期刊刊名：人文暨社會科學期刊 　 卷期：3卷1期

篇名出版日期：2007年6月1日

作者：JIAN-SHIUNG SHIE,謝健雄

語言：English

關鍵字：English frozen similes,idioms,semiotic structure,semantic composition,theme,vehicle,analogy,英語習用明喻,慣用語,符號結構,語意合成,象似本體,象似喻體,類比

被點閱次數：2次

閱讀時間：122sec

摘要：
In traditional rhetoric, similes form an independent category of tropes. And English frozen similes are frequently treated as a subset of idioms. This article explores English frozen similes on the basis of all the similes (221 altogether) in Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (1998). Addressed in terms of the semiotic topic-vehicle approach are the semiotic structure of English frozen similes and their semantic compositionality. Two conclusions are drawn from this study. First, the iconic structure of English frozen similes generally involves attribution of feature(s) from the semiotic vehicle to the theme. One interesting finding in this regard is that more than half of English frozen similes attribute nonhuman features to human beings, whereas personifying similes are few and far between. Second, English frozen similes, by virtue of the interaction between the semiotic theme and vehicle, show a high degree of semantic compositionality, and their linguistic constituents display a low degree of fixedness. Thus it is questionable to subsume English frozen similes within the general category of idioms.

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