A Study on the Usage of the Appellation “Tongzhi” in Contemporary Times

Abstract

The term “tongzhi” has undergone evolving semantic and contextual transformations across historical periods. This study employs a combination of questionnaire surveys, interviews, and corpus analysis to investigate the use of “tongzhi” in both real-life oral communication and virtual online interactions. The research reveals that “tongzhi” has become a niche term in contemporary contexts, demonstrating relatively low vitality in practical speech contexts but slightly higher vitality in virtual communication environments. Furthermore, the study utilizes encoding-decoding theory and discourse framework theory to explain the original meanings behind these contextual differences.