A CMB Framework To Opposite-Localizer-Superposition-Idioms Construction

There are a large number of localizer-superposition-constructions in Chinese idioms,such as “? A ? B”,“? A ? B”,“? A ? B”,“? A ? B”,“? A ? B”,“?A ? B” and “? A ? B”.OLSI(opposite-localizer-superposition-idioms),consists of one pair of antonymous localizers and other two components in one idiom,possesses distinctive word formation characteristics and semantic structure types.There are some scholars such as Li Yuming and Ren Yonghong having investigated this construction in their surveys,and they have described syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features of certain kind of OLSI.While most of these researches are from traditional linguistics perspective,ignoring the semantic production process and cognitive mechanism during the understanding;there is no general data analysis on such idioms.Based on a closed corpus of picked idioms exhaustively collected from the electronic format of popular version of Chinese Dictionary,author tries to illustrate the semantic production mechanism of OLSI with CMB(Cognitive Metonymic Blending)conducted by the integration of Cognitive Reference Point Theory(CRP),Metonymy and Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT)and provide related data statistics and induction analysis.This thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter one is introduction.It provides a general introduction to the motivation and objective of the research,methodology and data collection as well as layout of the thesis.Chapter two is literature review.It reviews the previous studies on Chinese Idioms,Chinese localizer words and OLSI,and then analyzes the shortcomings of these studies;finds the research direction of this article.Chapter three is theoretical framework.Aiming at the shortcomings and deficiencies of previous researches,it conducts CMB to illustrate the production mechanism of OLSI.Chapter four is data analysis and discussion.On the basis of the description of closed corpus,this chapter uses the CMB framework to analyze OLSI and make detailed classification and statistics.Chapter five arrives at the conclusion enumerating three major findings:1.It illustrates the production mechanism of OLSI with CMB conducted by integration of Cognitive Reference Point Theory(CRP),Metonymy and Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT)2.It builds a corpus of 320 items OLSI and gives an overall analysis of the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic features of OLSI with the help of CMB,and gives data statistics and inductive analysis accompanied by the relevant frequency data.3.Based on the core principles of “real – Language – Cognition” in cognitive linguistics,we find that the meaning of OLSI doesn't generate from the sequential composition of literal sense,but an intentional arrangement under a series of cognitive process,during which the metonymy and expansion of the meaning of localizer words play crucial roles,and all these are closely related to human experience and cognition.