An REM Analysis Of Chinese Numeral Idioms

With a big proportion in Chinese idioms, numeral idioms have ignited numerous scholars'interests in this field and prompted them to make abundant descriptions and analyses of Chinese numeral idioms, including their structures, categorization, cultural implication, figurative devices,translation and other aspects. All these, however, were done in studies of traditional linguistics, rhetoric, translation and cross-cultural communication in lieu of modern linguistics and from the perspective of cognition and pragmatics. And studies constitution models of Chinese numeral idioms under cognitive linguistic theories still remain a sheer blank.This paper is based on Event-domain Cognitive Model and cognitive conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics, as well as Relevance Theory in pragmatics and proposes an integrated theory frame: Relevance Event-domain Model, aiming to conduct a meticulous and quantitative analysis and establish the constitution model of Chinese numeral idioms. Data are collected from collected from Xinhua Idiom Dictionary and the numbers of idioms in the corpus are 648.The paper consists of the following five chapters.Chapter One focuses on a general introduction to this study, including the motivations, the objectives, methodology and layout of the paper.Chapter Two presents the literature review previous researches on Chinese numeral idioms and also the gaps found in the previous research.Chapter Three reviews the main theories, which will be applied in the paper, RT, ECM, metaphor and metonymy, and points their limitations. In the hope of filling the gaps, it proposes a new theory frame: the Relevant Event-domain Model, coupled with the description of constructing the corpus.Chapter Four concerns data analysis and discussion, specifically the establishment and analysis of the constitution model under the above-proposed theoretical frame.Chapter Five deals with conclusion and the four leading contributions of this study:First, for the first time, the study conducts a comprehensive research on Chinese numeral idioms, based on the corpus of 648 Chinese numeral idioms and REM, to establish their construction models, whose respective prototypical meaning has also been analyzed coupled with relative ratios and statistics.Second, the paper emphasizes the cognition of metaphor and metonymy within ECM which is applied to analyze Chinese numerals for the first time and proves the interpretative power of ECM.Third, finding that ECM remains weak in explaining why the numbers in idioms are irreplaceable, the research refines ECM with relevance theory.This chapter also points out limitations of my paper and proposes suggestions for its further research.