A Construction Grammar Approach To Variants Of Chinese Idioms In Advertisements

Chinese idioms' variants are widely applied in advertising,such as:“Youbei wuhuan"(?"?"??)(An ad for quilts),“Youbei wuhuan"(?"?"??)(An ad for cups),"Youbei wuhuan"("?"???)(An ad for Kwan Loong Medicated Oil etc.In order to explain this phenomenon,from the perspective of construction grammar,this thesis tries to study the characteristics of Chinese idioms'variants,their cognitive psychological process and their acceptability constraints by a qualitative and quantitative research.Any form,which can't be strictly predictable from its components parts or from other previously established constructions,is regarded as a construction,and idioms are a type of constructions.The reason why distorted elements of Chinese idioms'variants can be understood is that construction has a character of Gestalt,which can exert a psychological operation on any distorted elements to make them accord with the fixed semantics and structures of the original idiom.This kind of psychological operation is a necessary psychology process to understand Chinese idioms' variants.However,variants of Chinese idioms have different acceptability.In terms of this issue,through analysis of linguistic data,this thesis figures out two main factors which influence the acceptability of Chinese idioms' variants:the coercing operator and the coerced element which is the distorted part compared to its original one.The suppressing strength of the coerced operator depends on its syntactic and semantic proximity to the pro-construction.Because the more similar between the coercing operator and its original Chinese idioms is,the stronger of the curing degree of the Chinese idiom's construction will be.Moreover,if the numbers of coerced elements are changed less and their pronunciation,part of speech,and structure are more similar with original ones,then their resist-coercion force will be smaller and their acceptability will be higher.At last,this thesis further verifies the restricting factors of the acceptability of Chinese idioms,variants by a questionnaire-based empirical survey,which contributes to a deeper study about variants of Chinese idioms.Furthermore,it sheds some light on the explanatory power of Construction Grammar and provides implications for people who engage in advertising design in real life.