The Relationship between Social Custom and English Idiom
Ⅰ.Introduction
Idioms as a special form of language that carry a large amount of cultural information, such as history, geography, religion, custom, thinking pattern and so on. Therefore, they are closely related to the culture, especially idioms have an inseparable relationship of social /英语论文customs. From a dynamic view, language and culture interact with each other and shape each other. Idiomatic expressions are even difficult for native English speakers because their meanings cannot be determined through an analysis of their individual words. For instance, “to fall out” means “to quarrel”, but neither “fall” nor “out” has a sense of quarrel. Another example is “a feather in one’s cap”, which means “an honor or a success, of which one can be proud”. The meaning of this idiom is a metaphorical one. “Under the rose” is also very difficult to understand from the literal meanings of its component words, its true meaning is “secretly”. “To have a bee in one's bonnet” means “to have a strange fixed idea about something”. “To kick the bucket” means “to die”. The figurative interpretation of “shoot the breeze” is “to talk without purpose”. Unlike literal language, it is impossible to explain the idiom from the literal meaning of the individual words. Thus, English idioms are difficult to understand, because they are a combination of two or more words, which function as a unit of meaning.
For our Chinese students, English idioms are a stumbling block. It is very possible that they often not only feel at a loss in understanding conversations because of a key idiom but also misuse idioms. In this paper, I am going to make a study of the relationship between idioms and social custom cultures and throw some light on the learning of English idioms. As we all know, language is closely related to culture and can be said as a part of culture. They are the heritage of history and product of cultural evolvement. Consequently, we can know much about social custom culture through studying idioms and in turn get better understanding of idioms by learning the cultural background behind them.
Ⅱ.The Definition of English Idioms
Ⅲ.The Characters of English Idioms
Ⅳ.The Social Customs in English Idioms
A. The Relationship between Religious Beliefs and English Idioms.
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