‘您們’의 사용 양상과 의미 고찰

Abstract

‘ninmen(您們)' had already existed before the founding of modern Chinese language, but it has attracted attention from academia only when it started appearing frequently in modern literary works. In addition, there seems to have been a heated debate over its existence for a while. The most noticeable aspect is that the view of ‘ninmen(您們)' has changed smoothly with the passage of time. Therefore, this study examined the usage and the meaning of ‘ninmen(您們)' through website and corpus analysis and survey investigation. Aanalysis of the text containing ‘ninmen(您們)' in the ‘Renminwang(人民網)’ between 2004 and 2016 showed that the use of this pronoun has steadily increased recently. Through the corpus analysis, it was also found that ‘ninmen(您們)' is widely used in literary works, newspaper articles, science related texts, and ‘Weibo(微博)'. Moreover our survey revealed that 70% of the respondents answered that they have positive perception of ‘ninmen(您們)'. These results are attributed to the improvement of society's consideration and respect for human beings and it is expected that ‘ninmen(您們)' will become a new personal pronoun in the recognition of the native speaker. The meaning of ‘ninmen(您們)' is based on plural expressions based on an object. This is used as a strategy to convey politeness by collectively referring to specific objects or ambiguous objects when referring to objects to be respected or respected in emotion or societal convention. Moreover, when instructions and commands are delivered, ‘ninmen(您們)' has the effect of relieving excessive language towards the object, and it can also be used to express anger or sarcasm.