Cognitive Study Of English Idioms

Idioms,as the essence of a language, are an indispensable componentof vocabulary. Idioms vividly reflect the society and culture from whichit is derived from. It has been recognized by many second languageresearchers that second language user may sound unnatural if their speechis devoid of idiomatic expressions. There are two views on the meaningof idioms, traditional and cognitive. Traditional view holds that idiomsare arbitrary expressions whose meanings are non-compositional, that is,their meanings are not the functions of the meaning of their individualparts. Cognitive view holds that the meaning of idioms is not completelyarbitrary. Instead, they are motivated by their literal usage. However,learning idioms are notoriously difficult,especially for a secondlanguage learner, if he knows little about the society and culture wherethe target language lies, he can only learn idioms by blindmemorization.For the part of English Instructors in China, they usedto try every means to draw students’ attention by making them exposedto idioms rather than helping students to analyze the semantic motivationof idioms. Consequently English learners used to learn an idiomaticexpression by rote,which resulted in extremely poor long-term retentionand inappropriate usages in reality. Thereby an effective way ofacquiring idioms is badly needed.Thanks to the birth and development of cognitive linguistics, theallegation that idioms are arbitrary and unanalyzable has completely lostits validity. In the book Metaphors We Live By in1980, Lakoff and Johnsonfirst put forward the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. They hold that metaphoris not just a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourishor a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. In fact,metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but alsoin thought and action. Metaphor enables us to understand one thing in terms of another. Therefore, metaphor is acclaimed to be a cognitive toolin essence. This cognitive view on metaphor has far-reaching implicationsin field after field, like computer science, literary studies, law,clinical psychology, religion and linguistics. Language is a product ofhuman cognition and metaphor is a tool of cognition., so it is significantto study how metaphor can effectively promote the cognition of idioms.The present thesis consists of six chapters. The author begins withthe introduction, and then reviews both idiom and metaphor study. Afterelaborating on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its pedagogicalimplication, the author conducts an experiment to attempts to find outwhether the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to idiom teachingcan promote the idiom retention and arouse students’ interest in idiomacquisition.. The result of the independent samples t-test illustratesthat this approach can arouse learners’ interest in idioms andeffectively facilitate idiom acquisition.It should be pointed out that this idiom acquisition approach basedon Conceptual Metaphor Theory doesn’t serve as a substitute for any otheridiom learning strategy, but as a supplementary way to acquire Englishidioms. The author hopes that Conceptual Metaphor Theory can be widelyapplied in English idiom acquisition as well as in other aspects ofEnglish acquisition.