Research On Relationship Between Addressing Terms And Social Distance From The Perspective Of SAT

A Dream of Red Mansions (DRM) is one of Chinese classics, in which there are plenty of characters and abundant addressing terms correspondingly. These addressing terms have close relationship with social distance.Before all of the analysis, the author has read through DRM published by People’s Literature Publishing House for six times earnestly, in order to select all of the addressing terms and comprehend their employments. Because of many disputes about Chapter81to120of DRM, the thesis has classified and sequenced1615addressing terms selected from former80chapters on the basis of their initials (See Appendix1). And the author selects76examples from Appendix1to analyze in detail (See Appendix2). Under the guidance of Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT), the author completes the analysis from two major aspects. One is the impact of social distance on addressing terms, and the other one is the influence of addressing terms to social distance. In the first part the author has carried out the research from five aspects including context, status, gender, age, and degree of intimacy, based on theoretical foundation of SAT, containing similarity attraction hypothesis, social exchange hypothesis, causal attribution hypothesis and intergroup distinctiveness. Then the influence of addressing terms to social distance is analyzed and discussed correspondingly on the basis of convergence, maintenance and divergence from three perspectives of shortening, maintaining and broadening social distance. Thus in order to achieve aims the author does qualitative analysis primarily and descriptive research subsidiarily. In a word, people’s strategic and dynamic use of addressing terms in interaction is influenced by social distance and can control their social distance as well.The present research has both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, it helps to broaden the perspective on addressing terms. The various factors determining people’s choice of addressing terms are integrated into a socio-psychological variable---social distance. Pedagogically, it has significance to grasp of the effective communication strategies and to the harmonization of interpersonal relationship in society.