A Study On The Cultural Semantics Of Chinese Idioms

Idiom is a fixed form of language that the peoples of all dynasties accumulate over a long period, tightly linked with the national culture. Idioms originate from the spoken language and daily life. Created by the working people,the vulgar language expresses the vulgar culture that is quite familiar and trivial.In this study, the cultural semantic research of idioms is the main purpose, and Dictionary of Modern Chinese Idiom Specification is the corpus.The cultural reason of idioms semantic’s production mainly including folk customs, values, aesthetic psychology, mode of thinking etc. Folk customs include diet custom, dress custom dre, entertainment and festival custom that influent people’s folklore. Values mainly include the Confucian, Buddhism, Taoism. The aesthetic psychology make the object or a concept in idioms reflect praise or blame, good and evil, beauty and ugliness on some degree.Mode of thinking mainly reflects in image thinking, dialectical thinking, humanism logic.From the level of perspective of the manifestation of idioms cultural semantic, the idioms can be divided into dominant cultural semantics and invisible semantics. The dominant one refers to the literal meaning is a reflection of the things and concepts that are national and unique, including material and spiritual.The invisible one refers to the national culture reflected from the literal meaning to the word meaning.According to the influencing factors of cultural semantics, this kind of idioms can be divided into the association of object characteristics, habitual association, association of historical and cultural background.From the view of cognitive linguistics, we analyze the dynamic process of the cultural semantic construction through conceptual integration theory, so as to reveal the internal mechanism of cultural semantics.That is, how idioms transform the literal meaning to the word meaning under the dual role of cultural model and cognitive model.We found that there are three main types of conceptual integration network:single network, double network and mirror network.Idioms is a member of the use, so it has the property of use.But the idioms have missile in separate and distinct personality.The major features of Idioms cultural semantic are popularity, derogatory and times.