A Contrastive Study Of English-Chinese Body Parts Idioms

"Idiom" is the linguistic term familiar to every language learner, but its definition or connotation is not necessarily very clear to every one, for all the experts and the dictionaries do not define it identically. Some dictionaries do not categorize epigrams and proverbs into idiom. And their idioms only include phrasal idioms excluding sentence-idioms like epigrams while some others do. For example, Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary says: Idiom is "phrase or sentence whose meaning is not clear from the meaning of individual words and which must be learnt as a whole unit." Besides, they emphasize different aspects of idioms. Some put emphasis on the structure of an idiom while some on its semantic meaning and some others may emphasize its function. However, in this thesis, idioms we study mainly refer to fixed phrases consisting of two or more than two words or four characters (Chinese idioms) with implied meaning rather than the assembly of the literal meaning of individual words. This thesis mainly studies both English and Chinese idioms connected with human body parts. English idioms here include only fixed phrases without proverbs or epigrams, and the Chinese idioms in this thesis focus on four-character set phrases.Idioms are fruit of language and culture, correct use of idioms can add great beauty to our discourse and communication. Nevertheless, the nature of idioms' structural fixedness, profound and implied semantic meaning makes it difficult to understand and apply them correctly, which often leads to pragmatic failure or unsuccessful communication. Therefore, the study of idioms has attracted interests of experts both at home and abroad. Up till now, many linguists at home abroad and such as Fernando, Kovecses, Chen Wenbo, Yang Zijian etc, have made a lot of researches and accomplished a lot in this field. Western linguists have mainly investigated idioms' noncompositionatity or unanalysability(semantic perspective), productability or generativeness(syntactic perspective ), conditions of usage(pragmatic perspective ), and comprehension process (psycholinguistic perspective ). Internal linguistics focus their research on idioms' features, source classification, formation , application and their rhetorical functions. Undoubtedly, all these have laid good foundation for understanding and application of idioms.We believe that to fundamentally solve the problems of pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication caused by misuse or misunderstanding of idioms, communicators must know well the similarities and differences of the two corresponding languages and the causes of the differences. So a contrastive study of idioms in the two languages is helpful and very necessary. Although some cognitive studies on idiomatic phrases have been made, they are not theoretically systematic. What's more, few people have made contrastive studies on idioms from the perspective of cognition, whereas, this kind of study is essentially important to the mastery and application of English and Chinese idioms. In view of the fact that English and Chinese idioms touch upon a wide range of things, this thesis aims at the study of both English and Chinese idioms connected with human body parts.This thesis has analyzed similarities and differences of English and Chinese body parts idioms and their causes in the light of the theories of metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending, relevant theories of cognitive linguistics, which, to some extent, reveals the cognitive mechanism of these idioms. Through the study, we come to realize that English and Chinese body parts idioms share the same cognitive mechanism—metaphor and metonymy, which is due to the human way of thinking based on common body experience. However, the English Chinese body parts idioms also show some differences. To investigate the causes of such differences, we conduct a survey of idioms concerning "heart", "head", "hand" and "eye", taking as the corpora A Comprehensive Dictionary Of English Idioms and Phrases by Fujian People's Press and Chengyu Da Cidian(Dictionary of Idioms) by Commercial Press. The survey shows that 226 out of 494 Chinese idioms have two source domains, yet just only one in English. Taking "Tie Shi Xin Chang" as an example, the two source domains "Tie" and "Shi" describe people who are hardhearted without any sympathy for anybody on any occasion, while the corresponding English is "with a heart of stone", in which only one source domain—"stone" is used to express the same meaning. We attempt to expatiate on this phenomenon with Fauconnier's Conceptual Blending Theory. Conceptual Blending theory is also known as "Blending" or "Blending Space". Fauconnier explamed that the process of blending is made on the basis of two input spaces to form the third space, namely blending space. Blending space extracts partial structures from the two input spaces and then forms emergent structure. In addition, the culture is a reason not to be ignored.