A Cognitive Research Of The Chinese Four-character Zodiac Idioms

Chinese twelve zodiacs, as the most valuable cultural heritage of the Chinese history, have ignited more and more scholars’ interest. Besides, the study of twelve zodiacs has also ignited numerous scholars’ interest and prompted them to make abundant descriptions and analyses of twelve zodiacs from the perspective of metaphor, semantics, cultural linguistics and translation. However, all their discussions are mainly in a static level. All papers only describe information about twelve zodiac animals. No paper studies the Chinese zodiac idioms by constructing a theory model to analyze their meaning formation mechanism.This paper is based on Conceptual Blending Theory, Cognitive Prominence Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory and proposes an integrated theory frame—BPM Model, aiming to conduct a quantitative analysis and establish the constitution model of Chinese four-character zodiac idioms. Data are collected from the Xinhua Idioms Dictionary, and the whole numbers of Chinese four-character zodiac idioms are 310 items.The paper consists of the following five chapters.Chapter One focuses on a general introduction to this study, including the motivations, the objectives, methodology and layout of the paper.Chapter Two presents the previous studies on the twelve zodiacs, and the gaps found in the previous studies.Chapter Three reviews the main theories which will be applied in the paper— Conceptual Blending Theory, Cognitive Prominence Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and points their limitations on the interpretation of Chinese four-character zodiac idioms. In the hope of filling the gaps, it proposes a new theoretical model, namely, BPM Model to better interpret the meaning formation process of Chinese four-character zodiac idioms.Chapter Four concerns data analysis and discussion, specifically, the establishment of the corpus and analysis of the constitution model under the above-proposed theoretical frame.Chapter Five deals with conclusion and three contributions of this paper:First, the study conducts a comprehensive research on Chinese four-character zodiac idioms based on the corpus of 310 items and a BPM Model, the meaning formation mechanism has been analyzed.Second, the paper integrates a new theoretical model to analyze the meaning formation process of the Chinese four-character zodiac idioms and proves the feasibility of the new model.Third, what this paper has done makes a great contribution to the TCFL(teaching Chinese as a foreign language). Furthermore, the limitations are listed out and some suggestions for future research in Chinese zodiac idioms are proposed.