On English Idiom: Its Meaning Generation And Interpretation

The thesis takes English idioms as the object of the research and adopts the method of quantitative-qualitative research on the basis of corpus-based study. The aim of my present research is to probe into the generating and interpreting of the meaning of English idioms in light of pragmatic theories, and the theory of ontological study of implicatives (OSI) in particular. We shall attempt to build up a mechanism to explain how the meaning, especially the so-called metaphorical meaning, of an idiom comes from.Through the present research, we want to deal with the following major questions1. How English idioms are formed ?2. How implicatives contribute to shaping the complete expressions of the idioms?3. How the actual meanings of English idioms are achieved within the framework of the theory of ontological study of implicatives?After the quantitative-qualitative study of English idioms within the theoretical framework, some conclusions can be drawn as following.First, Ideational duality is the most important phenomenon in English idioms, that is, an idiom often shows double level of meaning, with the explicit meaning as the meaning shown by the words in the word combination of the idiom concerned, and the implicit meaning implied by the whole of the item of the idiom.Second, the economy of words results in the existence of semantic gaps and the opaqueness of the explicit meaning of the idiom. So the practice of economy of words brings in the necessity of the step(s) of supplementation and/or elucidation.Third, English idioms are built up grammatically and semantically within the framework of the ontological study of implicatives. Seen through this theoretical framework, most of the idioms have to rely on implicatives to generate their whole meaning, but the reliance shown by different idioms is different in degree. We also argue that implicatives play the roles of supplementation and elucidation in theprocess of interpretation. According to OSI, implicatives may be inferred through the specific contents embodied by the stereotypical relation(s) embedded in the linguistic expression concerned, the role of supplementation and/or elucidation and/is actually a process of reading of stereotypical relation(s). The meaning generating and interpreting course of English idioms, therefore, is a course accomplished through the help of stereotypical relation(s). In other words, Many English idioms are incomplete expressions grammatically and semantically, and should first of all be supplemented so as to be a complete expression. After this process, the supplemented idiom expression either might be interpreted directly or should be understood metaphorically, the latter process of which is the process of elucidation. On the basis of these analyses, consequently, English idioms may be classified into three main categories: the plain type, which mainly requires the process of supplementation; the implied type, which mainly requires the process of elucidation; and the opacity type which requires both processes.