A Cognitive Interpretation Of Chinese Zodiac Idioms

Chinese idioms, with rich cultural connotations, are the essence of Chinese culture and the collective wisdom of Chinese people. Originated from daily life, idioms were created in the process of people's practice. Animal idioms exist in all languages in the world, and the generation of animal idioms is based on the embodiment and interaction between human and animal world as well as the cognitive processing of humans. A close relationship between human and animals was established since the beginning of the existence of mankind. Animals are the most intimate species with human beings in the interaction between human and the objective world and are the closest creatures to human beings in terms of the property of species. In the long-term interaction and communication between the two, a lot information about animal culture has been projected to human beings on the basis of people's observation and embodiment, and then are fixed into words, therefore animal idioms conveying rich meanings come into being. There have been many studies about animal idioms, but most of them based on the perspective of culture, translation, metaphor and comparative studies between Chinese and foreign languages, few were conducted from the cognitive angle. Even if the studies related to animal idioms were conducted from the cognitive perspective, most of them were scattered case studies, not systematic and comprehensive.By means of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this thesis, regarding Chinese zodiac idioms as the research object, made a closed corpus on the basis of 496 idioms collected from Xin Shi Ji Han Yu Cheng Yu Ci Dian(2006) and based on ECM proposed by Wang Yin(2006), established Culture-based ECM(shortened as CECM) to explore the cognitive rationale of these idioms from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. The result of the study is that Chinese zodiac idioms are deeply grounded in the Chinese zodiac culture and reflect the way Chinese people engage the animal world. Thereby this study can further demonstrate the strong explanatory power of Embodied Philosophy and Cognitive Linguistics to language and criticize the philosophy of objectivism.