A Study Of Idioms In

The research on idioms of a specific book is the base of studying idioms as well as a significant part of Chinese vocabulary research. Guoyu is one of the most important materials in the pre-Qin period, so this thesis intends to make a systematic study of100idioms quoted in or originated from Guoyu, and it is composed of five major chapters.The first chapter is a summary of previous study related to this subject. The first part reviews the research history and recent advances related to Guoyu over the past hundred years. The second part is focused on the development of idioms which divides it into four stages and states the features, trends, representative scholars and works of each.The second chapter is the profile of the idioms in Guoyu. It analyzes the origins of those idioms and clarifies the forming ways of the idioms including "interception of the statements","general interpretation of the text","replacement of morphemes", and "contraction of the sentences".The third chapter analyses the structure and syntactic function of idioms in Guoyu, which are classified as three major categories including twenty minor classes. Based on the exhaustively quantitative and qualitative analysis of all categories and classes, it comes to the following conclusions:among the major categories, the non-coordinated idioms are the most in number; in all the minor classes, the subject-predicate class is the biggest in quantity; as for the quantitative relation between the minor class and the major category, the double predicate-object form, the subject-predicate form and the adversative form are the highest in percentage of their respective categories; on the level of formed and unformed idioms, the formed are dominant in idioms in Guoyu, of which the subject-predicate class contains the largest number of idioms; as for the grammatical nature and syntactic function, on the whole, the idioms in Guoyu present the nature of predicative and act as the predicate in the sentence. Among them, the double subject-predicate class, the double attribute-head class, the head-adverbial class, the concurrent class, the predicate-object class, the subject-predicate class and the concessive class are tent to be applied independently to form a sentence.The first part of the fourth chapter discusses the evolving mechanism of idioms which are classified into six types including the semantic change, the morphological change, the change of the applicable range, the change of the grammatical nature and syntactic function, the change of the emotional coloring, and the lexicalization of idioms. In the second part, six specific cases of evolution of idioms in Guoyu are conducted to demonstrate the evolving mechanism.The fifth chapter analyses13idioms in Guoyu which are not embodied in five most famous dictionaries of idioms in China, focusing on collecting examples, tracing sources, interpreting semantic meanings, and comparing variants.