A Corpus-based Study On Characteristics Of Idiomatic Word-combinations In American Sitcoms

The traditional linguistics concentrates on the creativity of language, but ignores the prefabrication.Idiomatic expression is a reflection of such prefabrication, and also the main realization form of Sinclair’s‘idiom principle’. Corpus statistics have shown that there exist large numbers of idiomatic expressions innatural discourse which can make the discourse natural and fluent. In recent years, the idiomaticexpressions have become the area of concern by linguistics. Previous studies mostly focus on the idiomaticexpressions themselves, and rarely conducted from stylistics perspective. Findings obtained from therelevant literature are that the use of idiomatic expressions is greatly influenced by genre, and thegenre-based studies, particularly the study on spoken idiomatic expressions are few. Thus this articleattempts to study the spoken idiomatic expressions appeared in American sitcoms which represent theinformal spoken genre.There still has been no consensus among researchers about how the term ‘idioms’ should be definedand delimited. The present thesis firstly reviews the relevant literature on the definitions and classificationsof idioms given by domestic and foreign scholars, on the basis of which a new term ‘idiomaticword-combinations’ is given, then redefined and delimited. With the rise of corpus linguistics, thecorpus-based approach has been the trend of phraseological study in recent years. Based on the frequencyof real language use, this approach can reflect the actual use of a phrase in a real context and overcome thesubjectivity and intuition carried in the traditional research, therefore the corpus-based approach isemployed in this thesis. Then, a Friends corpus is built through collecting subtitles of a representativeAmerican sitcom Friends which is popular with Chinese audiences. With the concordance tool Antconc,this thesis intends to give a quantitative and qualitative analysis of idiomatic word-combinations inAmerican sitcoms from the perspective of stylistics. Firstly, the frequently occurring idiomaticword-combinations in Dilin Liu’s (2003) corpus are searched and comparatively analyzed in Friendscorpus, and the result shows that there exists stylistic difference in the informal genre of American sitcomsabout the use of the frequently occurring idiomatic word-combinations. The frequently occurring idiomaticword-combinations in Dilin Liu’s corpus are not frequently occurring in American sitcoms. Then, what arethe characteristics of the idiomatic word-combinations in American sitcoms? So this thesis tries to analyze them from the levels of grammar, lexis, meaning and function. The results reveal that: grammatically, someidiomatic word-combinations influenced by different styles demonstrate particular grammatical preference;lexically, some idiomatic word-combinations in this informal genre appear various types of variants;semantically and functionally, meanings and functions of some idiomatic word-combinations also reflectthe stylistic specificality. With the enlargement of China’s cultural exchanges with other countries, foreignTV plays and movies are introduced into our country in different ways. English movies with soundtrack arewidely used in foreign language teaching. Nowadays, more and more English learners realize thatAmerican sitcoms play a positive part in their English learning, thus the analysis of idiomaticword-combinations in American sitcoms will be of great significance in film-and-television-based Englishteaching.