Towards Transcending Western Linguistic Thought:A Teaching of Chinese Idioms to Foreigners as an Example

• Main Authors: Yang Yu-hua, 楊又樺
• Other Authors: Chen Yung-yu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/16914223536744397753

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 語言學研究所 === 97 === Recently the world has different interests in language research. People tend to care more and more for Chinese. As a result of it, the Sinology becomes attractive and rich. In other words, Chinese Teaching and Chinese Linguistics are becoming so interesting that they almost fully occupy our focus attention. Especially Chinese idioms (Chengyu) start to be discussed by many sinologists. But this paper contends that the present discussions of Chinese Linguistics and Chinese idioms are not deep penetrating enough. Most research of Chinese idioms is just dealing with lexical analysis or just duplicating the logical framework of western grammatical thoughts. They never tried to view Chinese idioms as a whole. For this reason, this thesis will stand on the basic point of view – “Linguistics” to review and analyze Chinese idioms. The western linguistic thoughts stem from their historical backgrounds. Although they have different valuable viewpoints, but the proper methods for analyzing Chinese idioms are not obliged to follow the western linguistic viewpoints. We discuss and explore which methods and thoughts are appropriate for research Chinese idioms. We discover that the western linguistic methods can not fill in the gaps which divide western and eastern languages. Especially western linguistic thoughts are logic oriented and they tend to focus upon Linguistic Universals. Take Chinese idioms for an illustrating example, we have proved that Chinese Linguistics research should apply different analyzing methods than the western. It means that Chinese idioms should be analyzed with two main concepts, “historical contingency” and “cultural peculiarities.”