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A Study on Polysemy of Chinese idiom ‘Bu yi le hu(不亦乐乎)’
Journal of Chinese Language and Literature
2019, (81),
pp.171-195
DOI :10.15792/clsyn..81.201908.171
Publisher : Chinese Literary Society Of Yeong Nam
Research Area : Chinese Language and Literature
DOI :10.15792/clsyn..81.201908.171
Publisher : Chinese Literary Society Of Yeong Nam
Research Area : Chinese Language and Literature
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Chinese idioms are historical vocabularies which have been inherited for a long time, but the meaning of the word has changed in the course of its oral history. However, dictionaries often do not contain all of these changed meanings. Therefore, it is difficult for foreigners who understand vocabularies and acquire languages through dictionaries to understand the changes in the meaning of idioms. To overcome these difficulties, this study makes ‘Bu yi le hu’ the first target of study in polysemy idioms of Chinese. ‘Bu yi le hu’ is an idiom which comes from the first part of chapter 1 of 'The Analects of Confucius.’ This study, first classified the meaning of ‘Bu yi le hu’, is based on examples which extracted from the corpus and statistically produced figures. This study also analyzes the examples of corpus syntactically and examines the semantic relationship in terms of cognitive linguistics. As a result, this study confirms that the Chinese idiom 'Bu yi le hu' has other meanings that are not specified in the dictionary and that the relationship between the separation of meanings is represented in accordance with the rules of cognitive linguistics. Through this study, I could see that Chinese idioms like other ordinary vocabularies appear semantic changing through the process of semantic bleaching with semanticization and grammaticalization.
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