The Research Of Chinese ABAC Idiom Construction Under The CAB Model

Chinese idiom is defined as the concise phrase or short saying which exists inthe long life of Chinese people. Chinese idiom is vivid and concise because of itsconventional four-character form. It plays an important role in enhancing nationalcohesion and improves the cultural level. Therefore, it has ignited numerousscholars’ interest and analyses. Many experts and scholars have studied Chineseidiom by using kinds of theories. However, few of them have studied Chinese ABACidioms from the cognitive point of view. Let alone sufficient statistical evidence.The so-called Chinese ABAC idiom construction refers to the idiom which isformed by means of four Chinese characters. Most of them have parallelingstructures. Its first and third characters are the same, the second and fourth ones aredifferent. It is different from the sentence pattern. It is the collection of the wordswhich have overlapping form, stable structure relation and the grammatical meaning.In order to explain the production mechanism of ABAC idiom constructions, thispaper proposes the CAB Model which is combined by Cognitive Reference PointTheory, Autonomy and Dependence Theory and Blending Theory based on theConstruction Grammar Theory. The research objects of this paper are Chinese ABACidioms which have four-character structure. Based on the Electronic Edition of V4.00Version of Chinese Dictionary,908ABAC idioms have been selected to form aclosed corpus. They are analysed with a qualitative and quantitative method.There are five chapters in this thesis, and the main ideas are as follows:Chapter One is the Introduction. It introduces the motivation, purpose, researchscope, methodology and data collection as well as layout.Chapter Two is the Literature Review. It mainly reviews the previous relative studies on the construction from different perspectives by the scholars at home andabroad. Some Several related theories of Construction Grammar are introduced tofind the gap left by the previous researches.Chapter Three is the Main Theories. Based on the limitations of the previousstudies, the author analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of CognitiveReference Point Theory and Autonomy and Dependence Theory and BlendingTheory when they are used to explain the underlying mechanism of Chinese ABACidioms. At last, a CAB Model is established in this paper, which is a effectiveintegration of the three theoies, by which one of the Chinese ABAC idioms isanalyzed in detail.Chapter Four is the Data Analysis and Discussion. Based on the analysis of theclosed corpus, the CAB Model is used to analyze the syntactic, semantic andpragmatic features respectively, coupling with relative ratios and statistics.Chapter Five is the Conclusion. It deals with the conclusion drawn from thisresearch, including major contributions of the study and the limitations as well assuggestions for the future research.The major contributions of the thesis are as follows:First, a CAB Model is established by integrating the Cognitive Reference PointTheory, the Autonomy and Dependence Theory and the Blending Theory of theCognitive Linguistics. The CAB Model is proposed to expound the underlyingcognitive mechanism of ABAC idiom constructions in modern Chinese for the firsttime.Second, a closed corpus is established which is formed by908ABAC idiomconstructions. They are counted and classified in detail. The author sums up their syntactic features, semantic attributes and pragmatic functions, coupling with relativeratios and statistics.Third, the908ABAC idiom constructions are divided into five types mainlyaccording to their syntactic features. They are shown in the following tables:Table1The Idiom Types and Syntactic RepresentationGrammatical structures Number Rate（Num/908） Examples1. The verb-complement coordination34137.56%百依百顺2. The verb-object coordination29132.05%碍手碍脚3. The endocentric coordination25227.75%半生半熟4. The subject-predicate coordination121.32%马去马�'5. Others121.32%阿猫阿狗Finally, the author points out the shortcomings of this study and gives somesuggestions for future research.