From etymology to modern phraseology: A corpus-based study of structural variants of Chinese idioms in naturally-occurring contexts

Compared with recent developments in English corpus lexicology and phraseology, the study of Chinese lexicology and phraseology still remains at a level similar to what Fernando has described as quasi-lexicography (Fernando, 1996: 10-11) in the study of English idioms, where explanations provided in idiom dictionaries are rather prescriptive and static than descriptive and dynamic: a typical template of explanation consists in no more than a paraphrase meaning; the etymological origin of the entry; one or two illustrative examples and synonyms equally in a four-character idiomatic pattern if available. As a result, items collected in recent Chinese idiom dictionaries are presented as if they had not experienced morpho-syntactic variations or pragmatic shifts of any sort since they first came into use hundreds of years ago. The current situation of Chinese phraseology has largely restricted our understanding of the nature of Chinese idioms to a preliminary level of analysis as characterized by subjective or intuition-oriented judgements. Therefore, in the present study, I shall propose for the first time to situate the study on an essential subject of Chinese phraseology, namely the structural variability of Chinese idioms, within a naturally-occurring context as provided by the Corpus of Chinese (Beijing University, 2005), with a view to submitting the detected structural variants of Chinese idioms to a systematic description and to examine whether the seemingly idiosyncratic behaviour of Chinese idioms as highly responsive to the changing contextual circumstances is in fact governed by a set of underlying linguistic rules operating simultaneously at syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels (Minsky, 1980: I; Fillmore, 1976: 25; Brown & Yule, 1983: 236; Moon, 1998: 163-166). The results obtained in my investigation on the structural versatility of certain kinds of Chinese idioms are in the nature of a pilot study; and the corpus-driven approach adopted in describing and analysing the structural features of Chinese idiomatic variants in naturally-occurring contexts will help prepare the ground for the setting-up of an appropriate methodological framework for future research on the subject matter.