| Idioms take a great part and play an important role in any language. There are thousands of idioms rooting in the history, culture and experiences of human beings and it is a common phenomena existing in every language. Plenty of researches have been done both at home and abroad in this field. From the traditional view, idioms are seen as set phrase and expressions whose meanings cannot be predicted from the meanings of their constituent parts studies. It has provided a good basis for the study of idioms, but the traditional views have some limitations in the further investigation of idioms. As the development of cognitive linguistics, linguists have studied idioms from the cognitive perspective which considered that idioms are analyzable and predictable. The object of this study focuses on idioms on"eye". As to English idioms, we mean the common set expressions, exclusive of slang and proverbs; as for Chinese idioms, we mean idioms that are mainly four-character set idioms (chengyu). This thesis is an attempt to study idioms from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. It is argued that, from this angle, we will be able to understand the idioms clearly and then use them properly. Based on current studies of idioms, this thesis aims to investigate into idioms on"eye"from the perspectives of conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, metaphtonymy and general knowledge. This thesis intends to explore the meaning formation of idioms on"eye"from a cognitive perspective so as to provide an angle for the study of idioms related to body parts. The analysis shows that the formation of idioms on"eye"is not arbitrary and non-decomposable but motivated by cognitive-semantic mechanism. The statistical result demonstrates that conceptual metonymy plays a more important part in the formation of idioms on"eye". The closer the object that eye stands for relates to the original function of eye, the correspondingly conceptual metonymy plays a more important role in the formation of idioms and accordingly, the number of idioms is larger. Finally, two future research directions are suggested. One is to search for more examples of idioms related to body parts in order to prove that metonymy is more important than metaphor, and the other is to conduct a comparative study between English and Chinese idioms based on the theories of cognitive linguistics. |
