Research On The Semantics And Cultural Connotation Of Idioms Containing "water"

Water is the source of all things,and human knew the water having reached a high level long before. In ancient China the understanding to the water also deep into the philosophy, politics, ethics and other aspects. And from a large number of fairy tales,we know the history of the world’s peoples originated from flood period, therefore,to some extent, culture was originated from water.The paper firstly defined the research object, and classified the conceptual metaphor of "water" of containing character "water" idioms on the basis of Metaphor Theory. And the standard to define the research object is that idioms contain morpheme "water", whose semantic is directly related to water, namely describes character of water. According to Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphor Theory,the paper divided the conceptual metaphor of "water" into four types: movement is water;power is water; female is water and emotions are water.According to origin the meanings of containing character "water" idioms, the paper based on Zhou Guangqing’s intermediary sign of idioms theory divided the idioms into three types: idioms describing specific imagery; idioms constructing typical imagery and idioms expressing emotion by "borrowing" image, analyzing the semantic category of idioms. Obviously we can know their concepts: the first type is to explore the semantic by describing specific imagery while the second type constructs the representative imagery,and the third one is to express emotions by"borrowing" composite imagery. Then the paper calculated the number of three types idioms: 66,104 and 61, and their proportion respectively is about 27%, 43% and 25%.Finally, from the production and living conditions and political ideas of ancient society, this paper elucidated the cultural connotation of containing character "water"idioms.