Orality And Writing: Two Utterances Of Idiomatic Phrases

Idiomatic phrases are ready-made and familiar fixed phrases in alanguage,and are discourse units above the word level. As a generic term,idiomatic phrases consist of proverbs, idioms, locutions and the two-partallegorical sayings. Proverbs and idioms are two distinctive phrases dueto their obvious orality and literacy. But traditional studies do notnotice this kind of contrast between orality and literacy, and only treatit as Stylistic variation. This kind of static homogeneous method failsto see the impact that the media and context have on the language. It onlyfocuses on definition and boundaries of idiomatic phrases, and the staticstructure description on various phrases.The method of semiotics not only pays attention to content level thatsymbol bears, but also to the symbol attributes and other contextualfactors, as well as interaction the symbols and the contents have.Therefore, this study is a dynamic heterogeneity study. We will apply thismethod in the study of idiomatic phrases and take into account theheterogeneous elements such as Chinese character, and pay attention tothe symbol mechanism by which idiomatic phrases can form and exist.Orality and written are the symbol mechanisms, which are two basic modesof idiomatic phrases. With differences of Orality and written, differentidiomatic phrases show varying degrees of "word" and"character" in thecharacteristic features. Proverbs are the typical oral idiomatic phrases,and idioms are typical written idiomatic phrases. They represent the " language" pole and " character" pole of idiomatic phrases. This thesisis under this kind of" language" and" character " relationship andcompares proverbs and idioms in synchronic structure morphology anddiachronic evolution, on purpose to investigate how the oral feature andchracter writing impact on proverbs and idioms.