英语习语的理解策略研究
关键词 英语习语 理解策略 上下文
毕 业 论 文 外 文 摘 要
Title A Survey on the Strategies Used by EFL Learners to Understand English Idioms
Abstract
This research adopted a research method called thinking-aloud to study what strategies are used by ten Chinese EFL learners when they tried to understand the meaning of 20 English idioms. Data revealed that subjects usually employed more than one single understanding strategy in interpreting the meaning of an English idiom and that context played an important role in the whole process of the subjects’ interpretation.
Keywords English idioms understanding strategy context
Table of Contents
1． Introduction 1
2．Aims 2
3. Methodology 2
3.1 Subjects 2
3.2 Materials 4
3.3. Target Idiom Selection 5
3.4. Procedure 5
3.5. Data Collection 6
4. Analysis 6
5. Discussion 8
5.1 Strategy Type Distribution 8
5.2 Comprehensive Analysis 9
6. Conclusions and Suggestions 11
Acknowledgements 12
Bibliography 13
1． Introduction
An idiom (Latin: idioma, "special property") is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made(The Oxford Companion to the English Language,1992,pp.495–96). There are estimated to be at least 25,000 idiomatic expressions in the English language.
In linguistics, idioms are usually supposed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality; yet the matter remains debated. In phraseology, they are defined in a similar way as a sub-type of phraseme whose meaning is not the regular sum of the meanings of its components. John Saeed (Semantics, 2003, p.60) defines an "idiom" as words collocated that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilized term. This collocation—words commonly used in a group—redefines each component word in the word-group and becomes an idiomatic expression. The words develop a specialized meaning as an entity, as an idiom. Moreover, an idiom is an expression, word, or phrase whose sense means something different from what the words literally imply. The idiom "beating around the bush" means to hint or discuss obliquely; nobody is literally beating any person or thing, and the bush is a metaphor. When a speaker uses an idiom, the listener might mistake its actual meaning, if he or she has not heard this figure of speech before. Idioms usually do not translate well; in some cases, when an idiom is translated into another language, either its meaning is changed or it is meaningless.
When two or three words are often used together in a particular sequence, the words are said to be irreversible binomials, or Siamese twins. Usage will prevent the words from being displaced or rearranged. For example, a person may be left "high and dry" but never "dry and high." This idiom in turn means that the person is left in their former condition rather than being assisted so that their condition improves. Not all Siamese twins are idioms, however. "Reading, writing, and arithmetic" is a frozen trinomial, but it is usually taken literally.
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