitous.The present thesis investigates the diachronic change of the attitudes towards women expressed by the appositive“Pro(single)+ yige +NP”(PNP)construction from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective.This research includes two parts.One concerns the diachronic change of the three attitudes towards women expressed by the PNP construction.The other part examines the effects of the five social factors,namely,age,marriage,social status,economic status,and education level,on the different attitudes towards women and their diachronic change.For the first question,on the basis of usage-based approach,the thesis focuses on the nouns or nominal phrases referring to women appearing in the NP slot of the construction and counts the token frequencies of the three different attitudes towards women,namely,the negative,neutral and positive attitude.In order to show their diachronic change,two stages are established according to the contexts where the PNP construction is used: the stage from Western Han Dynasty to foundation of the People's Republic of China(the first stage)and the stage from the foundation of the People's Republic of China to the present(the second stage).Before the analyses of the two separate stages,the whole data is analyzed at first so as to have a general understanding for the two research questions.For the three types of data,all suggest that negative attitude is the most frequent one,followed by neutral attitude,and the positive is the least frequent.Comparing the two separate stages,the study finds that cases showing negative attitude towards women drop while both neutral and positive attitude rise a little bit.The underlying reason for such a phenomenon is assumed to be the improvement of women's social status along with the development of society,resulting in a more positive evaluation for women.This in turn plays a role in the semantic changes of the PNP construction,that is,the negative sense is weakened while the neutral and positive sense are strengthened.Secondly,by means of multivariate logistic regression method,the thesis analyzes the effects of five social factors,namely,age,marriage,social status,economic status,and education level,on people's attitudes towards women and their diachronic changes.There are several findings.Firstly,the analysis of all the data indicates that unmarried women are more likely to be evaluated neutrally andpositively,comparing with the unmarried ones.Secondly,analysis of the data in the first stage implies that women with high education level are more likely to receive a neutral evaluation rather than negative ones,and unmarried women tend to be evaluated more positively.Thirdly,analysis of the data in the second stage indicates that unmarried women are more likely to be evaluated neutrally.This observation is assumed to result from the convention that being unmarried is connected with youth,vigor,and purity from man's point of view in patriarchal society.That is the reason why unmarried women are more likely to be approved and praised.This is also a possible answer for the change that unmarried women are evaluated more positively in the first stage than in the second stage.This is because of the truth that the evaluation criteria for women become more diverse nowadays than in the past,when women's role in the society relies heavily on marriage.As for the reason about the influence of five social factors on neutral attitude in the stage,it makes sense to evaluate well-educated people at least neutrally,if not positively in most cases.Through the analysis of the “Pro(single)+yige + NP” construction,the thesis reveals the diachronic change of the attitudes towards women expressed by the construction and the influence of five social factors(age,marriage,social status,economic status and education level)on the different attitudes and their diachronic change.The revealing investigation is helpful for Chinese-learners to gain a comprehensive understanding about this construction.Besides,to some extent,it has illustrated the interaction of language,cognition,and society. |
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