A Constructional Approach To The Categorization Of Chinese And English Three-Word Idioms And The Contrastive Study On Their Syntactic Functions

The present paper explores the categorization of Chinese and English three-word idioms and discusses the differences of the syntactic functions between those idioms of the two languages. The categorization of three-word idioms is motivated by the classification of idioms in Fillmore et al.[1] and the autonomy/dependence alignment [2]. To improve the classification, we also borrow the concept of chemical-bond. In the present study, verbs in the three-word idioms are seen as equal to the metallic ions in chemistry. Both Chinese and English three-word idioms can be divided into ionic-bond type and covalent-bond type. Moreover, based on the model of the autonomy/dependence alignment, the Chinese three-word idioms can be further classified into11subtypes, while English three-word idioms will be categorized into9subtypes.The contrastive research of the syntactic functions is conducted on the basis of the classification. We start with the contrastive study of the categorization between Chinese and English three-word idioms. Qualitative study is the first step in the discussion of the syntactic functions. The examples are obtained through the corpus and the syntactic functions of the three-word idioms will be analyzed within the sentences. Indeed, we can draw some conclusions from the qualitative study, but the lack of representativeness and reliability makes the study incomplete, calling forth the quantitative study. In the present paper,1000Chinese three-word idioms and1000English three-word idioms are picked up from the Dictionary of Idioms from the Ancient Chinese Novels and NTC’s American Idioms Dictionary respectively. With the assistance of SPSS and corpus, we have done some data processing on the syntactic functions of the three-word idioms. A special note for this is that the chi-square test in SPSS will prove the reliability and representativeness of the sample test in the present study.We find, first of all,32.3%of the English covalent-bond idioms act as objects or subjects in the sentences and67.7%as modifiers or complements;25.7%of the Chinese covalent-bond idioms act as objects or subjects and74.3%as modifiers or complements. Secondly, all of the English ionic-bond idioms can function as predicates and97.8%of them can also be modifiers or complements;86.5%of Chinese ionic-bond idioms act as predicates and13.5%as modifiers or complements. According to this, the difference and similarity of the syntactic functions between Chinese and English three-word idioms can be concluded as follows:all the English ionic-bond idioms act as predicates while in Chinese over80%of the ionic-bond idioms function as predicates leaving13.5%functioning as modifiers or complements; the syntactic functions of covalent-bond idioms are similar in Chinese and English:about70%of the covalent-bond idioms function as modifiers or complements while about30%act as objects or subjects.The findings of this contrastive study will help analyze the syntactic functions of the three-word idioms in the sentences and assist the translation of the three-word idioms. Moreover, the present study is the first research on the classification of three-word idioms, which, we hope, will be of help for the study of idioms.