The Language And Culture Study Of The Chinese Livestock Idioms

As an important branch of the animal idioms,the Chinese livestock idioms have accumulated abundant language information and cultural information,which also makes them a significant component of the idiom study.The Chinese livestock idioms have major implications for investigating the ways of the ancient Chinese’s activities and understanding the creation of matter and spirit.However,the study of the livestock idioms so far exist many problems,such as the incompletion of the corpus collection and the non-depth of the cultural analysis.This paper selects the Chinese livestock idioms as research object.By discussing the source,construction form and cultural meaning of the Chinese livestock idioms,this paper tries to fully reveal the important role that the livestock plays in the ancients’ life,and the rich connotation the livestock contains as a cultural symbol.The whole paper divides into five parts.The introduction part defines the Chinese livestock idioms,clears the source corpus and points out the significance and objectives of the Chinese livestock idioms based on the previous research achievements.The first part gives a general introduction of the Chinese livestock.By sorting the Shuo Wen Jie Zi’s characters which related to the livestock,this part presents a better understanding of the livestock’s biological characteristic.Affected by the thinking method of “nature and human merge”,some biological characteristic of the livestock has been moralization and then form the humanistic image of the livestock.The second part analyzes the source of the Chinese livestock idioms from the local source and the foreign influence.The local source divides into the classical idioms and the non-classical idioms.The foreign influence mainly discusses the influence of the Buddhism.The third part analyzes the construction form of the Chinese livestock idioms which consists of two parts,the coordinative part and the non-coordinative part.Influenced by the Chinese’s duality thinking,the quantity of the coordinative is much more than the non-coordinative.This part is also trying to differentiate and analyze the synonymy abnormity idioms and the idioms which have the same morpheme and different order.The fourth part explores the cultural connation of the Chinese livestock idioms from the material level and the spirit level.In order to enriching the previous studies,the author mainly highlights the “marriage view” part and the “name culture” part.The fifth part sums up all the main substances and emphasizes that as a historical accumulation,the Chinese livestock idioms carry profound cultural connotations.Grasping these cultural connotations is not only beneficial to understand the cultural traditions and inherit the national spirit,but also present an important guiding significance to the Chinese teaching,especially the teaching Chinese as a second language.