Flexible Uses Of Chinese Idioms: An Interpretation From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

The full picture of idioms in human language is kaleidoscopic and far more complicated. With the investigation of idioms in linguistics community being increasingly deepened and widened, the traditional views on idioms are constantly questioned. Evidences from the flexible uses of Chinese idioms indicate that the internal syntactic structures of many idioms are as analyzable and regular as common expressions such as Modifier-Noun constructions, Verb-Object constructions, and Subject-Predicate constructions respectively, so idioms' forms are not necessarily fixed. They manifest a certain degree of syntactic flexibility; the internal semantic structures of many idioms are decompositional in one or more ways, which ensure that some given putative slots are permitted to be located in the concerned idioms. So, many idioms are compositional to some degree. By applying Construction Grammar, a number of problems about idioms can be solved. With regard to the explanation of the flexible uses of idioms, Construction Grammar posits that, syntactically, the 'quasi-new' variants of idioms result from the smooth interaction of the relative idiomatic constructions, namely, the idioms themselves, with the more ordinary core constructions which license general subject-predicate structures, Verb-Object Phrases and Modifier-Noun phrases etc. Semantically, the idioms which permit a certain degree of syntactic flexibility are formal or schematic idioms with a shematical slot within them. A schematic idiom as an independent construction has its own inherent specifications, thus any semantically contentful element(s) can be eligibly filled into the slot(s), provided it is or they are compatible with the internal specifications of the concerned idiom/construction. The high token frequency of a schematic idiom will facilitate the establishment of its status as prototype for language users to categorize other linguistic expressions which are lexically and syntactically similar, especially those expressions sanctioned by the concerned schematic idioms. As an overall structure, a schematic idiom has its own constructional meaning. In frame semantics' view, the constructional meaning will evoke a frame which is composed of a system of related concepts originating from language users' real world or background knowledge, by means of which language users can judge that the sanctioned expression is an instance of the schematic idiom. Once the schema-instance relation is identified, the understanding of idiom variant is not difficult because the idiom variant is a specific case of the prototype frame of the schematic idiom. Additionally, as a schematic idiom...