A Study Of Russian Evaluative Idioms

In recent years, many researchers have put a lot of efforts to study the category appraisal in the lexical semantic system of language, and have gained a variety of academic achievements. But the evaluative meanings in Russian idioms have not yet been thoroughly studied. Many linguists have made a preliminary meaningful exploration about the Russian evaluative idioms, but their researches often limited to some partial features of evaluative idioms, failing to reveal its essential characteristics. So far, in either Russia or China, we have not found a synthesized and exhaustive study about the Russian evaluative idioms.Relying on the theory of Russian idioms, through the perspective of the theory of category appraisal, this article attempts to make a systematic research on the Russian evaluative idioms. We aim to reveal the structural features and syntactic features of Russian evaluative idioms, and make a detailed research on semantic features of Russian evaluative idioms in terms of overall and specific evaluation.The topic of this thesis-a study of Russian evaluative idioms-is of great significance both theoretically and practically. On one hand, the outcome of this study can enrich theoretical knowledge of Russian idioms and linguistics. On the other hand, its outcome can be widely used in practical Russian teaching, providing useful help for Chinese students to study Russian idioms.The novelty of this thesis lies in the following aspects:conduct a systematic and comprehensive study of Russian evaluative idioms; make a complete list of evaluative idioms; carry out analysis in terms of its lexical and grammatical features; and sum up types of the meaning of evaluative idioms in terms of overall and specific evaluation.This thesis consists of Introduction, four chapters, Conclusion, references and appendices.The Introduction gives a brief introduction to the major achievements in the study of Russian evaluative idioms by Russian and Chinese linguists and describes the research significance, research perspective, research method and research purpose of this thesis.We aim to clarify several issues closely related to the category appraisal in first chapter. This chapter summarizes of the concept and composition of appraisal, and sums up types of evaluative meanings. Based on the different principles of classification, those evaluative meanings are classified by several types.The second chapter aims to solve an important problem-how to determine whether an idiom is evaluative or not. According to the basic theory of Russian idioms, we generalize several types of the meanings of Russian idioms-nominative, categorical, modal and evaluative meaning. Further, we clarify the relationship between evaluative meaning and others meanings of Russian idioms. Finally, we determine the standards of Russian evaluative idioms.We aim to classify the evaluative idioms in terms of their lexical and grammatical features in third chapter. This chapter divides the evaluative idioms into three types:substantive evaluative idioms, verbal evaluative idioms and adverbial evaluative idioms. By analyzing each type of the classifications, we interpret the structural features and syntactic features of Russian evaluative idioms.The fourth chapter makes a detailed comprehensive research on semantic features of Russian evaluative idioms. On the basis of overall and specific evaluation, we individually make classifications for evaluative idioms. According to overall evaluation, Russian evaluative idioms are divided into three types:idioms with positive evaluation, idioms with negative evaluation, and idioms with positive and negative evaluation at the same time. In terms of specific evaluation we classify the evaluative idioms into five types:emotive evaluation, ethical evaluation, intellectual evaluation, normative evaluation and characteristic evaluation. Further, this chapter also analyzes detailed contents of each type of evaluative meanings.The Conclusion briefly and concisely summarizes the study of this thesis. Besides, we give a prospect for the future study of Russian evaluative idioms as an academic topic.The appendices contain all the Russian evaluative idioms in Dictionary of Russian idioms (2010), with detailed specification of their classifications.