从英汉称呼语的不同分析中西方文化的差异性

从英汉称呼语的不同分析中西方文化的差异性1．Introduction

In Chinese the address forms are defined “Terms of address people use when they greet each other to reveal their relationship, such as tongzhi (comrade),

gege(elder brother), etc.”[1]56According to Richards[2]34“An a ddress term refers to the word or words used to address somebody in speech or writing”. To sum up, address forms can be defined as the words that people use to address others in communication.

Address formsare an important and necessary part of human languages; people use them a lot in daily conversations or interactions. They have the function of establishing, maintaining and strengthening the interpersonal relationship between participants. They are the first information presented by communicators, which indicates a person’s intention or emotion to the addressee. Moreover, they represent a part of language evolution in process and they are embodiment of a certain culture.

This thesis tries to analyze address forms that are used in face-to-face addressing, with the application of linguistic theories, with the aim of thoroughly understanding the different usage of English and Chinese address forms and making some efforts to probe in the feasibility of their equivalent cultural differences, which may give us some suggestions in intercultural communication. The principal method used in this dissertation is comparative analysis, because comparison is one important and effective approach to get the essence of two similar matters.

2.General review of address forms

From very early in human history, address forms have caught scholars’ attention both home and abroad. Address form has attracted increasing attention from researchers in many fields, such as historical linguistics, social linguistics, etymology, ethnology, psychology. Lots of researches have been done since the early 1950s both abroad and home.

2.1 Previous studies on address forms abroad

Western scholars’ research on address forms roughly began in the 1950’s. Since then, sociolinguists and psycholinguists have made some remarkable achievements in the study of address forms. In 1960 Brown and Gilman [3]55 published The Power and Solidarity of Pronoun. They found the T/V (Latin to and vos) usage is governed by power and solidarity after investigating the use of second person pronoun tu and vous in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The mode T/V is similar to “ni” (你)and “nin”(您) in Chinese. It is a brilliant work and “Brown and Gilman are regarded as initiators of modern sociolinguistic investigatio ns on address forms”[4]13. One year later Brown and Ford investigate the use of address forms in American English and they found the principal choices in American English are between First Name (FN) and Title+Last Name (TLN). FN is roughly equal to T and TLN to V. In 1972

Ervin-Tripp[5]225took a new approach to the study of the use of address form in