| Liaozhai Folk Poems are long narrating stories created by Pu Songling with colloquialism and Zichuan dialect on the basis of the contemporary popular folk songs. There are fifteen types of Liaozhai Folk Poems and most of them are created in his late years. In these Folk Poems, Pu Songling describes the hard life of low class people, portrays a number of characters with distinct personality, and advocates the morals of "goodness" with sharp hand. In his creation, Pu Songling draws a lot from folk language with a bold hand, succeeding in carving out a new path of Qing opera and making great contributions to the development of local opera and folk music. Therefore, Liaozhai Folk Poems are highly reputed as the essence of Chinese literary works.Idioms, the combination of set phrases, have characteristics of fixedness in formation, fusion in meaning, wholeness in use, regionality in style and independence in function. Among the different types of idioms, proverbs express a certain reasoning or judgment and comminute a kind of knowledge and experience, having the feature of representation. Locutions mainly describe the appearance, nature, and state, having the feature of description. For Xiehouyu, it generally has two parts, opening words and explanations for the first part. It has evident feature of quotation.Liaozhai Folk Poems contain 293 idioms, including 120 Xiehouyu, 110 proverbs and 63 locutions. These idioms have an uneven distribution in the fifteen types of Folk Poems. Their distribution has four features: first, early Folk Poems hardly use idioms; second, most Folk Poems about love and marriage don't use idioms; third, Folk Poems about immortals seldom use idioms; fourth, Folk Poems about real life tend to use idioms. Proverbs in Folk Poems mainly fall into life proverb, satire proverb and political proverb. Proverbs have evident variability, instnictiveness, and satire. Locutions in Folk Poems have five features: they are mostly formed by three syllables; the frequency of repetition is much higher that proverbs and Xiehouyu; most have derogatory sense; most are in the structure of predicate plus object; most act as certain components in sentences and some can be independent sentences. Xiehouyu can be about animals, plants, humans, subjects and ghosts and gods.Idioms in Folk Poems contain different figures of speech as metaphor, pun, hyperbole, antithesis and metonymy. Metaphor is mainly made up of concrete matters in reality and imaginary matters; pun idioms are represented by phonetic pun and semantic pun; hyperbole is mainly represented by direct hyperbole and indirect hyperbole; antithesis and metonymy can also be found in folk poem idioms.Folk poem idioms contain Confucian culture, religious culture and commercial culture in early Qing Dynasty. Both essence and defect of Confucian culture can find their expression in folk poem idioms. Religious culture reflects Taoist culture and Buddhist culture while commercial culture reflects the commercial state in early Qing Dynasty and the commercial thoughts of the labor people.Liaozhai Folk Poems employ idioms in various ways. They integrate regular use, irregular use, explicit use, implicit use, separate use and inseparate use in a whole. They display the adept language skill of the author, the earthliness, humor and satire of the Folk Poems, and promote the successful creation of characters, especially female characters.
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