An Analysis of Chinese Xiehouyu(歇后语, XHY) 英语毕业论文.doc

An Analysis of Chinese Xiehouyu(歇后语, XHY)Abstract As is widely acknowledged, Chinese Xiehouyu(for歇后语, herein after abbreviated to XHY) is a fruit of wisdom grown by Chinese broad masses and an invaluable asset twinkling in the Chinese cultural treasury. To start with, we’d like to talk about XHY’s notable functions, both semantically and pragmatically, which, to a considerable degree, leads to our choice of XHY as the thesis’s subject. On the one hand, XHY is considered valuable in terms of its semantic function. According to the Chinese-English Dictionary (1996),“ XHY is a two-part allegorical saying, of which, the first part, always stated, is descriptive, while the second part, sometimes unstated, carries the message”. Surrounding XHY’ semantic function, scholars have carried out their studies mainly from the perspective of rhetoric function and syntactic function(We Duanzheng，1 980，P．102—1 20；Wen Duanzheng，Zhou Jian，2000，P．1 50-1 51). We’ll state this part concretely in the following article (chapter 3) and, to avoid the needless duplication, we just want to give a rough introduction here. Briefly speaking, XHY, with its subtle rhetoric and unique syntactic pattern, performs a great semantic function in the linguistic world. On the other hand, applied widely in people’s daily life, XHY also exerts a pragmatically communicative function. According to some researchers who has devoted to this field( Halliday, 1994; He Ziran,2000; Ran Yongping, Zhang Xinhong, 2007), XHY’s pragmatic function is generally reflected upon such four aspects. First, XHY can elicit a humorous effect during conversations, which, creating a kind of relaxing and jocular atmosphere, helps speakers express their meanings and achieve their goals more effectively. Here is an example：“石老根说：‘我这是刚进庙的和尚念经——现学现唱，其他的字就不认识了。’(《玉龙的眼睛》，第73页)” . (Shi Laogen says：“Im a newly-arrived monk to chant scriptures——singing as soon as learning, but the rest is out of my ability. ”(The Eyes of Yu Long, P．73