CHINESE IDIOMS: SYNTACTIC FORMS AND CULTURAL VALUE

Authors

  • Ayesa Universitas Indonesia
  • Hermina Sutami Universitas Indonesia

Keywords:

Chinese idioms, compositionality, syntactic opacity, metaphors

Abstract

Chinese idioms possess Chinese cultural values. This study aims at finding out the cultural reflection of Chinese idioms by analyzing their syntactic form. Apart from the Indonesian language, most Chinese idioms (??chéngy?) consist of four characters. In general, idioms have various forms, such as compounds, phrases, and clauses. These forms can also be found in Chinese idioms. However, it is difficult to determine the syntactic form of several idioms, in other words, some idioms are syntactically opaque. In addition, we will also examine idioms that are syntactically transparent along with the degree of the compositionality of their meaning. Therefore, there are two types of idioms: syntactically transparent idioms and syntactically opaque idioms. Moreover, idioms are also related to their own metaphorical sense. Metaphorical idioms show the user's language realm in expressing a situation, an action, or an event that is referred to. To find whether a metaphor exists in an idiom, we examine its contribution of the constituent meaning to its whole meaning. The idioms used in this research are four-character idioms, which are taken from the “Chinese Internet Corpus”, which is the most popular online corpus. The selected idioms from the online corpus will be verified using the “Xinhua Idiom Dictionary”.

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Published

2022-06-26

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