Abstract:

Address terms are word systems that used frequently to address a person or object in social communication. It can reflect the speaker's role, family, social status and relationships. What’s more, Address terms are to some extent dependent on the development of society, history, background in different cultures between English and Chinese and every language has its own address terms. This study aims to discuss the different usage of address terms in English and Chinese and the causes of these differences so that making it easier and more convenient in cross-cultural communication between east and west.

Key words: address terms; contrast between English and Chinese; national culture; cross-cultural communication

摘要：

称呼语指的是在称呼某人或者某物时所用的词语，是人际交往中使用最频繁的语言现象，它能反应人与人之间的社会关系与社会地位。称呼语对民族文化有一定的依赖性,英汉不同的历史文化背景等造成了称呼语的使用差异。通过对英汉称呼语的不同方面进行比较，并简要地归纳造成这些差异的原因，更好地促进中西方文化交流，推动跨文化交流发展。

关键词：称呼语；英汉对比；民族文化；跨文化交流

1.Introduction
Address terms are not a new topic in academic research and are still worth studying for their significance nowadays. So far, linguists home and aboard have made a large number of researches on the address terms. Some of them studied from the sociolinguistic perspectives, some of them studied from the pragmatic perspectives. In the west, studies on the address terms can be traced back to 1960s. The work of Brown and Gilman was considered as "the classic and most influential study of address terms and the social relationships they reveal" (Fasold 1990) published in 1960. Roger Brown and Marguerite Ford have classified the address terms in three categories. The first one is to call each other’s names; the second one is to call others both on names and titles; the third one is to call one on names and the other on titles. They thought, at the same time, address terms were controlled by "power" and "solidarity". Power reflects social status.That is to say, the one who has more power, the one who has more ability. As for solidarity, it shows the kinship and relationships between people. On the basis of their studies, Ervin-Tripp pointed out and made analysis the factors that controlled the address terms in Sociolinguistic Rules of Address. From then on, scholars have studied the usage of address terms in English, Germany, French, Russia languages.