A Comparative Analysis Of English And Chinese Oral Body Part Idioms Based On Cognitive Semantic Study

Idioms gradually take shape in the process of long-term human language use, and theyare the accumulation of life and the crystallization of intelligence of mankind. Notsurprisingly, idioms have long been the subject concerned and studied by linguists andscholars both at home and abroad for several decades. Traditional linguistics insists thatidiomatic meaning is a kind of special meaning, and that idioms are conventional, fixed andunanalyzable in meaning and structure. Though traditional study of idioms has laid a solidfoundation for the further study of them in the future, its great limitation and flaw are fullyexposed when the study deepens step by step. With the rapid development of cognitivelinguistics, many linguists and scholars attempt to study idioms from the perspective ofcognition. Diametrically opposed to the traditional views, cognitive linguistics insists that themeaning construction of idioms is not arbitrary, but motivated and analyzable. To some extent,the idiomatic meaning construction is cognitively processed by conceptual metaphor,conceptual metonymy, and conceptual blending. While some cognitive linguists once appliedconceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy and conceptual blending to the study of idioms,so far they have not yet form a theoretical system in this field of study. Additionally, there arestill few linguists and scholars who conduct a comparative study of English and Chineseidioms from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics at present. Therefore, it is necessary andsignificant as before to make a comparative study of English and Chinese idioms in theframework of cognitive linguistic theory.In view of the extensive coverage of idioms, the thesis mainly makes a comparativestudy of idioms that contain a reference to an oral body part under the theoretical frameworkof conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, and conceptual blending. First and foremost,the present object of study is only confined to such English and Chinese idioms containing areference to an oral body part or referring to a vocal organ as “mouth, lip, tooth, tongue,throat”, and the focus of study is on English idioms in the form of set phrases, and thefour-character Chinese idioms. It is due to the salience of function, gestalt, and culture in human cognition that the author chooses oral body part idioms as the object of study.Subsequently, based on the linguistic data from the reference books The ContemporaryChinese Dictionary, The Typological Dictionary of Chinese Idioms, Longman Dictionary ofEnglish Idioms, and Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English, the authorsemantically makes a comparative analysis of English and Chinese idioms that contain areference to an oral body part. According to the quantitative analysis of English and Chineseoral body part idioms, the linguistic data show that69％Chinese idioms and68.6％Englishidioms are motivated by conceptual metaphor and metonymy.The thesis, to some extent, reveals the cognitive mechanism of the English and Chineseoral body part idioms through semantically comparative analysis of them. According to thequalitative and quantitative analysis of English and Chinese oral body part idioms, it isdisclosed that there is the same cognitive mechanism, namely, conceptual metaphor andmetonymy, in them, for the way human thinks has universality based on experience of oralbody parts. Nevertheless, the study also shows that there is a cognitive difference betweenEnglish and Chinese idioms of this kind. Rather, in English single-image idioms only onesource is mapped onto one target domain, while in Chinese double-image idioms, two sourcesare mapped onto the same target domain. Then the author attempts to expound the cognitivedifference in light of conceptual blending theory (CBT) proposed by Fauconnier and hiscolleague Turner. The CBT is established and developed on the basis of mental space theory,so it is also known as blending theory, blending space theory, or conceptual integration theory.Fauconnier (1997) claims that conceptual blending is a cognitive process during which peoplethink and act in a creative way, and that it is by gradual conceptual blending and producingnew blending space on the basis of the integrated concept that people can incessantlyrecognize the world and themselves. Furthermore, the author posits that different culturalmodels may be another reason for cognitive difference between these English and Chineseidioms containing a reference to an oral body part.