A Contrastive Approach To The Conceptualization Of Chinese And English ANGER Idioms

Chinese and English emotional idioms have constantly been studied by numerous scholars and researchers from such various perspectives as pragmatics,semantics,and syntactics,etc.There are rich studies on Chinese and English emotional idioms but few of them involve the mechanisms behind the meaning construction of these idioms,especially of the SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms,and they rarely illustrate how the concepts are correspondent to their different formal representations.This thesis is devoted to the studies of these problems.The thesis mainly focuses on the problems listed below:(1)The classifications of Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms.(2)The conceptual mechanisms in the formation of Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms,the similarities and differences within the Chinese,within the English,and between Chinese and English,and the possible reasons behind.(3)The conceptualization processes in the formation of Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms,the similarities and differences within the Chinese,within the English,and between Chinese and English,and the possible reasons.The main findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)Based on the ways of meaning construction during conceptualization,both Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms can be classified into mainly four types.(2)The conceptualization mechanisms used in the meaning construction of Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms are mainly metaphor,metonymy,and the combination of the two.However,there are differences in the percentage of adopting those mechanisms in Chinese and English.The possible reasons underlie the differences within Chinese idioms and within English idioms may be the pragmatic purposes and the context in the communication.The reasons for the similarities between the conceptualization mechanisms of Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms may be also the same physiological structure of brain shared by all humans and the limited key elements in SHENG QI(ANGER)event frame.The reasons for the differences between the conceptualization mechanisms of Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms may be cultural model and the influence of surroundings.(3)The conceptualization processes of both Chinese and English SHENG QI(ANGER)idioms are quite similar and the differences mainly rest in the specific selections of different ways of conceptualization.The possible reasons underlie those similarities are the same physiological structure of the brain and common features of languages themselves.The differences in the conceptualization of Chinese and English idioms are mainly caused by the cultural models and the linguistic unit frames of SHENG QI(ANGER)and the linguistic units to represent SHENG QI(ANGER),and pragmatic factors.