| Man is a social animal. The interpersonal interactions occur among human beings at every moment. Different interpersonal relationships as reflected by emotions among human beings are various in the intimacy and alienation. It displays dissimilar levels. As a common means of speech communication and language art, honey words are an area that one has experienced or will undergo one day. Like lubricants and agglutinations for interpersonal relationships, honey words are effective in softening and drawing interpersonal relationships closer. No one can communicate so successfully without this effective means. Hence, honey words are closely connected with our daily life, but no enough attention has been paid to them so far. This thesis attempts an exploration into the honey words in a broad sense. Love words, compliments, flatteries, congratulations, comforts and addresses with active emotions, flowery words or words embedded in everyday objects are all included in the present study. Users of honey words are classified into 8 groups. The writer conducts a qualitative analysis of the relevant data. The corpus and data are selected from movies, plays, books, real conversations and short messages on the mobile phones.The writer firstly explores honey words from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics (IS), a subject concerning macroscopic behaviors that takes the explicit behaviors of psychosocial phenomena into consideration. Cooperative Principles (CP), Politeness Principles (PP) and Contextual Correlates of Adaptability serve as the theoretical support and research tools.Languages are conducted in a particular psychosocial environment. Language capability will be influenced by psychosocial factors. Psychological sociolinguistics is to consider the microcosmic psychology and explore the implicit aspects of psychosocial phenomena. Hence, the author tries to discover the characteristics of honey words from the aspects of psychological process and mechanism for psychological sociolinguistics. The psychological process and inner mechanism of honey word users, writers and hearers and readers are respectively explored so as to reveal the underlying rules. Social exchange theory and symbolic interactionism offer a clear theoretical guidance for this study.With a hope to analyze honey words, the writer attempts to reveal the potential rules, certain speech communicational patterns, psychosocial mechanism of the honey words speakers, writers and hearers and readers, help people concerned to comprehend the rules of social conducts and interpretational strategies, so as to create more harmonious interpersonal relationships and social atmospheres and give some instructions to language users who conduct these language symbols– honey words in an active manner.The research suggests: 1) In terms of the form of the language, honey words are individualistic. It can be complicated or simple, implicit or explicit. The language of honey words is fairly free; 2) Honey words comply with Politeness Principle, especially the Approbation Maxim and the Agreement Maxim of Leech's Politeness Principle. Honey words often violate the Quality Maxim and Quantity Maxim of the Cooperative Principles, hence producing conversational implicatures; 3) Honey words can be seen as exchange behavior and the exchange goods are material or non-material. This can be thought of as the underlying rules for people to follow in their behaviors of using honey words; 4) Honey words are a kind of language symbols. Role-playing is important in this process of social intercourse. With this psychological mechanism, users of honey words tend to use this language form to express certain emotions so as to meet one's own needs.
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