Grammatical structures and metaphorical content in Chinese idioms

Abstract

The aim of this research is to clarify the typology and relationship of grammatical structures and metaphorical expressions within Chinese idioms. In this study, a corpus of 30,000 Chinese idioms was compiled from various idiom dictionaries, and 1,000 idioms were randomly selected, annotated, and categorized based on their internal syntactic structures, grammatical functions in sentences, metaphor types, and metaphorical content for statistical analysis. The innovation of the research lies in employing a corpus to conduct a quantitative analysis of the prevalent syntactic structures and the most common types of metaphorical usage found in Chinese idioms, as well as to explore the quantified relationships between them. The findings reveal that Parallel Structure, Attributive Structure, and Subject-Predicate Structure are the most prevalent internal syntactic structures of Chinese idioms, while the structural metaphor is the most widely used conceptual metaphor. However, no significant correlation was observed between the internal syntactic structure of Chinese idioms and metaphorical content, grammatical function in sentences.