On Cognitive Mechanisms Of Idiom Interpretation

The thesis is an attempt to study the three basic mechanisms of idiom comprehension from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, and ultimately aims at testifying that human language and cognition are fundamentally shaped by the same processes.The interest in idiomaticity is well founded, considering its unique features and numerical quantities in both English and Chinese. However, scholars in different fields view idioms from very different perspectives. Therefore, diverse ideas and theories concerning idioms arise. Linguistic study of idioms has been focused on the description of syntactic and semantic features, historical origins, and pragmatic values, holding the view that idioms have arbitrarily stipulated meanings. Psychological experiments also seemed to support the lexical representation hypothesis, which supposes that idioms are stored in the mental lexicon as morphologically complex words and are retrieved in the same way as any other word.But cognitive linguistics open up a new horizon that the meanings of idioms are not arbitrary but rather motivated. That is, they do arise automatically by productive rules, and fit one or more patterns in the conceptual system. The compositional view represents the achievements in cognitive research of idioms. Tt provides solutions to the syntactic and lexical flexibility of idioms, but fails to recognize some other important dimensions of idiomaticity. And in arguing that idioms are compositional, it fails to take into account that some idioms are indeed nondecomposable. The paper takes an overall point of view, and claims that the motivation of decomposable idioms can be recovered.The theoretical foundations on which my analysis is based are mainly from sources of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor and metonymy. In correspondence to their experientialism view that figurative language is conceptual rather than rhetorical to the core, idiom origins in metaphor and metonymy are not out of rhetorical effect, but conceptual systems.The author then clarifies some of the core notions that constitute the theoretical field of idiom representation and comprehension: (a) the notion of compositionality which is the basis of the idiom classification in the paper, (b) the notion of literal meaning that has gained priority in traditional study, and (c) the concept of syntactic and semantic productivity of idioms and its relation to compositionality.In order to buttress the argument, plentiful examples in both English and Chinese are provided to analyze the role of metaphor, metonymy, and conventional knowledge in idiom interpretation. Although these three kinds of basic knowledge are conventionalized in the sense that they are part of everyday cognition as to be unconscious and automatic, they do form a link between an idiom and its figurative meaning and constrain the way people interpret them. The mappings of source and target domains exist independently in the conceptual system and function to structure and organize many aspects of human thought and cognition. The frames of culture also constrain the understanding about the world, which in rum automatically influence the thoughtway and language people of that culture uniquely possess.Based on the demonstration, two cognitive models in expounding different kinds of idiom interpretation are given in parallel with their specifications in both languages.Finally, a conclusion is drawn that idioms are partially semantically motivated by tacit knowledge such as metaphor, metonymy, and conventional knowledge underlying them.