A Study Of English Idioms In The Light Of Speech Act Theory

English idioms are the essence of the language of English nations. They are phrases orsentences refined in the long history of social practice. As a commonly-used languagephenomenon and a mirror of culture, idioms embody rich cultural and pragmaticsignificances. And the study of idioms by the linguists has a long history. However, they aremainly concerned with the lexical structure, the semantic feature and the syntactic function ofidioms. Although idioms are commonly used in communication, the systematic studies ofidioms from the pragmatic perspective are very few. Thus, this dissertation analyzes Englishidioms with the speech act theory as the main theoretical basis. Besides, the relationshipbetween the idioms and context would also be analyzed in the thesis.Speech act theory studies language from a new perspective. It does not pay attention tothe grammatical structure of speech. Instead, it concerns how people perform some actions byspeech and the influence of the speech. And this dissertation presented the study of the speechact theory by Austin and Searle and their classification of the illocutionary acts. And the studyof the idioms in this thesis is mainly based on the classification by Searle.This dissertation studies the English idioms from the perspective of the illocutionary acts.And it takes the sentence idioms as the object of study. The idioms are mainly classified intothe categories of assertives, directives, expressives and commisives. And in each category thedifferent illocutionary acts played by the idioms, such as advising, thanking, threatening areanalyzed. The methodology used in this dissertation is qualitative analysis, by which a greatdeal of sentence idioms are adopted and analyzed.English idioms are the most commonly used phenomenon of English language. To studythe English idioms with the speech act theory can provide us with more detailed knowledgeof the usage and comprehension of idioms. It is very necessary for us to grasp idioms fully and comprehensively since many idioms in English are not only used to express someopinions, but also to perform some illocutionary acts.