A BR Approach To The Metonymic Mechanism Of Chinese Four-character Idioms

What most scholars are concerned with on Chinese four-character idioms iswhether their meaning is motivated or not. Previous studies on Chinese four-characteridioms pay more attention to describe their grammatical structures, or to draw ananalogy among them from the angle of formal linguistics. However, as cognitivelinguistics is widely accepted, the unanalysability of idiomatic meaning is questioned.Cognitive linguistics holds that idioms’ meaning is analyzable and motivated. What’smore, it believes that such motivation is embodied from people’s everyday experienceand understood by means of abstract thinking models such as metaphor, metonymy.However, current studies are few on the metaphorical or metonymic mechanism ofChinese four-character idioms, and due to the fact that more attention is paid tometaphor, it makes enough room for our study on Chinese four-character idioms fromthe angle of metonymy, because metonymy is just treated as a thinking model and itscognitive mechanism is not discussed in studying idioms. This thesis concentrates onthe inner metonymic mechanism of Chinese four-character idioms and explains howsuch metonymic mechanism operates from the point of cognitive linguistics. In orderto show the operation of metonymy contained in Chinese four-character idioms, thisthesis builds the BR model by integrating the Conception Blending theory and theCognitive Reference Point theory. At the same time, the study is conducted byqualitative research and quantitative research. By studying738corpora and analyzingtheir semantic characteristics, they are divided into three types:one-parallel-reference-point metonymic idioms, two-parallel-reference-point ones andnon-parallel-reference-point metonymic ones. Finally, the BR Model is used toanalyze these three types prospectively.The whole thesis is made up of five chapters, and the main content:Chapter One is a brief introduction to this study. It includes the research scope,motivation, data collection and lay out of the thesis.Chapter Two is a literature review. First, the definition of metonymic Chinese four-character idioms is made. Then we review the studies made by scholars at homeand abroad from the point of Chinese four-character idioms’ form and source, syntax,cognitive linguistics and psychological linguistics, and limitations of previous studiesare pointed out.Chapter Three is to build a theoretical frame. The new theoretical frame is putforward to aiming at remedying limitations of previous studies on Chinesefour-character idioms. Therefore, the thesis raises the BR model by integrating theConception Blending Theory and the Cognitive Reference Point Theory.Chapter Four is to analyze and discuss the collected data. First, we describe thecollected data in detail and divide them into three types: one-parallel-reference-pointmetonymic idioms (64.36%), two-parallel-reference-point ones (9.62%) andnon-parallel-reference-point ones (26.02%). Then the BR model is used to discussthese three types to discover the inner metonymic mechanism of Chinesefour-character idioms supported by relative data and cases.Chapter Five is conclusion. The whole thesis is concluded and what needs to befurther studied is pointed out. Finally, some suggestions are given for further studieson the subject.