Cognitive Study Of Chinese Diet Idioms From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Diet idiom is an important part of Chinese idioms,and its semantic meaning involves many fields,and the meaning of the idiom is not a simple literal meaning.On the basis of predecessors' research,we adopt the new research perspective to examine the semantic construction process of the idiom,using the conceptual integration theory in cognitive linguistics to study it.We collect 400 cases of diet idioms from the "Chinese Idioms Dictionary",establishing a small corpus to research it.The semantic category of idioms on diet include evaluation of the characters,objective things and behavior,the political and military activities,articles and words and evaluation of daily life.The structure of diet idioms mainly include eight types:combined type,partial formal,subject predicate type,verb complement type,verb object type,telescopic form,serial verb construction and condensed type.We analyze and classify the semantic construction of diet idioms with the conceptual integration theory.The types of semantic construction include metaphor,metonymy and the combination of metaphor and metonymy.The conceptual integration of metaphor can be divided into one-step metaphor and two-step metaphor.Metonymy conceptual integration is divided into one-step metonymy and two-step metonymy.The combination of metaphor and metonymy includes three types:the first one is metonymy gets priority,the second one is metaphor gets priority,the last one is the alternating combination of metaphor and metonymy.We carry on the overall analysis and the statistics to the idiom cognition situation.From the macro perspective,the semantic synthesis of diet idioms is largely based on the two modes: metaphor and metonymy.One-step conceptual synthesis is mainly based on metaphor,two-step synthesis is mainly based on metonymy.The semantic synthesis of evaluation of characters,objective things and behavior categories are mainly based on metaphor,The semantic synthesis of daily life categories are mainly based on Metonymy.From the microscopic point of view,specific dietary words in the overall semantic integration present different attributes.According to the cognitive situation,we sum up the semantic features of the idioms.Finally,we explore the integration reasons of diet idioms.