Mechanisms Of English Idioms: A Holistic Approach

Idioms play an important part in our daily life and always arouse the curiosity of scholars. For centuries, linguists have never slackened their painstaking efforts in penetrating into the study of idioms and much past work has been concerned with the syntactic, semantic and functional aspects, etc. Nowadays, psychological and cognitive science, esp. cognitive linguistics and pragmatics bring us new perspectives to approach the essence of idioms, and many researchers have endeavored to find out the inner mechanisms underlying the production and interpretation of English idioms. Some of these studies account for this issue with inspiring ideas, most of which however, fail to give a convincing explanation. So this paper tries to make some tentative exploration in this aspect.For this paper, the key question lies in:What is the underlying mechanisms of production and interpretation of English idioms? And this question is further divided into the following two questions:(1) How does the speaker produce an indirect expression to replace the true message, which also well makes sense?(2) How is the hearer able to uncover the implied true meaning?These two interrelated questions are our main concern in the present study.Our key theoretical goal is to search a possible, feasible and reasonable account for the inner mechanisms underlying such conventionalized expressions. And we adopt a qualitative and introspective method in our study on the basis of a considerable account of data, which mainly come from one of the authoritative collections, namely, A Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English compiled by a Chinese scholar Qin Xiubai. To conduct our research, some findings in the psychological experiments are absorbed to illustrate some dimensions of idioms while abductive reasoning is adopted in operating the mechanisms of idioms production and interpretation. Our thesis mainly emerges from the theory of Generative Holism and the Theoretical Framework of MM (Mental Model)-Based Pragmatic Reasoning proposed by Xu Shenghuan which consists of two organic parts, namely, the Autonomy-Dependency Analytical Framework and the MM-Based Explicature-Implicature Analytical Framework, which provide a workable explanation for the producing and understanding of utterances respectively. It also draws nourishment from some achievements in cognitive linguistics such as metaphor and metonymy.This tentative mechanism is close to people's common language sense and keeps to the cognitive hypothesis that there is no inherent distinction between human's cognitive ability and the cognitive principles reflected in language.The key viewpoint of this paper lies in that in the producing process, the speaker utilizes subconsciously his/her cognitive knowledge of metaphor and metonymy, both of which are pervasive in our daily life as two cognitive concepts, and undergoes a dynamic process in which three steps are involved, namely, word selecting, decomposing and integrating; while in the comprehending process, the hearer tends to construe the explicit expression in a holistic way along the two dimensions of proximity and similarity with the mode of metaphorical and/or metonymic thinking and finally uncover its true meaning.Making such a tentative exploration and detection of the mechanisms of English idioms, we hope that this mechanism could make a little contribution, maybe to a lesser extent if possible, to the exploration of idioms from a cognitive perspective.