A Study On Metaphorical And Metonymy Of Chinese Plant Idioms

As an important part of Chinese idioms,idiomatic expressions have the characteristics of image,popular and interesting.It often uses words related to daily life,such as plants.This paper takes Chinese plant idioms as the research object,and collects and analyzes 329 plant idioms with metaphor and metonymy.Firstly,according to the metaphor and metonymy of plant parts in idioms,it is divided into three basic types,metaphor,metonymy and metaphor-metonymy combination.Metaphor accounts for 92.10%,which is divided into four categories,plant domain mapping human domain,thing domain,human domain or thing domain and homophonic metaphor.Metonymic plant idioms accounted for 5.76%,and the main metonymy is the metonymy between the whole and its parts.Plant idioms involving metaphor and metonymy accounted for 2.13%.This paper argues that the reason why metaphorical plant idioms are far more than metonymy is that metaphor plays a greater role than metonymy in the process of semantic extension of plant idioms.Metaphor involves two domains and can link plant domains to many other cognitive domains according to some similarity.Metonymy involves only one cognitive domain,and its main function is reference,which has its limitations.Then,the activation of plant idioms are analyzed.According to the activation times of plant idioms,they are divided into single activation and superposition activation.Single activation accounted for 33.13%,superimposed activation accounted for 66.87%.This paper argues that the reason for the large proportion of superimposed activation is that the semantics of plant idioms will continue to develop and extend in use.When a meaning is recognized,new meaning will be activated on this basis.With the increase of activation times,idiom semantics has also been developed.From the way of activation,it can be divided into similarity activation and whole-part association activation.Plant idioms related to similarity activation accounted for 93.31%,and plant idioms related to whole-part activation accounted for6.69%,which was consistent with metaphorical metonymy.Finally,based on the discussion of activation mode,the semantic parsing degree and cognitive mechanism of Chinese plant idioms are studied.According to the semantic relationship of idioms,Chinese plant idioms are divided into single-layer interpretable plant idioms,double-layer interpretable plant idioms and paraphrase interpretable plant idioms.Among them,single-layer analytical class accounted for6.08%,the proportion of bi-level analytic class was 42.25%,and the proportion of paraphrase analytic class was 51.67%.The semantic cognitive mechanism of each kind of plant idioms is expounded by using conceptual integration theory.The single-layer analytic plant idioms are mainly based on the shape,function,and action traits as the activation similarities,the similarities between the activation of bi-level analytic and anaphoric plant idioms are more abundant,mainly in shape,taste,traits,cultural attributes and values.