The Study Of Idiomatic Variability From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistics

Idioms,as an important part of language,have always been a hot topic in linguistic research due to their frozen structure,concise meaning and frequent use.The research on idioms at home and abroad has experienced different stages on the basis of Structural Linguistics,Transformational Generative Grammar,Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics,with more corpus usage and less introspection and intuitive judgment.However,previous studies on idiomatic variation have mainly focused on describing idiomatic variation categories or exploring parodic use of idioms while lacking a systematic research on the inherent mechanism of idiomatic variation.Moreover,previous studies have always focused on idiomatic ontology,but language is not isolated,static or homogeneous.Therefore,social factors must also be considered in the study of idioms,especially in the study of idiomatic variability,which is ignored by previous studies.In recent years,Cognitive Linguistics has started to shift its research focus from embodiment and universality of cognition to social variation of language and cognition,which provides a new perspective for our research.Therefore,this study is to explore idiomatic variability from this new perspective,Cognitive Sociolinguistics(CSL),by integrating internal,subjective and cognitive factors with external,objective and social ones,hoping to break new ground for the research on idioms.This study adopted the research methods of corpus and introspection.The linguistic data were mainly from network resources and corpuses like CCL,BNC and COCA.We described the linguistic features and classification of idiom variation in a comprehensive way.Then we established a new way of classifying idiom variation on the basis of their variation principles.After that we discussed the motivations and constraints of idiom variation in details,which helped to discover the inherent principles of idiomatic variation and find out the cognitive social pattern of idiomatic variation.This study attempts to answer the following questions:1.What are the principles and categories of idiomatic variation? What are the motivations of idiomatic variation?2.How will the idiomatic variation affect their frozenness? What factors constrain the idiomatic variation? What is the relationship between frozenness and variability of idioms?3.What is the social meaning of idiomatic variation besides its linguistic meaning?The major findings of this study are as follows:Firstly,to answer research question 1,we classified the idiom variation into different types and analyzed the motivations of idiomatic variation systematically from the perspective of CSL.Idiom variability reflects the flexibility and innovativeness of human language.From cognitive view,idiom variability is a continuum and different types of idioms possess different degrees in variability due to their different cognitive mechanisms,which therefore leads to the fuzziness of classification of idiom variation.This study proposed new dimensions of idiom variability by taking both cognitive and social factors into consideration and then classified idiom variation into systematic variation vs non-systematic variation,usual variation vs occasional variation,intentional variation vs non-intentional variation according to the five principles of idiom variation(constructional adaption,literal-scene manipulation,topic indication,topic-related literal-scene manipulation,ambiguity and punning)and three parameters(the degree of conventionality,the degree of frequency and the degree of intentionality).Idiomatic variation is a creative activity,whose creation is decided by the syntactic and semantic features of idioms and the way how idioms,as complex constructions,adapt to detailed contexts.Therefore,idiomatic variation is triggered by complicated and multi-dimensional motivations though these motivations indicate some principles to follow.The motivations include syntactic motivations,semantic motivations,pragmatic motivations and integrated motivations.1.Idioms exhibit syntactic features of literal language to some extent,which leads to the fact that the grammar which works on literal language can also work on idioms,which is considered as syntactic motivations of idiomatic variation.2.Analyzability,transparency and relevancy are three semantic motivations of idiomatic variation.The more analyzable the idioms are,the more likely they are to change.Likewise,the more transparent the idioms are,the more likely they are to change.The semantic relevancy involves horizontal and vertical relevancy: on the horizontal dimension,interaction and relevancy often exist between the idioms' different constituents of literal meaning and between those of idiomatic meaning,which motivates the idiomatic variation;on the vertical dimension,the idiomatic variation is always resulted from the relevancy between one constituent of the idiom and another outside of the idiom,including synonym,homophony,polysemy,opposite,hyponymy and logic inversion.3.Pragmatic motivation is the most direct motivation of idiomatic variation.Being used highly frequently,idioms are likely to change when language users try their best to get the most appropriate form in order to achieve the best communicative effects and convey new implications.4.Human beings' ability of creating novel grammatical constructions is the integrated motivation of idiomatic variation,which,depending on the cognitive grammar network can trigger the idiomatic variation by blending the multiple motivations.Secondly,to answer research question 2,we dissected the cognitive constraints on idiom variation from the perspective of CSL.Cognitively,idiomatic variation is constrained by recognisability,functionality,compatibility,grammaticality while variation between wordplay and systematic variation is limited by two more detailed factors: non-ambiguity and non-conspicuity.These cognitive factors,though constrain idiomatic variation,work on different types of idiomatic variation in varying degree.Functionality mainly works on wordplays,non-ambiguity and non-conspicuity mainly work on systematic variation,and other factors work on different types of idiom variation.Socially and culturally,when using idiom variants the speaker needs to take his relationship with the hearer into consideration.That is to say,idiom variation is also constrained by social relationships in a certain culture.The social and cultural factors include speech community,cultural level and shared information.Idiomatic variation is constrained by both cognitive factors mainly working on language itself and social factors mainly working on the speaker or the agent in a usage-event.Base on the analysis of constrains on idioms,it is found that the relationship between frozenness and variability of idioms is unity of opposites.Frozenness and variability of idioms are two poles of a continuum with different types of idioms located on different points.That is to say,different types of idioms exhibit different degrees of frozenness and variability.The nearer one idiom is to one pole,the stronger feature that idiom possesses of that pole.Frozenness and variability coexist in idioms and depend on one another.Their unity of opposites can be illustrated as follows: 1)they depend on and relate with each other;2)they are mutually exclusive and constrain each other at the same time;3)they are interchangble,complementary and consistent to some degree.Thirdly,to answer research question 3,we described the social schema of idioms and idiomatic variation and put forward a cognitive social pattern of idiomatic variation from the perspective of CSL.There exists a metonymic source-in-target and part-whole link between idioms and their users when idioms are considered as a cognitive reference point.Therefore,both idioms and idiomatic variation can map into social schema.Idiomatic variation is a creative usage-event,where there are two subjects including the speaker and the hearer who are also the two subjects in the social schema of idiomatic variation.Besides,the linguistic and social stereotype of idiom prototype,the new frame activated by idiomatic variation,the concrete speech style and the cultural model of the community are the important factors which must be considered in the construction of the social schema of idiomatic variation.We described how the hearer noticed the words in the idiomatic variation,consciously dealt with the linguistic categorization and then social categorization and finally constructed the social schema of self-cognition and cognizing others:1.Hearer locates Speaker socially and regionally on the basis of his/her speech pattern in a general way.2.Hearer locates Speaker socially and regionally in more specific ways.3.Hearer locates Speaker relative to him/herself.4.Hearer changes his/her relative position with respect to Speaker.5.Hearer receives idiom variants and further entrenches the idiom prototype.It must be mentioned that idiomatic variation itself can be regarded as the deviated use of literal language,so the social schema of idiomatic variation is analogical to that of idioms.A cognitive social pattern of idiomatic variation was also put forward.The pattern is comprised of one hypothesis,two-way driving force,three stages and two principles.One hypothesis refers to the one that idiom frozenness and variability develop in a dynamic way,i.e.idiom frozenness and variability are constructed dynamically with the interaction between linguistic structure,cognitive operation and social factors.This hypothesis is further divided into three sub-hypotheses,which are: 1)the grammaticalization of idiomatic symbols is not limited within individual cognitive grammar but the result of the entrenchment of collective cognition,which stores in the mental lexicon of each member of a certain speech community during the process of conventionalization and then forms shared thinking system;2)the categorization of idioms on social level results in social and cultural stereotype.This categorization interacts with syntactic categorization and semantic categorization,making idioms a representative type in a native language and one of the cultural cores of a nation;3)the contextualization of idiom variation works as the ground of the profiled conceptual schema.Idiom variation will strengthen the frozenness of the prototypical idiom.Two-way driving force refers to the centripetal force improving idiom frozenness and the discreteness triggering idiom variation.Three stages include idiom frozenness,variation and further frozenness.Two principles refer to cognitive optimization principle and social identity principle.This study,on the basis of previous research,is original in the following three aspects: 1)It first studied idiomatic variation systematically,exploring the categorization,principles,motivations and constraints of idiomatic variation on the basis of virtual linguistic data and the analysis of the nature and features of idiomatic prototypes from the perspective of CSL.2)It first put forward a cognitive social pattern of idiomatic variation.3)On the basis of the study of idioms from the perspective of structuralism,functionalism,cognitive linguistics and so on,this study first did research on idiomatic variability from a new angel,CSL.