Cultural And Pragmatic Study Of Russian Address Forms

Address forms, which are the member of language and are shared by almost all languages in the word, are important means of expressing feelings and thoughts and a bridge for people to communicate with each other. Meanwhile, they prove to be used most frequently in social communication of human-beings.Address forms are the common phenomena both in Chinese and Russian languages. However, Russian address forms were traditionally regarded as an independent and smaller grammatical unit and were paid less attention by linguists. In recent years, with the development of sociolinguistics, language culture, especially the development of communication-pragmatics, the study of address forms has become increasingly active. As the fossil of Russian national history and culture, Russian address forms are getting more and more attention from linguists, especially from cultural scientists and pragmatists。As the main information carrier of human-beings, address forms are closely related to culture and pragmatics. On the one hand, from a historical and diachronic perspectives, address forms clearly reflect the patriarchal ideas, values, emotional thoughts, etc; changes of address forms in different period present vestige of the times and deeper cultural factors; on the other hand, the speaker uses a certain address form to express his particular feelings and intentions, even he will use different address forms to the same person according to the different occasions and situations. Study of address forms in cultural dimension, which reflects some characteristics of an entire country or nation, reveals the common problems of language, while, study of address forms in pragmatic dimension, which proves to be interpretation of language usage of different users in certain situation, reflects the personality problem of language.To make culture and pragmatic a pointcut, in this thesis, we make a deep analysis of Russian address forms under the dimension of history, society and the times. In macro cultural analysis, we regard address forms as the fossil of history and culture of Russian society to reveal profound changes in the perspective of history and society, meanwhile to analysis the influence of these changes on language and language users; While, in micro pragmatic analysis, we treat address forms as the basic unit of communication to achieve their intended purpose or perform certain actions by using different kinds of address forms in practical communication with each other. The study of Russian address forms from the cultural and pragmatic perspectives not only offers us a general understanding of cultural characteristics and a good comprehension of deep influence of society development and changes on language, but allows us to have a proof that language is not only the tool to record culture and history, but a way of communication, which lays a solid foundation in theory and practice for the essence of language.