Cultural Connotations Of Spring Festival Idioms

Language is a symbol carrying quantitative information,and its function is to communicate and disseminate.Idioms,as an important part of the language system,are the crystallization of language art and people’s wisdom.Their prominent feature is that they care about culture in a wide range and to a certain extent.The Spring Festival idioms are the idioms that govern the Spring Festival culture.The Spring Festival is the most abundant,enthusiastic and valued festival in traditional Chinese festivals.The number of studies on introducing Spring Festival customs and discussing the characteristics of Spring Festival festivals is very large.Scholars mostly analyze Spring Festival culture from the perspectives of folklore,history and sociology.Although some scholars have touched on the culture of Spring Festival from the perspective of language,few studies have been conducted to explore the cultural connotations contained in the idioms of Spring Festival by taking the idioms widely circulated by the public as a breakthrough.Based on the Spring Festival idioms,this paper uses the research ideas of cultural linguistics to look at culture from idioms,which is a new perspective,aiming at enriching the research forms of Spring Festival culture.On the premise of collecting the corpus,this paper classifies the cultural connotations of different aspects reflected in the corpus into three aspects: material cultural idioms,ethical cultural idioms and psychological cultural idioms of the Spring Festival.Chapter one combs the material culture reflected in the idioms,expressing the theme of people’s wishes from four aspects: people’s dietary characteristics,decorative features,pre-festival cleaning and New Year’s entertainment.Chapter two analyses the ethical culture in the idioms,and shows the concept of respect for the elders and love the children,the concept of filial piety offering sacrifices to ancestors and the concept of harmonious neighborhood dealing with affairs from the normative Chinese New Year etiquette behind the idioms.The third chapter analyses the psychological culture of idioms,including the psychology of reverence,reunion and projection;the fourth chapter analyses the functions of Spring Festival idioms,including marking and inheritance.