A Study Of Idioms In

“Destiny of half a lifetime”, the first complete novel of Eileen Chang, formerly known as "Eighteen Springs", tells a story of several young people who lived in the old Shanghai,and shows us the special social scene and characters of the times.In this paper, we tried to select the Chinese idioms in this book as the object of study,trying to explore the linguistic characteristics of Chinese idioms. In the first part, we talked about the purpose and significance of this study,and made it clear what the definition and standard of selection of idioms is, which paved the way for the study of idioms.In the second part,we mainly talked about the internal structure and hierarchies of idioms. We could divided idioms in this book into ten different parts of which linking structure idioms covered a biggest proportion. Besides,idioms could be classified in layers,including single layer idioms,double layer idioms,three layer idioms as well as cross-layer idioms which were worth studying.In the third part,we discussed the grammar function of idioms according to the outside collocation. Further study would be done as long as we analyzed conditions and features of idioms when they functioned as object,complement, attribute, subject, adverbial, etc..In the fourth part, the functional types and functional transformation of the idiom were discussed. We could divided idioms into verb, adjective, noun, verb-adjective and transferred forms according to different function types.At the same time, we discussed the connection among the structure,the hierarchy and the grammar function of idioms.In the fifth part, the variation of idioms was analyzed and studied, which included expanded forms, change-one-character forms and the other forms,three forms in total, all of which belong to the expression form of "dynamic".