A Cognitive Study On The Formation Of Chinese Four-Character Human Body Idioms

Chinese idioms are concise and incisive phrases or short sentences formed by the Han nationality in its language activities,which are the crystallization of the collective wisdom of Chinese people.It is widely used in people's daily life because of its four-character form,beautiful rhythm,readability,vividness and strong expressiveness.Cognitive Linguistics,developed on the basis of Embodied Philosophy,is based on human beings themselves,believing that physiological and psychological activities such as categories,concepts,reasoning and mind are gradually formed depending mainly on the perception of body parts,power movements,spatial relationships and so on.Likewise,through human observation and embodiment,many human body words including“tou”,“kou”,“mu”,“er”,“xin”,“shou”,“zu”and so forth are fixed through idioms,forming human idioms with rich connotations,like“jue tou jue nao(????)”,“miao shou hui chun(????)”and“chi xin xiang dai(????)”,which are ubiquitous in everyday life.Previous studies on human body idioms have mostly focused on culture,translation,grammar and contrastive studies,but few have studied them from a cognitive perspective.This thesis takes human body idioms as the research object and human body idioms in Xin Hua Cheng Yu Da Ci Dian(2013)as the corpus to construct an EAF(Embodiment-Autonomy and Dependence Theory-Frame Theory)analytical model.The cognitive mechanism of Chinese human body idioms is deeply studied and the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features are analyzed.Research shows that Chinese human body idioms are closely related to people's interactive embodiment with the outside world.They are internally interdependent and operate in the frame of human body.Syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features are mainly as follows: 1.Syntactically,Chinese four-character human body idioms in event category are mainly verb-object structures,while ones in entity category are primarily endocentric structures.In terms of syntactic functions,Chinese four-character human body idioms can be used as subjects,predicates,objects,attributives,adverbials and complements.2.Semantically,there exist coordinate,progressive,causal and purposeful relations between the first sub-part and the second sub-part within Chinese four-character human body idioms.3.Pragmatically,Chinese four-character human idioms have three pragmatic effects: economy,vividness and emotional coloring.The significance of this study lies in:First,a new interpretation framework is proposed to study Chinese human idioms,based on which,this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features of Chinese four-character human body idioms.Second,through the study of human idioms in the corpus,it is helpful for us to understand the causes behind human idioms,thus helping us to better use these idioms,understand the essence of Chinese culture and the wisdom behind Chinese idioms.