An Investigation And Study On The Social Address Term "A Yi(阿姨)"

The social address term "A Yi(阿姨)" is one of the social appellations which are used very frequently in the modern society. The academia had little study on this field, by far, and still have controversies on the definition of it on some dictionaries. Moreover, there are many problems in practical application about "A Yi (阿姨) ". To solve these problems, in this paper, we used the method of questionnaire survey. After some interviews and a pre-research, we modified this questionnaire for many times. At last, we selected the central region of Zhejiang Province as the research area, and selected six groups as the respondents, including the pupils, junior high school students, senior high school students, undergraduates, younger people in the society, the middle-aged and elderly. Through the usage and reception, influencing factors and usage problems, we had the investigation and analyses to have a more comprehensive and systematic investigation and study on "A Yi (阿姨) ".The paper is divided into six parts.The first part is an introduction. After starting with a brief about the meanings and historical evolution of "A Yi (阿姨) ", the current research and significance, we illustrate the research object, contents and methods.The second part is elaborating the basic situation of the questionnaire, including respondents, the contents, process, and deficiency.In the third part, we investigated and analyzed the situation of "A Yi(阿姨)" through its usage and reception. The results show that the address term "A Yi (阿 姨) "has a very wide range of practical application, and is used to call the woman who has the same age as mother or some special female staff who we have frequent contacts in our daily life. The older you are, the less possibility you will use it, and the more likely you will be called "A Yi(阿姨) " and accept it. Moreover, "A Yi (阿姨) " is usually used on some informal occasions. What is noteworthy is that there are many middle aged and elderly people use it to call some female staff, such as nanny. As "A Yi(阿姨) is used more frequently to call such female staff, it added more derogatory sense and thus people become more unwilling to be called "A Yi(阿姨) ".Part four is analyzing elements which affect the use and acceptance of this term. Primarily based on the Verschueren’s theory of adaptation, and referenced on Brown and Gilman’s theory of power and solidarity, we grouped the influencing factors into three main categories:the mental, physical and social factors, which can be divided into field, formality, age, gender, status, mental age, communicative motivation and so on. The results show that all of these factors will affect this term’s use and the social factor has the biggest impact.Part V attempts to discuss some related issues, including the reference point on age of using the social address term "A Yi(阿姨)" and its problems in practice. According to the survey result, we discussed it and found that taking mother’s age as the reference is not enough, we should also take ourselves’ages into account at the same time.The last part is the conclusion.