Study On Animal Idioms In Chinese Language

Idioms are the most vivid and interesting part of fixed phrases in modern Chinese. Many idioms constituted with animal morphemes are the colorful part in modern Chinese lexicons. This paper attempts to systematically study animal idioms and analyzes this linguistic phenomena from a new academic perspective—cognitive linguistics. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the logic of human beings to facilitate language learning, using and understanding.Based on a great deal of language materials, this paper redefines the research object which mainly refers to the idiom with animal names that describes behaviors of animals or comes from animal-oriented literary quotations and fables.Chinese animal idioms possess not only the universal laws of Chinese idioms but also their uniqueness. Most of them derive from fables, literature, ancient legends and folk colloquialism. The major types of the structures of Chinese animal idioms include parallel structure, modified structure, narrative structure, special joint structure and compact complex structure. The most common ways for idiom formation are consisted of directly quoting the whole texts, compressing and switching sources. The significance of the idioms will not change if the image of the animal does not change and its behavior or incident occurs in the similar way. The metaphor of animal images concentrates on three aspects: human beings, narration and sentiment.The cultural significance of animal idioms is a bright spot. The images of the top 17 animals in Chinese idioms contain the cultural significances which are different from those in English, Russian and Japanese but are actually more inclined to unification. And this conclusion may become a new breakthrough point for the observation of the commonness in human beings'logic and the exploration of the history of the ethnic cultural communication.The humanistic research further reveals the rich connotation of the material life and the spiritual life of ancient people. Base on the studies concerning semantic cognition, the two cognitive mechanisms of animal idioms are emphasized; hypermetaphor and mapping are the existing modes of metaphor phenomena; the metonymy concerning characteristic and category and cognitive principles are the main types and conventions of metonymy. The embodiment and conterfactuality of animal idioms are helpful for the achievement of their metaphorical functions.