A Cognitive Study Of Metonymy In Idioms On Human Body Parts

Idioms take a great part and play an important role in any language. They are the crystals of a language. Since the 1960s, idioms have received constant attention, both from the view of their meaning and also of their form. From the traditional view, idioms are identified as set phrases and expressions, and the meanings cannot be predicted from the meanings of their constituent parts. The traditional view has provided an excellent basis for the study of idioms, but it has some limitations in the further investigation of idioms in that almost all of these studies stay on the language level. With the development of cognitive linguistics, linguists have studied idioms from the cognitive perspective, considering that idioms are analyzable and predictable. Based on current studies of idioms, the thesis intends to explore the motivation underlying the formation and comprehension of idioms on"human body parts"from a conceptual metonymy so as to provide an angle for the study of idioms related to other kind of cases. The analysis shows that the formation of idioms on"human body parts"is not arbitrary and non-decomposable but motivated by cognitive-semantic mechanism, that is metonymy. The statistical result demonstrates that conceptual metonymy plays a more important part in the formation of idioms related to human body parts. The more salient the function of human body parts is, the larger the number of correspondingly idioms is. Finally, the author lists two future research suggestions. The first is to search for more examples of idioms related to other kind of cases in order to prove that metonymy is an important role in motivating the meanings of English and Chinese idioms, and the other is to conduct a study developing an interdisciplinary perspective on idioms based on other theories of cognitive linguistics.