Cognitive Approach To Semantic Motivation Of Idioms

There is a misunderstanding for traditional linguistics, which emphasizes that the idioms are special linguistic expressions in that they are fixed in structure and arbitrary in meaning. This is what traditional view of idioms-non-compositionality. However, the newly-developed area of linguistic field-cognitive linguistics maintains the different view. Cognitive linguistics believes that idioms are compositionality in nature, namely the meaning of most of idioms can be inferred from components of the idioms and the structures of idiomatic expressions are flexible. Cognitive linguistics explains the compositionality of idioms by exploring the semantic motivation behind the idioms. The main idea of experientialism is that language reflects the concepts in human mind; our embodiment experiences help us achieve many kinds of cognitive models including conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, image schema, and frame; these cognitive models are reflected in our linguistic expressions like the idioms.This paper focuses on three kinds of semantic motivations: metaphor, metonymy and general knowledge (or frame). Conceptual metaphor is very important cognitive model as many cognitive linguists claim that our thought is metaphorically structured. This thesis devotes more space to the analysis of semantic motivation of conceptual metaphor (including structure metaphor, container metaphor, ontological metaphor, orientation metaphor) behind the idioms; conceptual metonymy is also the important cognitive model, providing the semantic motivation for idioms; the role that general knowledge plays in motivating idioms shall not be ignored as it permeates all the human cognitive structures. The thesis also presents the comparison between English and Chinese idioms sharing the same cognitive concept with the aim of disclosing scientific value of cognitive linguistics and reliability of cognitive approach to the idiom learning.