| Idioms are the crystallization and essence of developments and evolutions of alllanguages. Taking over a large proportion of all language phenomenon, idioms boast richstructures and strong explanatory powers. However, due to the fact that they mostly appear inways unconform to grammatical rules, idioms have long been considered as epiphenomenonand left out of linguistic studies. In order to amend this defect and study language in acomprehensive way, scholars like Fillmore and Kay used idioms as a starting point andinitiated Construction Grammar, which was later improved and optimized by more languageworkers like Langacker(1987,1991), Lakoff(1976), Goldberg(1995,2006) and so on.Goldberg(1995,4) once defined Construction Grammar as such,“C is a constructioniffdefC is a form-meaning pair <Fi, Si> such that some aspect of Fior some aspect of Siis notstrictly predictable from C’s component parts or from other previously establishedconstructions.” Given this, all language phenomenon including words, phrases, sentences, areform-meaning pairs with comparatively independent constructions. In a given language unit,different constructions coerce and interact with each other, contributing to the whole meaningof the unit. Normally, Chinese simile idioms consist of four characters, in which the fourelements, body, vehicle, simile word, and ground, either present at the same time or absent oncertain occasions. They are arranged randomly and coerce with each other to form differentconstructions. In this sense, the meaning of a particular Chinese simile idiom is unpredictable,and corresponding translations are comparatively difficult.In this thesis, Chinese simile idioms are categorized from the perspective of ConstructionGrammar, and arrangements of the elements in different idioms, coercion effects amongdifferent components and their contributions to the meaning of the idiom in which they areincluded are studied respectively. Moreover, through a constructional comparison betweenChinese and English simile idioms, corresponding translation rules an strategies are proposed. |
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