A Study Of Idiom Formation And Acquisition-From The Perspective Of Language Memes Theory

Word study is generally considered as the basis and core in language learning. Compared with other common words, idioms should be a highlight, as well as a big picture and a hard nut to crack. For an idiom is the cream of a language, which can present a richest content in culture and show a particular thinking habit of a nation, it should not be ignored in any language acquisition. However, for its distinctive characteristics, many learners often feel hard and helpless to master them. What they can do is only to struggle confusedly in the sorrow of accumulating them by rote. The birth of memetic theory injects fresh energies into language research. It opens up a bright window from a brand-new perspective for the issues in origin, development, and acquisition of language. Memetic theory was first put forward by Richard Dawkins, a Neo-Darwinist and biologist in Oxford University, in his famous work"The Selfish Gene"in 1976. Since then,"meme"as a term and a unit for cultural evolution and cultural inheritance began to attract more and more scholars'eye. It is so influential that many scholars dispute among different schools and show their own different ideas.The obvious effect on language research is the emergence of language memes theory. This study aims to make a tentative exploration in idioms which are often used colloquially in people's daily communications by way of this theory, and hope that it may be helpful to language learners and idioms fans.According to this theory,"Language itself is a meme, and it is incorporated into all different language hierarchies."It is various in the ways of formation and working of language memes, meanwhile it appears with a lot of variations.An idiom is a broad category, which includes not only set phrases and expressions, but also colloquialisms, proverbs, discourse markers, slogans, catchphrases, and so on. As for its features, it is stable in structure, integrated in semanteme, and conventional in usage. In spite of these features, other features like being informal in style, figurative in rhetoric suggest that they do not remain unchangeable absolutely. There are variations in usage by all kinds of ways. Inspired by language memes theory, the writer makes a hypothesis of idiom-formation, i.e., based on an existed or existing idioms, an idiom base will become an"idiom meme (IM)"by means of deleting, adding, changing or replacing some components, and finally it produces a new idiom with the involvement of the learner's cognition and psychology. This hypothesis brings us a breakthrough for the problem in idioms acquisition.From the study, we may find it is the idiom meme that plays a decisive role in idiom-formation. In compliance with language memes theory, an acquisition of idioms is a process of an idiom being imitated, replicated and transmitted from one host to another host. In view of view of the combination of this conclusion and the model of second language acquisition, a certain model of idiom acquisition must be followed by idioms learners in the process of idiom acquisition, which is a model of assimilation, adoption, analogy, regularization, replicating and disseminating of the original idiom memes in the process of input and acquisition idioms. In this process, there are many factors that have effects on idioms acquisition, including both internal factors and external factors, among which cognitive factors are the most important ones.This study may bring some implications for idioms learners and help them more or less with their acquisition of idioms in their language learning if they can pay much attention to the input of cultural memes, become adept in imitation, attach full importance to association, adjust the psychological mode, value the comparison both between languages and between cultures, make regular practice in the output of idiom memes and do not ignore the role of environment.