A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of English-Chinese Body Idioms

Idiom is the linguistic term familiar to every language learner, but its definition orconnotation is not necessarily very clear to every one, for all the experts and thedictionaries don’t define it identically. Some dictionaries don’t categorize epigramsand proverbs into idiom. And their idioms only include phrasal idioms excludingsentence-idioms like epigrams while some others do. For instance, Oxford AdvancedLearner’s English-Chinese Dictionary says: Idiom is "phrase or sentence whosemeaning is not clear from the meaning of individual words and which must be learntas a whole unit." Besides, they emphasize different aspects of idioms. Some putemphasis on the structure of an idiom while some on its semantic meaning and someothers may emphasize its function. Nevertheless, in this thesis, idioms we studymainly refer to fixed phrases consisting of two or more than two words or fourcharacters (Chinese idioms) with implied meaning rather than the assembly of theliteral meaning of individual words. This thesis mainly studies both English andChinese idioms connected with human body parts. English idioms here include onlyfixed phrases without proverbs or epigrams, and Chinese idioms in this thesis focus onfour-character set phrases.Idioms are fruit of language and culture, correct use of idioms can add greatbeauty to our discourse and communication. However, the nature of idioms’ structuralfixedness, profound and implied semantic meaning makes it difficult to understandand apply them correctly, which often leads to pragmatic failure of unsuccessfulcommunication. We believe that to fundamentally solve the problems of pragmaticfailure in cross-cultural communication caused by misuse or misunderstanding ofidioms, communicators must know well the similarities and differences of the twocorresponding languages and causes of the differences. So a contrastive study ofidioms in the two languages is helpful and very necessary. Although some cognitivestudies on idiomatic phrases have been made, they aren’t theoretically systematic.What’s more, few people have made contrastive studies on idioms from theperspective of cognition, whereas, this kind of study is essentially important to the mastery and application of English and Chinese idioms. In view of the fact thatEnglish and Chinese idioms touch upon a wide range of things, this thesis aims at thestudy of both English and Chinese idioms connected with human body parts.This thesis has analyzed similarities and differences of English and Chinese bodyparts idioms and their causes in the light of the theories of metaphor, metonymy andconceptual blending, relevant theories of cognitive linguistics, which, to some extent,reveals the cognitive mechanism of these idioms. Through the study, we come torealize that English and Chinese idioms share the same cognitivemechanism---metaphor and metonymy, which is due to the human way of thinkingbased on common body experience. However, the English Chinese body parts idiomsalso show some differences. To investigate the causes of such differences, we conducta survey of idioms concerning "heart","head","hand" and "eye", taking as corpora AComprehensive Dictionary Of English Idioms and Phrase by Funjian People’s Pressand Chengyu Da Cidian (Dictionary of Idioms) by Commercial Press. The surveyshows that226out of494Chinese idioms have two source domains, yet just only onein English. Taking "Tie Shi Xi Chang" as a example, the two source domains "Tie"and "Shi" describe people who are hardhearted without any sympathy for anybody onany occasion, while the corresponding English is "with a heart of stone", in whichonly one source domain---"stone" is used to express the same meaning. We attempt toexpatiate on this phenomenon with Fauconnier’s Conceptual Blending Theory.Conceptual Blending Theory is also known as "Blending" or "Blending Space".Faunconnier explained that process of blending is made on the basis of two inputspaces to form the third space, namely blending space. Blending space extracts partialstructures from the two input spaces and then forms emergent structure. In addition,the culture is a reason not to be ignored.