A Case Study of Students’Address Terms to College Counselors within the Framework of Linguistic Adaptability

Renmin University of China,Beijing,China Email:helen_zhangwl@163.com

[Abstract]Address forms can be of importance concerning smoothing communication.From the perspective of linguistic adaptability,adopting in-depth interview,this paper aims to explore the terms that college students choose to address their counselor who is a key figure to students in their college life and give the explanations of why these terms are chosen.By the case study of a prestigious university in northeast China,the paper classifies 4 categories out of 20 terms used by students,which can serve as a reference for college students to properly address their counselors,as meantime provides proofs to the explanatory power of linguistic adaptability.

[Keywords]address terms;linguistic adaptability;college counselors

Introduction

Address forms tend to be inevitable during any conversation or communication.On campus,a special group of administrative people,being regarded and named as“counselors”,helping students to deal with nearly all of their non-academic issues.To the students,addressing counselors properly seems crucial as they constantly communicate with their counselors throughout the college life.While studies on a variety of different address forms conducted within the field of pragmatics are no rare thing,linguistic adaptability may provide a relatively new theoretical foundation for interpretation;and for records studies on address terms particularly for college counselors within the framework of linguistic adaptability are far from adequate.Given this,by conducting the in-depth interview(together with a pilot interview and a follow-up interview)to the students from a prestigious university in the northeast of China,this paper aims to discover what are the possible and proper terms used by students to address a counselor and to explain why these terms are chosen within the framework of linguistic adaptability.Consequently,the paper will also tend to be able to give instructions to students in terms of proper address to their counselor and to add up the explanatory power of linguistic adaptability by extending the realm of its empirical researches.

Address Terms and Linguistic Adaptability

The publication ofUnderstanding Pragmatics(Verschueren,1999)marked the formal establishment of Adaptation Theory.According to Verschueren,using language is a process of continuous making of linguistic choices(Qian,1991),and the reason why people are able to make choices lies in three properties of language:variability,negotiability and adaptability.Adaptability can be further divided into four aspects:contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability,and the salience of adaptability.The contextual correlates of adaptability include all the ingredients of the communicative context with which linguistic choices have to be interadaptable(Verschueren,1999),and the ingredients of which,specifically,refer to language users,mental world,social world,and physical world.

Language users,considered as the focal point in the communicative context,includes both utters and interpreters.Mental world refers to the psychological factors influencing linguistic choices,including emotion,cognition,beliefs,personality,motivation,wishes etc.Social world includes the factors like social conventions,social norms,social status,culture,religion,race,nationality,etc.Physical world mainly refers to time and place,while it may also consist of physical conditions,gestures,body postures etc.

Early studies concerning address forms within the framework of linguistic adaptability seem to be mainly conducted among Chinese scholars,and to a large extent applied to literature analyses.Ma and Zhang(2014)adopted the framework of linguistic adaptability to analyze the address forms in the TV seriesDa Zhai Men.Yao(2014)studied the address forms inDream of Red Mansionsby analyzing social world,mental world and physical world.Wu,Wang,and Zhang(2014)studied on the address forms inA Dream of Rea Mansions.while Li(2014)studied inThe Joy Luck Club.Lv(2014)analyzed the translation of address forms inDream of Red Mansions.Above researchers seem to all dedicate to probe into the application of linguistic adaptability of address forms in literature works.

On the other hand,despite the abundant existence of studies abroad on address forms,there tend to be few of them taking a perspective of linguistic adaptability.Instead,the studies are inclined to turn to other pragmatic theories.Velman-Omelina and ?t?adneva(2016)interpret the address forms to unfamiliar people by politeness principle.Ghezzi and Mella(2015)studied choices between the address forms tú and usted in current peninsular Spanish also by politeness principle.Similarly Johns and Félix-Brasdefer(2015)from the perspective of politeness discussed the production of requests among Senegalese speakers of French in Dakar.Zhao(2014)was another researcher related address forms to politeness principle.Tracy(2011)analyzed address forms by politeness principle and face theory in the study of language in court.Jiang(2015)’s study related address forms to speech act.Huang and Zhou(2017)’s analysis of Chinese kinship terms used for addressing nonkin involved an attitudinal speech act.Findings on address forms by Farenkia(2015)is based on analysis of the speech act of invitation refusals in the study.

College counselors,taking care of college students from every aspect only other than giving academic instructions,is a group of administrative people uniquely existing in China.College students may communicate with their counselors and thus tend to need address the counselors in everyday life.Yet presently far from adequate are the studies specifically focusing on address terms for college counselors.There are studies made reflections on address terms for college counselors but from educational perspective(Liang,2013; Zhao,2012; Wang & Li,2013).Xue(2016)had her study focused on various face-to-face social address terms by college students on campus,with only a small part generally mentioning address terms for a counselor;

Address Terms for College Counselors

Different from the earlier studies,this paper is particularly focused on studying address terms for college counselors and aims to provide explanation for the choices from the perspective of linguistic adaptability.Taking in-depth interview(Chen,2000)as the main method,an outline with designed questions was first conducted to 10 students as a pilot interview.Being refined,the revised version of interview was conducted to 32 students.After the interview to the students,another quick interview was done to the counselor of the participants to check the property or acceptability of the address terms chosen by the participants.

Specifically,the participants were 32 voluntary students out of 144 sophomores from the Department of Foreign Languages in D University.Each eight of the participants came from different majors(Business English,Technical Communication,Russian,and Japanese).So few male students were in the department that they were excluded from sampling.All the participants were asked questions about communication with their common counselor“LZL”,who was the only counselor in charge of these sophomores,a post-90s female postgraduate majored in Russian.With permission,the students’statements were sound-recorded for convenience of proceeding and analyzing.Interview questions involved were mainly about what the terms they choose were and why they chose so.

Following is the table(Table1)of address terms for the counselor in order of frequency of being used.Among the terms,“LZL”represents the full name of the counselor,as“L”represents the last name and“ZL”represents the first name.

Table 1.Frequency of Address Terms To the Counselor

Altogether 20 terms were given by the students as the terms they have used to address the counselor.And it can be seen that even though there was a variety of address terms being mentioned,only a few of them were widely used while the majority of others tend to be exclusively used by some specific students.“ZL 姐”and“導員（兒）”were the two terms most frequently adopted among the students given that the frequency of being mentioned were 31 and 30 respectively.“老師”seemed to be the third common term used by students compared with the other 17 terms being mentioned no more than 5 times.8 of the terms were even each used by merely one participant.

Concerning the nature of each term,the 20 terms can be classified into 4 categories,namely(1)teacher category;(2)sister category;(3)brother category;(4)others.The classification was indicated in Table 1 with the number of each category.In the interview to the counselor of the participants,all the address terms of four categories were shown to the counselor and were confirmed being used.The counselor also suggested that each of the terms were acceptable to her,as she stated:

“嗯對，是有這些（稱呼），哈哈，我覺得都可以的呀，都好，嗯，大家想怎么叫都可以的。”

However,the counselor also mentioned that it would be just fine if she was addressed by terms from teacher category or sister category as she stated:

“都行，叫我ZL 姐就行，導員（兒），都可以。”

Linguistic Adaptability of the Address Terms to Contextual Correlates

Adaptation to mental world,social world,physical world and language user led the students to choose different terms.The factors differ from one another in terms of their degree of influences placed on different categories of address terms.

For the teacher category,the choices of address term made by the participants mainly adapted to social word and language user.Concerning term“老師”,19 of the participants stated that they would use it when the occasion is rather formal,here is an example statement:

“就是有時候開會啊，比如年級會，或者有時候有領導在，旁聽什么的，那還是叫得正式一點比較好吧，就叫導員（兒）或者老師什么的我覺得比較好。”

Or some of the participants chose the teacher category because of social distance as 9 of them believe it was better to show respect to the counselor:

“雖然就是導員（兒）人很好，特別溫柔，但我還是覺得她那個畢竟怎么說呢，也是老師嘛，還是叫老師這樣比較禮貌，就是還是要有那個尊敬在的。”

Apart from adaption to social world as shown above,language user was also taken into consideration when making choices of address terms.17 of the participants mentioned people present when communicate with the counselor are influential and these were typical adaptation to the interpreters,which is included as one of language users:

“就是也分情況，嗯像在辦公室，其他導員（兒）都在，然后有領導檢查的時候，還是要叫‘啊，導員（兒）你看這個怎么樣怎么樣’這樣子。”

“如果有其他人在比如同學什么的，就不是就我們兩個面對面這樣比較私密的對話，那我可能還是傾向于叫老師，因為就是想就是保護一下ZL 姐的面子吧，也不是說面子，反正就那樣，對。”

Choices of others category also mainly adapted to social world and language users,as students pointed out they tended to call the counselor in a more intimate way given that either they believe they had an intimate relation with the counselor or they had a private talk with the counselor.Statistically,7 out of 8 participants stated the former,and all of them confirmed the latter.Below are the examples:

“我們私下關系都很好啊，所以也不會叫老師啊，導員啊，一個是感覺太正式，再一個有點生分了。之前開玩笑叫老鐵，后來也就一直這樣叫了。”

“就如果是私下我們平時發短信啊，有時候順路去個學院啊也不會想那么多，就是朋友一樣，就直接叫名字了，當然如果是當眾就是正式點的場合，那肯定還是沒有。”

When adopting terms from sister category and brother category,participants mainly adapted to social world and mental world.31 students expressed that their counselor was a young adult just like them thus making calling her“big sister”proper:

“因為ZL 姐就很年輕啊，也沒有比我們大多少，就是特別像一個大姐姐。”

“你不覺得就很符合她嗎？就是知心姐姐的感覺，而且本來都是一個學院的學姐。”

And all 5 students calling the counselor“Z 哥”believed it was the personality of the counselor led them to do so:

“導員很爽朗，就是很爽快，敞亮，像個大男孩，所以就叫哥了。”

Conclusion

Based on the results of the interviews of 32 college female students in D university,this study aims to analyze the address terms for a college counselor within the framework of linguistic adaptability and it turns out to be not only a reference to college students for their addressing counselors but also a new evidence adding up the use of linguistic adaption theory.

Addressing the college counselor was a process of linguistic choice making.20 terms are chosen by participants to address their counselor.While“ZL 姐”,“導員（兒）”,and“老師”are the top three frequently used terms,all the terms can be classified into four categories:teacher category,sister category,brother category,and others category.The choices of address terms by participants can be interpreted within the framework of linguistic adaptability as they involve adaption to contextual correlates.Specifically,choices from teacher category and others category mainly adapt to social world and language users,since relationship,social events and interpreters are the major factors being taken into consideration; choices from sister category and brother category mainly adapt to social world and mental world,since relationship,age and personalities are the major influential factors.It is worth noticing that address terms from teacher category and sister category are the commonest adopted terms among students and also tend to be the more acceptable ones for the counselor,making themselves the proper and safe ones to be used.