A Cross-genre Analysis Of Idiomatic Expressions

Idiomatic expressions are used everywhere and are studied by various scholars. However, the nature and function of idiomatic expressions still remain fuzzy, let alone their genre-specific nature. The goal of this thesis is to study this feature.With the slightly modified theoretical framework based on SFL and meta-functional categorization, this thesis does both a local, qualitative analysis of the160samples from the four genres of news report, advertisement, academic abstract and fairy tale to see the patterns of the use of them, and a global, quantitative analysis of these samples to see the distribution of them. It is revealed that the relationship between idiomatic expressions and genres is a dynamic one:locally, the pattern of idiomatic expressions changes in accordance with the change of communicative purposes, but at the same time, they are part of the communicative purposes. Globally, the change of the degree of formality and promotion of genres change the distribution of idiomatic expressions, but at the same time, they determine, at least partly, the degree of formality and promotion of genres. Thus, the genre-specific nature of idiomatic expressions cannot simply be interpreted as idiomatic expressions merely reflecting the change of text types. Rather, it means that idiomatic expressions realize genres-they co-evolve and meta-redound with genres.