Study Of Plant Four-character Idioms Based On Conceptual Metaphor Theory

The four-character plant idioms are rich in connotation.They are not only the carrier of cultural knowledge inheritance,but also contain the practical experience and philosophy of Chinese people’s life.They are the essence of Chinese vocabulary.Conceptual metaphor is one of cognitive models,and its structural implicit features can be fully demonstrated in four-character plant idioms,which is helpful for the public to understand and master the conceptualization process of idioms.Based on the experiential cognition of plants,people use their basic experience to understand and represent abstract or complex conceptual categories on the basis of their perception of plants and the specific characteristics of plants With the help of the Modern Chinese Dictionary and other two dictionaries,this paper collects a total of 538 four-character plant idioms.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory,the metaphor types of plant four-character idioms are summarized into three types: entity,personification and container.Furthermore,the paper uses conceptual metaphor mechanism to analyze the semantic construction process of four-character plant idioms,and finds that there are two types of semantic construction,one is integrated metaphorical mapping and the other is partial metaphorical mapping.Finally,from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory,the basic method of teaching Chinese as a foreign language with four-character plant idioms is proposed,and a detailed teaching design is formulated.This paper,exploring metaphors of four-character plant idioms from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,broadens the research perspective of four-character plant idioms,helps people understand the cognitive path of the semantic formation of plant idioms and the cognitive way of the Han people’s image-oriented thinking,so as to promote the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language with four-character plant idioms.