| Along with the social development, language also changes. How to see the changes of Chinese idioms which keep pace with times? It’s an important topic which we have to face. Inorder to show the objective situation and the internal rules of Chinese idioms semantic evolution,we choose the polysemy phenomenon of Chinese idioms as our research task.Chinese idioms research has had a long history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese idioms have become an important object of our linguists. With the different understanding of Chinese idioms semantic meanings,idioms semantic meanings become a key factor that in the idioms qualitative research.The double meanings is the characteristic property of idioms. So we make the characteristics of double meaning as the judgment standard of idioms.Every idiom have literal meaning,which is the transformation base of the whole meaning. We explore the Chinese idioms polysemy phenomenon, first, it’s point to a static describe of an idiom in the dictionary, which have multiple meanings; Second, Chinese idioms polysemy Phenomenon is mainly tciers to the idiom whicn have the coexisting phenomenon of the extended meaning and the figurative meaning.We think Chinese idioms should have two types.One kind is the idiom that has multiple meanings in the dictionary, we called the dominant polysemy idiom. One kind is the idiom that doesn’t have multiple meanings in the dictionary but has the actual pragmatic polysemy usage, we called recessive polysemy idioms.Language and social development exists the phenomenon of changing together.Under the control of the inherent regularity, idioms semantic features transfer, narrow or expand with the social changes. Along with the social historical development, Chinese idioms rational meaning, praise or blame colour have evolved. Compared with the stability of the rational meaning, Chinese idioms appraisement colorific changes are more vulnerable with the influence of the social cultural concept changes. The most common reasons of the idioms semantic praise or blame transformation are:the metaphor or extension of the word meaning, and the differences of the value orientation of ancient and modern.On the polysemy description of Chinese idioms synchrony meaning, by researching the paraphrases in Chinese idioms dictionaries, we summarize the polysemy description in the following several ways.(1)the different meanings of the words in Chinese idioms.(2)the different emphasis in the whole meaning of Chinese idioms include different characteristic leaning/virtual and essence coexistence/causes and effects extension.(3)different associative meanings,(4)different meanings produced by different collocations.We discuss polysemy phenomenon, in fact also discusses the interactions between the significance of language and pragmatic meaning.In the background of the rise of pragmatics,the research on the Chinese idioms usage is also gradually in-depth.In practice, some Chinese idioms’ literal meaning can be used independently, also can produce new pragmatic meaning, this is the cognitive adjustment of the idiom literal meaning. Other Chinese idioms’ literal meaning is unchanged, the whole meaning tends to appear semantic migration, this is the cognitive adjustment of the whole meaning.Colour significance reflects the characteristics of language sociality, is the reflection of conventional language features.In a period of time, the colour significance of idioms is stable.But, in practice,people often switch the colour between praise and blame.In short, we can say that Chinese idioms semantic connotation is rich,by researching with the corpus of Chinese idioms and the dictionary paraphrases of Chinese idioms. But,according to the basic meaning for words, idioms semantic meaning is synchronic and diachronic stability.Idioms semantic changes are mainly in the range from the evolution of the morpheme, vocabulary, and grammar to social and times changes,which is the result of language factors and outside factors in language that work together.Idiom polysemy phenomenon are concerned, idiom polysemy phenomenon not only embody the rich connotation characteristics, also reflect the characteristics that language changes along with the eras. |
