Affective Idioms In English

As the crystals of a language, idioms are known for its conciseness and profound meanings. A proper use of idioms makes the whole speech and writing vivid and colorful. Based on previous experience, human create idioms with own languages and words, therefore the literal meanings of idioms are usually different from their figurative meaning. On the basis of conceptual framework, the object of this thesis is mainly fixed on four basic affective idioms of human in English in order to explain their figurative meaning and their cognitive mechanism.At the beginning, the author discusses the previous studies of idioms from different schools, such as the structural, semantic and cognitive perspectives. Through the survey of idiom researches home and abroad, a cognitive framework to analyze idioms-the combination of metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending theories-is proposed. Then based on this framework, the author conducts a series of cognitive analysis which are concerned with affective idioms in English, such as sad, fear, love and pride in order to show the whole cognitive mechanism. It is believed that a good understanding of idioms'cognitive mechanisms will help for foreign language leaning and studying.