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Language Usage Survey Of Commercial Places In Fuzhou City

Posted on:2012-07-17Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:G Y HuangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155330335466085Subject:Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
While Putonghua (Mandarin) spreads as a national standard language in China, there is a wide range of post-diglossia phenomenon. According to situations, people who live in dialect regions can choose to use Putonghua or the local dialect or both of them in their family and social life. This post-diglossia circumstance has become more complicated since the 1980s along with the process of industrialization and urbanization, which have brought a lot of population movement, created intensive language contact between people from different social or ethnolinguistic backgrounds and changed both functions and structures of the local urban language community.Thus far in empirical literatures the dynamics of language choices in bilingual/ multilingual communication has been studied mainly from either a sociolinguistic approach, such as normative demands and various characteristics of the interlocutors, or a social psychological perspective, which is represented by the well-known Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT), or both of them. The present study is aiming to explore how sociolinguistic norms are obeyed or broken by sociostructural factors and characteristics of interlocutors in Fuzhou, Fujian Province. In this article, the unobtrusive measurement is used in a language usage survey of market and department stores in Fuzhou. And an integration of SAT and characteristics of the interlocutors such as their role, social class and age are applied to analyze how language choices are made in certain situational language setting and how sociostructural factors affect the use of language choices.The article will be structured as follows. As an introduction, the post-diglossia phenomenon in China and related studies are reviewed in Chapter 1. In chapter 2, the design of the present research is presented, including research questions, research subjects and research methods. And the result of the research is elaborated in Chapter 3, followed by discussions of it in Chapter 4 and the conclusion in Chapter 5.
Keywords/Search Tags:Fuzhouhua, Putonghua, post-diglossia, language choice, urban language survey
PDF Full Text Request
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