Abstract
This study examines the constructional idioms in Chinese within the framework of lexical semantics. In general, there are various ways in which Chinese conceptualizes an event involving two lexical entities. A typical example is chi doufu, a certain V+O set of the verbal ‘eat’ and nominal element ‘beancurd’. The idiomatic interpretation of the idiom ‘came on to’ is not deducible from its component parts. The major questions we attempt to answer are: What are the characters of idioms in language? What is the relationship between the constituents of an idiom? How do they reflect on the mapping that lies within the domain of mental among the multi-layers of grammar? How are they associated with conceptual schema? Do their information structures bear any kind of information, e.g., the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic properties? Our goal is to accomplish the tasks for which the idiomatic meaning of an idiom is being constructed in the lexical semantic structure. The organization of this thesis is as follows. Chapter I gives a brief introduction to previous studies of idiomatic expressions and an overview of the thesis. Chapter II presents the theoretical background. Chapter III analyzes lexical boundaries of idioms in order to further the interaction between combinations of semantic (or discourse) functions. The idioms under discussion are classified into three categories, namely, lou majiao ‘to betray the pot to the roses’, chi doufu ‘to take liberties with’ and dai lumao ‘being a cuckold husband’. We address their conceptual structures and thematic relations by setting out the basis of the idiosyncratic information of their meanings. Chapter IV is the kernel core of the thesis: it deals with the specification of argument structure and constructional template of idiom chunks of events in a given society, involving participants that include the communicator and the addressee. We primarily extract authentic data from corpora to validate the proposal suggested here. Chapter V lays out the compatibility between idioms and four other Chinese constructions: the genitive construction, the passive construction, the ditransitive and pivotal constructions. Chapter VI elucidates the semantic extension in idioms from the literal sense to idiomatic meaning with two cognitive mechanisms: metaphor and metonymy. For example, the central or prototypical reading of the idiom dai maozi ‘to wear hat’ is ‘to put a label on’. We assume here the metaphor as IDENTITY IS HAT. It is taken as a source of insight into personal status of common judgments in the culture. We show that most of the intertwined network can be explained by the account of family resemblance. Lastly, Chapter VII concludes that our purpose is to make considerable claims about the degree of idiomaticity. After all, it should be clear from this investigation that we are in need to take idioms as constellations of semantic roles since we aim to understand more fully the coverage of linguistic universals.