Sociolinguistic Research On Gender Appellations In Ancient Chinese

Chinese appellation culture is an important part of Chinese culture. Researches about Chinese appellations have achieved fruitful results since the ancient times, but there still exists some problems, such as putting more emphasis on the research of kinship terms while the social appellations’ study is insufficient, and cohort study is very weak; lack of systemic and exhaustive researches. Therefore, a systemic and thorough research of Chinese social appellations in a certain historical period based on original data is necessary.As an important part of Chinese appellations research, research on the gender appellations in ancient times has both academic value and important practical significance. This paper is intended to make an all-round systemic research on all the gender appellation cases from the diachronic and the synchronic dimension, based on thirteen ancient Chinese literature( including “ Shi Jing”,"Shang Shu",“Zhou Yi",“Zhan Guo Ce”,“Zuo Zhuan”, "Zhou Li", “Yi Li", “Li Ji”,“Lun Yu", “Meng Zi",,"Li Sao”,"Shi Ji" and the metrical composition in the Western Han Dynasty),so as to make up for the insuffienct of the research in this area, based on which we can make a preliminary study on its characteristics of usage, the cultural connotation it reflects and the its restraining factors.This paper is mainly divided into five chapters.The first chapter is a general overview of the research on this topic, including a summary about Chinese appellations research,the meaning and the method of the research, a definition of the corpus.The second chapter is a summary of all the gender appellation cases in the corpus,and also conducts a brief analysis from etymology angle. It contains two parts: the female appellations and the male appellations.The third chapter contains two parts.In the first part, the paper analyses the development and the distribution of gender appellations from the diachronic and the synchronic dimension. Although the analysis of this part is based on a large number of ancient texts, in consideration of the still insufficient corpus and technical limitations,the paper can only provide a statistical analysis about the distribution of gender appellations in ancient China, so as to offer some support for the further research. In the second part, the paper analyses the cultural connotation reflected by the gender appellations.The forth chapter discusses the influencing factors of usage characteristics from the angle of culture.