Cognitive Approach To The Acquisition Of Chinese Idioms

Idioms are the essence of language, and the familiarization and grasp of idioms is widely regarded as the basic standard by which the language capacity is tested.However, due to their great quantity and tremendous hardness of how to use the idioms properly, the acquisition of idioms has always been a big problem confronting the language learners. Many approaches have been made by linguists to explore the nature of idioms as to find a better way of learning them. The traditional non-compositional view of idioms treats idioms as arbitrary and fixed pattern of languages, and there are many problems inherent with it.Cognitive linguistics holds that some idioms make sense because they are motivated by conceptual structures that exist independently of language; and idioms reflect human conceptual systems and serve as the window onto people's conceptual structure.The present dissertation focuses on the acquisition of Chinese idioms, with the conceptual metaphor and image schema theory as its theoretical foundation. After profoundly probing the features and working mechanism of conceptual metaphor and discussing the properties and transformation of image schemas, the author sets up a hierarchical framework which shows how conceptual metaphors and image schemas are realized in the linguistic expressions. The author also focuses on the semantic motivation on Chinese idioms. Detailed analysis of Chinese idioms illustrates how the experience-grounded cognitive structures serve as semantic motivation behind the idioms. In the subsequent chapter, a study is conducted to verify whether cognitive models (conceptual metaphors and image schemas) can facilitate the learning of Chinese idioms. With the positive result of the study, the author formulates a new way of teaching Chinese idioms based on the cognitive models.