The Metonymic Approach To English And Chinese Idioms

In our verbal communication, we make frequent use of set expressions including idioms, which are usually not to be understood literally. We encounter idioms everywhere in our daily life as well as in literature, and to communicate successfully one can never ignore the importance of idioms. Any general-purpose language understanding system must accommodate a wide variety of idiomatic expressions. Nowadays with China's further opening to the outside world, communication becomes more important. In such a situation, English as a world language plays a vital role in communication. At the same time, Chinese as a language for communication is also receiving tremendous attention by people all around the world. That is why more and more students are learning English and Chinese. These two languages are both abundant in idioms. So the command of idioms has become a very important way for language learners to judge their language ability in learning the target language, hence the importance for people to study the meanings of idioms.Traditionally idioms are considered as "dead metaphors". Some scholars take idioms as arbitrary collocations of words, which should be learned one by one. Based on such views, scholars tend to have their attention paid to the compiling of idiom dictionaries and they study idioms from etymological perspectives. Modern linguistics has brought scholars new linguistic theories for solving the problem of idioms. The study of idioms has mostly been focused on their lexical and syntactic features. With the development of cognitive linguistics, scholars have turned to study idioms by adopting the cognitive approach, mostly the metaphor theory. Despite the different perspectives people take, scholars disagree mostly on whether idioms are compositional or noncompositional, whether they are motivated or unmotivated, and how people process idioms.Based on an introduction to the definition and characteristics of idioms, the author of this thesis attempts to offer a new perspective of interpreting idioms in light of the theories of conceptual metonymy. Cognitive linguists have studied metaphor thoroughly whereas metonymy tends to be mistakenly taken as a subclass of metaphor. Metonymy is traditionally considered as a kind of figure of speech and is usually defined as the substitution of one thing for another that is closely related to or belongs to the same category. According to cognitive linguistics, metonymy is another conceptual mechanism people employ when they get to know the world. The author applies the theory of cognitive metonymy to the interpretation of English and Chinese idioms, especially those that contain such body-part terms as "head", "face", "eye" and "hand" so as to prove that metonymy is ubiquitous in human language, and that metonymy is part of our world knowledge and influences our ways of thinking. The study of this thesis proves that idioms are compositional and are semantically motivated. Finally, the thesis provides a discussion of the importance and implication of this study for the teaching and learning of idioms.