Chinese Idioms Generation Model

Idioms is one of the fixed expressions. The literal meaning of this phrase does not suggest its figurative. Research on idioms has served scholars to form two completely opposite viewpoints about the comprehensional mechanism of idiom: noncompositional and compositional. On the noncompositional view, idiom has been lexicalized, becoming a long "word". The process of comprehension of idiom is that of abstraction, because the metaphoric meaning of idiom has been stored in mental lexicon. Whereas on the compositional view, the metaphoric meaning of idiom can be constructed. The literal meaning of compositions within a word has a great influence on the process of comprehension of idiom. Given the limitation of the two views, a number of researchers have proposed a mixed model, in which access representation is considered as a process in terms of both a single word and morphemes within a word, which probably become the representational and accessional units when each unit interactivate one another during the process.In three experiments we make further research on the lexcical access during the production of idiomatic phrases. The result shows(1) that the representation of idioms is hybrid, idioms can be both unitary in that they require their own lexical entry, and compositional in that they make use of simple lemmas in the mental lexicon; (2)that the representation of morpheme is the linking bridge between the representation of idioms and the representation of words of idiom;(3) that decomposability of idiom has a influence on the process of idiom.