The Fuzziness Of Vehicles In English Idioms And Its Inspirations For Translation

Idioms are expressions of a language, also a social and cultural phenomenon. At the same time, they are a reflection of the body experience and the product of the interaction between humans and the world, namely, the product of cognition. The traditional view distinguishes two distinct features of idioms, one is the semantic unity and the other is the structural unity. The overall meaning cannot be derived and analyzed according to the independent meaning of the individual parts of idioms; each morpheme has been placed regularly in a form of no deconstruction. Therefore, the overall meaning of idioms is independent of human beings'conceptual system and is separate from daily experience and knowledge of language participants. In other words, idioms are isolated at the cognitive level. In recent years, this traditional view on idioms has been challenged by cognitive metaphor. The latter seeks a new perspective to explore the cognitive process hidden behind the idioms, which links the meaning of idioms with cognitive experience of people and analyzes the deep psychological cognitive process under the representation of their language forms. Obviously, this idea introduces us an entirely new horizon.In the light of cognitive linguistics, concept is the product of understanding the world by humans, and its formation is based on the cognitive categories originating from people's own lives. Language is the symbolic representation of things in categories. Idioms, as a special language form, epitomize these conceptual structures. In the paper The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, Lakoff (1993) put forward the idea that the everyday conceptual system we rely on to think and act is metaphorical in nature. As a special symbol, the metaphorical meanings of idioms are used by people to refer to or describe the unfamiliar categories with familiar characteristics of persons or things, to stimulate people's association as well as activate a variety of symbolic images. Such a process and outcome reflect cognitive differences of the varied nationalities in their cultural traditions and ways of thinking.Idioms discussed in this thesis mainly refer to proverbs, slang and so on. And the fuzziness of vehicles in idioms refers to the cognitive differences behind the comparison of English and Chinese idioms from a cognitive point of view. Hence, the fuzziness of vehicles in idioms means different cognitive styles reflected in vehicles. The reason why we study the fuzziness of vehicles in English and Chinese idioms is that idioms are the carriers loaded with a wealth of cultural and pragmatic information. They are a kind of language representation and the symbols of mental representation. And in discourse, they carry more information, which plays a certain role in information transmission.This thesis first reviews the studies of idioms home and abroad, indicating the trend from the static to the dynamic. And then it establishes the perspective, significance and research methods of this thesis (Chapter One). Idioms have long been a research hotpot with different opinions about their definitions, classifications and features. On a basis of the comprehensive contrast with these definitions, the author presents her understanding of the concept of idioms. A discussion is underway with respect to the three main features:semantic unity, structural stability and metaphorical language. Besides, drawing on the three metafunctions of systemic-functional linguistics, the illustrations are given respectively on ideational, relational and textual metafunctions (Chapter Two). Metaphor is not only an important rhetorical device, but also is a kind of way of human cognition. The vehicle of idioms is the object used metaphorically to refer to another thing. It is an integral part of the metaphor, reflecting a certain amount of fuzziness:ontological fuzziness and epistemological fuzziness, which are based on objective fuzziness and differences of thinking (Chapter Three). Then in the light of relevance theory, this paper investigates the relationship between the vehicles in English idioms and fuzziness, and the psychological mechanism in interpretation respectively. It begins with the fuzziness in vehicles of idioms, treating the process of interpretation as a kind of cognitive mental activity (Chapter Four). The fuzziness of vehicles, while hindering the translation, actually brings some inspirations at the same time as the translation itself is a process of reproduction out of the original along with coordination and interaction among original author-translator-reader whereas the fuzziness will hinder the translation either (Chapter Five). Finally, on the basis of analysis and exposition, the author briefly and tentatively concludes that the fuzziness of vehicles in idioms, as the transformation of thinking patterns, reflects the fuzziness of cognitive thinking. There exists the intrinsic dependence between the vehicle and thinking, interacting and influencing each other, to lead to the effective interpretation of English and Chinese idioms (Chapter Six).