Metaphorical And Metonymic Clothing Idioms:A Contrastive Study Between English And Chinese

Since idioms are a special kind of language and cultural phenomenon,a contrastive study of English and Chinese idioms is of great importance to the research into English and Chinese cultures.As a general designation of clothes and ornaments,clothing is used for covering bodies and keeping warm,and it also becomes a sign of fashion and culture.Thus,the studies on clothing idioms are significant to idioms and culture.This paper treats English idioms as conventional expressions(except for slang and proverbs)and Chinese idioms as four-character units.Traditionally,metaphor and metonymy are only thought of as rhetoric devices.With the development of cognitive science,linguists define them not only as rhetoric devices,but also as thinking modes.Although there are a few cognitive studies on English and Chinese idioms,the cognitive contrastive studies on them are much fewer.Based on the current studies on clothing idioms,by adopting theories of conceptual metaphor,and metonymy as the theoretical framework and selecting English and Chinese clothing idioms as research object,this thesis makes studies on conceptual metaphor generated by mapping from clothing onto human affairs,situation and natural landscapes,on conceptual metonymy generated by clothing standing for human,relation,status,livelihood,emotion,appearance and work and on the function of metaphatonymy on constructing clothing idioms.Besides,it also tends to make a contrastive study between English and Chinese clothing idioms and analyze the underlying reasons for the similarities and dissimilarities.Examples in this paper are collected mostly from Oxford Idioms Dictionary,Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors and Dictionary of Chinese Idioms.The major findings of this study are as follows: first,cognitive metaphor and metonymy can work together or alone to construct English and Chinese clothing idioms;second,English and Chinese clothing idioms share common conceptual metaphors QUALITIES OF HUMANS ARE CLOTHING,HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS CLOTHING,NATURAL LANDSCAPES ARE CLOTHING and common conceptual metonymies CLOTHING FOR HUMANS,CLOTHING FOR STATUS,CLOTHING FOR LIVELIHOOD,CLOTHING FOR APPEARANCE,CLOTHING FOR EMOTION;third,conceptual metaphor LITERATURE IS CLOTHING and conceptual metonymy CLOTHING FOR RELATION tend to occur in Chinese idioms,while conceptual metaphor SITUATION IS CLOTHING is frequently used in English idioms;finally,the similarities are based on the common philosophical experience and the dissimilarities lie in the cultural difference between Chinese and Western countries.This study not only broadens the application of cognitive linguistics,but it also supplies a new direction for the study of idioms and cognitive linguistics.Besides,to some extent,itprovides a new method for the teaching and learning of foreign language and culture.