The Pro-spatial And Pro-temporal Differences Between Chinese And English Idioms

Sufficient attention has not yet been paid to the inner organization,unconventional grammatical structures and variations of idioms in the relevant academic domain.Based on a self-built idiom and idiom translation corpus as well as the authentic idiom usage data retrieved from large-scale Chinese and English balanced corpora and Chineses and English spoken corpora,this dissertation adopts the view of pro-temporal and pro-spatial differences between Chinese and English,using an integrated method of theoretical analysis and empirical examintation,qualitative and quantitative analysis,to address the following three main research questions:First,what are the similarities and differences in the internal organization of Chinese and English idioms?Second,what are the shared and distinct characteristics of the unconventional grammatical structures of idioms in the two languages?Third,what differentiates Chinese idioms from their English counterparts in terms of their variations?Following the above three questions,the thesis probes into the inner organizations,unconventional grammatical structures as well as their variations from three dimensions,namely,"chunky collage and hook-like continuity","spatial congregating relationship and temporal linear relationship" and "endogeneity and exogeneity".There are four main conclusions the present research has arrived at.Firstly,Chinese and English idioms are heterogenous,which are mainly composed of phrasal idioms,sentential idioms,and complex sentential idioms.On the basis of this classification,the present research exams the internal organizational characteristics of symmetrical Chinese and English idioms.Meanwhile,through the analysis of their corresponding translations,the study reveals their inner traits and their underlying causes.In contrast with English symmetrical idioms,Chinese symmetrical four-character idioms show up as a distinctive linguistic phenomenon in Chinese.This phenomenon can be ascribed to the trait of strong spatiality in the Chinese way of thinking.With this trait,the language representation of symmetrical four-character idioms has few connectives and grammatical markers.Also,phrases and even more complex linguistic units can be created simply by juxtaposing the elements of the symmetrical idioms.English symmetrical idioms,however,diverge from the Chinese ones in their inner organizations.In English symmetrical idioms,paired words,paired phrases,and paired sentences are created by pairs of words,phrases,and sentences respectively.Governed by the conspicuous temporal traits,English symmetrical idioms are liable to adopt overt linking devices in order to make their inner organizational relationship explicit.Secondly,through a contrastive inquiry of Chinese and English idioms of unconventional grammatical structures,three main findings have been drawn:first and foremost,Chinese unconventional four-character idioms are aberrant from Chinese conventional four-character idioms in respect of grammatical structures.Chinese unconventional four-character idioms are concise but not simple.The internal structures of Chinese unconventional four-character idioms are intricate,which can be roughly divided into two categories,namely,lantency and condension.Unconventional English idioms,on the other hand,also manifest complexity,but their number is rather limited with low frequencies in language use.Next,Chinese unconventional four-character idioms' form and content create tension,but it can be eased by their endogeneity.The deep root of the tension and endogeneity lies in the salient spatiality of Chinese.As a result of pro-temporal traits,English unconventional idioms are exogenous,which leads to the fact that tension can be eliminated solely by virtue of external form.Therefore,once they violate the rule of grammatical structure,their tension can hardly be resolved.After that,unconventional four-character idioms are in the same vein as the prominent spatial representations of Chinese,and come up as a quintessential epitome of the Chinese way of pro-spatial thinking,and at the same time demonstrate the peculiarity of the Chinese language.However,English unconventional idioms stand apart from the pro-temporal representations of English,which is usually deemed as the violation of grammatical structure and therefore hardly acceptable.Thirdly,"fixedness" and "variation" are two conflicting but mutually inclusive characteristics of Chinese and English idioms.Based on Chinese and English spoken corpus,the current study conducted an empirical investigation of the organizational component of Chinese and English idiom-variations,namely,substitution and insertion.Research results show that insertion receives the highest frequency,followed by substitution.The variations of Chinese idioms exhibit pro-spatiality in terms of logical devices' insertion,symmetrical idioms'insertion,temporary substitution and so forth.Unrestricted by exogenous form,Chinese idiom variants retain meaning-predominant as well as semantic endogenous in the post-variation.In contrast,English idioms are proved to be pro-temporal since all types of variations,whether substitution or insertion,can be realized only with the aid of overt apparatusFourthly,the empirical study of the re-order of Chinese and English idioms shows that Chinese idioms tend to be re-ordered simply by relying on the shift of word order,while English idioms prefer variations triggered by the morpho-syntactical means.Meanwhile,by using the data retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)and the BLCU Corpus Center Corpus(BCC),the present study intends to reveal the similarities and differences between Chinese and English symmetrical idioms as well as the underlying reason behind these similarities and differences.There are three main findings presented:First of all,Chinese and English symmetrical idioms in language use demonstrate the feature of fixedness,but most of them are reversible.Then,in contrast with their English counterparts,Chinese symmetrical idioms are more complex in structure and more diverse in word order.Finally,the root cause of the difference between Chinese and English symmetrical idioms lies in the pro-spatiality of the Chinese language and the pro-temporality of the English one.In summary,the present work focuses on the inner organizations,unconventional grammatical structures and variations of idioms.Further,a finer-grained discussion has been carried out through the elaborations of the chunky collage,spatial congregating relationship and endogeneity of the Chinese idioms as well as the hook-like continuity,temporal linear relationship and exogeneity of the English idioms.Research results verify the existence of the pro-spatial traits of Chinese idioms and the pro-temporal traits of English idioms.These studies mentioned above can be expected to be of theoretical significance and practical value,contributing to the study of Chinese and English idioms,the contrastive study of English and Chinese and also the compilation of dictionaries.