Research On Common Proverbsin Modern Chinese

As a common idiomatic unit in human language,proverbs exist widely in Chinese and have a long history.Judging from the receipts of various proverbial dictionaries at present,the number of them is huge,amounting to more than 60,000,but it still can not fully reflect the overall picture of Chinese proverbs.As to their source,these proverbs have spread from various historical periods to the present,and they are also commonly used in general,as well as from various dialects,ethnic groups,and even borrowed from the different languages and deeply rooted in the Chinese system.The superposition and convergence of proverbs from different sources have become an indispensable part of Chinese communication.However,in modern Chinese,among a large number of proverbs,which are still active in written and oral communication,what kind of characteristics do they have,what kind of characteristics do they show,what kind of diachronic evolution have they undergone,what are reasons for their evolutions,what kind of functions do they have,such a series of issues have not yet been paid attention to by the academic community,and the relevant research results are still rare.Therefore,this dissertation takes 2201 proverbs as the research object,which have been determined in the research project Vocabulary of Common Idioms and studies their nature,source,type,structure,characteristics and functions in order to show the complete picture of the proverbs in modern Chinese.This dissertation is divided into six chapters.Chapter 1 Introduction,includes four parts.The first part introduces the determination of the research object and the related research basis.The second part elaborates the theoretical and practical significance of this study.The third part presents the current research on Chinese proverbs and the methods of determaining the common degree.The fourth part shows the research methods the corpus sources of this study.Chapter 2 Definition and determination of common proverbs in modern Chinese,includes two parts.The first part presents the diachronic change of the conceptual cognition of Chinese proverbs,explores the use of structure and meanings of proverbs in specific contexts from both static and dynamic perspectives,and exhibits the nature of proverbs.It holds that proverbs are idiomatic sentences with fixed sytactic structure and meanings in spoken language,uesed to express people’s experience or cognition,quotated to reason out and make an arguement.Then it shows how the proverbs are distinguished from temporary sentences and other genres of idioms.The second part introduces the specific methods to determine and extract the common proverbs in modern Chinese.It is finally confirmed that 588 first-class common proverbs and 1613 second-class common proverbs are the research objects.Chapter 3 The Sources and types of common proverbs in modern Chinese,includes two parts.The first part makes a textual research on the origin of Chinese proverbs from diachronic and synchronic perspectives.It holds that the main historical origin of the first-class common proverbs is modern times,showing an increasing trend from the late Tang and Five Dynasties to the Ming and Qing Dynasties,and analyses this phenomenon and its causes.On the basis of comparing the total number of the common proverbs in the first class with their original forms,the conclusion is drawn out that the proverbs of modern Chinese are always mainly derived from proverbs with more fixed structure,less semantic changes,long-lasting inheritance and universality in circulation and use.The common proverbs in modern Chinese can be divided into two categories:the autogenous source and the exogenous source.The former includes the proverbs from Mandarin and dialects,although accounting for a small proportion in the first-class common proverbs,they are deeply rooted in the core of common Chinese proverbs and enrich the source the system of Chinese proverbs.By classifiing and making a statistical data of the semantic content types of the first-class common proverbs by multi-polarity,the second part shows that the common proverbs in modern Chinese are different from their original types of agricultural proverbs and production proverbs in the initial stage of proverbs’generation.The social proverbs are the main components of the types of common proverbs,which overwhelmingly surpass the numbers of the natural proverbs and become the mainstream of the common proverbs in modern Chinese.In social proverbs and philosophical proverbs,there is a phenomenon of semantic content type transfer,it leads to the conjecture that only when the meaning is expanded and transferred from the expression of direct experience to the expression of abstract generalized judgment and philosophical speculation,can natural proverbs be transformed into the category of common proverbs in modern Chinese.Chapter 4 The structure and characteristics of common proverbs in modern Chinese,includes four parts.The first part investigates and analyses the pronunciation structure and characteristics of proverbs from three aspects:rhythm,metrics and rhyme.Firstly,based on the statistics of the number of words in Proverb sections and proverb sections,it is found that there is a special phenomenon of the dividing line of seven words in proverb sections,and then analyses this phenomenon with the theory of information processing capacity limitation in cognitive psychology.Secondly,by investigating the prosodic features of proverbs in modern Chinese and the tendency of"metricalization" of proverbs,this dissertation holds that the prosodic structure of proverbs is the product of the interaction and mutual restraint of syntax,semantics and prosody,but generally mainly influenced by the "control" of Chinese prosodic rhythm rules,it shows a strong tendency of prosodic syllable combination.Thirdly,on the basis of breaking through the traditional research paradigm of rhyme and investigating and counting the rhyme patterns of the first-class common proverbs,it indicates that it is the rhyme that connects the context by using the similar features of auditory objects.It is concluded that the diversity of the phonetic structure of proverbs lies in that the speaker always makes the best use of Chinese phonetic resources when organizing the speech structure to generate proverbs,so as to make the speech structure of proverbs more vivid,more coherent and highlight the focus of information,so as to make the listener remember and disseminate them.The second part investigates the syntactic structure of common proverbs in modern Chinese and divides them into single structure and complex structure according to the structure levels.It analyses the proportion and specific situation of each type of proverbs from static and dynamic perspectives.It summarizes four characteristics of the structure types of common proverbs in modern Chinese.1)Chinese proverbs are mainly composed by complex sentences,while the common degree has a negative effect on complex proverbs;2)Compact sentences are highly adapted to Chinese proverbs,which fully reflects the bearing role of form on meaning;3)Semantic sub-categories of complex sentence proverbs are special,parallel sentence categoric is distinguished in all the types,and antithesis is a special syntactic means;4)The relevant markers in Chinese proverbs are usually omitted and the parataxis in unmarked forms are the most important way of construction of proverbs.In addition,the dissertation also summarizes and analyses the change types of common proverbs from the perspective of lexical and syntactic structure.The third part firstly classifies semantic structure of proverbs into combinating structure and blending structure,and points out that the combinatorial semantic structure is one of the important features of proverbs’semantics in modern Chinese.The blended structure can be divided into two categories:holistic blending and partial blending,which are all generated under the influence of metaphor and metonymy mechanism.Secondly,based on the conceptual blending theory,a case study of the dynamic construction of proverb semantics is carried out in this part.Chapter 5 Syntactic function and metadiscourse function of common proverbs in modern Chinese,includes two parts.The first part divides the syntactic functions of proverbs into sentence-completing and sentence-forming fuctions,according to their syntactic distribution in larger syntactic structures or units and their overall functions.Through the exhaustive investigation of the samples of 35 high-frequency proverbs in the corpus,it is found that sentences-completing fuction is the main syntactic function of proverbs,while sentence-forming fuction is the secondary,and there are differences in the degree of functions of each syntactic component.No matter what kind of syntactic component proverbs serve as,they are not members of the typical category.That is to say,the sentence-forming function of proverbs is untypical compared with words.The second part discusses the fuction of preverbs in the discourse paradigm and holds that proverbs have metadiscourse functions such as discourse function and interpersonal function.The textual function is mainly expressed by topic structure,cohesion and source of evidence,while the interpersonal function is mainly expressed by explicit expression and evaluation of attitudes.Chapter 6 The Evolution and Motivation of Proverbs,includes two parts.The first part traces the origin of proverbs’ development and evolution from two aspects of structural forms and semantics,and analyses the types and specific reasons of their evolution.The second part summarizes the course of proverb’s evolution,and elaborates the main factors that restrict and influence proverb evolution from the ligustic and other factors respectively.It holds that the lingustic reasons are that the evolution of proverbs are mainly influenced by the diachronic development of Chinese lexical and syntactic system,the comparable transformation between different genres of idiomatic phrases and the analogy of the same format or structure;the other reasons are mainly manifested in social,cultural and stylistic factors.