A Study Of The Power And Solidarity Relationship In Chinese Military Context

Sociolinguists regard the speech between the addresser and the addressee as the social acts and take for granted that speech could reflect the social relationship between the speakers, especially the power and solidarity.In this thesis, I would like to introduce the power and solidarity relationship in Chinese military context of Jilin City. At first, the thesis poses three questions of this study. The first questions is whether there is the only one relationship—power relationship in the military context? The second one is what kind of relationship will exist between officers and between soldiers—the power relationship or the solidarity relationship? The third one is the factors which can influence the power and solidarity relationship in military context. Then the thesis makes a survey and research to answer the three questions. Firstly, the thesis will introduce the related theory of this study. The related theory includes the power and solidarity, Speech Act Theory and an overview of context. The thesis introduces the definitions of power and solidarity, the T\V usage for the theory of power and solidarity. It also has talk on the studies on address forms to illustrate this theory in detail. As for the Speech Act Theory, the author illustrates two linguists'view on the theory—Austin's and Searl's. At last of this part, there are three linguists'opinions on context mentioned. The three ones are Malinowski, Firth and Halliday. The thesis combines these three theories to analyze the data taken from a land army of Jilin City.Secondly, this thesis represents a framework for the research process and research approach; the research approach adopts anonymous observation to investigate the office-soldier conversations on the formal and informal occasions. There are questionnaires of address forms allotted to 111 soldiers and officers. According to the results of the survey, the study focuses on the linguistic issues of time duration, address forms and speech act. From the statistic result the thesis uses the theories mentioned above to analyze the data and get some conclusions according to the result of research on the data. After quantitative analysis and case study, we find the reflections on the power and solidarity relationship on the formal informal and informal occasion. We conclude the following points:1. The officer holds power on the soldier and the old soldier and the young one hold the same power on all the formal occasion2. There is a rigid hierarchy of the address forms either on the formal occasion or informal occasion.3. When the squad leader isn't on the spot, the older soldier and the young soldier have the equal position under this situation. When the squad leader is on the spot, he holds power on the others.4. When the situation is in the dining hall, both the squad leader and the older soldier are equal.At last it shows the factors and their influences on the power and solidarity relationship such as military rank, military age and context and the limitations of this study.