A Study Of Chinese Animal Idioms

Language is handed downed in the process of human labor.People express their own thoughts, feelings, ideas, attitudes and folk customs through vocabulary, so it tells you a lot of information about the culture. Idiom, which is a special kind of the Chinese vocabulary system, reflects people’s wisdom and it is not only the treasure of language and the crystallization of national culture but also the "living fossil" of the Chinese nation cultural history, social history and the spiritual world. There are some idioms so called “animal idioms” which relate to animal form a special and interesting category of idioms. This paper choose animal as a research subject because of the following reasons.First, human has a very close relation with animals. Our ancestor lived with animals from ancient times and they almost got anything from them, so you can figure out the living conditions of human from animals. Second, they place special emotions on animals due to the long life together. Third, the science and technology at ancient times are undeveloped, people think that animals have some "mysterious force" and regard it as their own relatives, ancestors, protection of God and even "Totem" for them to respect.This paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter discusses the significance of the topic, research methods and related studies herein. The second chapter discusses the cultural significance of animals. The third chapter analyzes the structure of the animal idioms. In the structural analysis of the animal idioms, we divide them into the following categories: parallel structure, prejudicedstructure,subject-predicate structure,verb-objectstructure, verb-complement structure, pivotal structure, conjunction predicate structure and tight structure. Parallel structure of idioms thatcan be divided into the following four classes: two prejudiced parallel structure, two subject-predicate parallel structure two verb-object parallel structure and four animals tied structure. We analyzes the causes of 22 structures appear in these idioms structure and the phenomenon of two animals antithesis appear in the idioms.The fourth chapter discusses the phenomenon of animal idioms that morpheme and lexical meaning are opaque. In order to obtain better teaching effect, we made a simple experiment and put forward some principles and advises, hoping that can be help. The fifth chapter is the conclusion part of the article and make a summary the whole article.