Research On The Semantic Transparency Of Chinese Idioms And Their Production In Essays By Primary And Secondary School Students

As a special category of Chinese vocabulary,Chinese idioms(chengyu)represent the essence of the Chinese language through their compact structure,neat format,harmonious rhythm,and complicated semantic characteristics.As an important carrier of Chinese culture,idioms are not only the focus of language arts classes,but a key source of difficulty for primary and secondary students.The rich and varied use of idioms is a metric by which we can understand the level of students' vocabulary development.Though Chinese idioms have a unique structure,the semantics,in particular their highly generalized?fixed and complicated characteristics,have the primary impact on students' acquisition and use.To better analyze idiom meaning,we introduce the concept of “Semantic Transparency,” combining semantic characteristics with the pattern of the interpretations in a Chinese idiom dictionary to create a classification system for idioms written by students.The system contains three major categories with five different subtypes of idioms.In view of the shortcomings of the previous studies on native speaker idiom production,we use statistical analysis of a large-scale corpus to investigate the production of Chinese idioms.In particular,we observe the distribution of idiom types and tokens across the dimensions of semantic transparency and student grade level.Statistical analysis indicates that there are different characteristics of different grades in using idioms and that semantic transparency influences the production of idioms in different grades.In order to make this research more scientific and rigorous,we use the methodology of experimental design to further study the influence of semantic transparency,frequency,and grade as possible factors influencing the usage rate.The experimental results show the usage rate of high transparency idioms is higher than that of low transparency idioms,high frequency higher than low frequency,and high grade higher than low grade.We also find an interaction between semantic transparency and frequency—the effect of transparency is only present in high frequency idioms.As a final step,we evaluated the sentences in the corpus containing idioms for usage accuracy.After identifying all instances of usage error,we applied error analysis to classify and analyze the trends in detail.Errors mainly occur in one of two aspects: semantics or collocation.Within semantic errors,we classify them as literaral interpretion,semantic repetition,and semantic confusion.Collocational errors can be further classified as wrong match,incomplete structure,structural redundancy.In view of the different types of errors in use of idioms,we put forward suggestions on the teaching of idioms from the aspects of semantic transparency,frequency,collocation and so on to instruct the students to use Chinese idioms better.